Obama was just as non-confrontational with that other thug Chavez, who pressed him with a copy of a book-length anti-American diatribe called "The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Pillage of a Continent." Its author, Eduardo Galeano, typically described America under President Bush as a terrorist war machine in a 2006 Pacifica Radio interview: "This $2,600 million spent each day to kill other people, this machine of killing peoples, devouring the world resources, eating the world resources each day. So this is a terrorist structure indeed, and we are in danger, so President Bush is right, I think. We are suffering a terrorist menace."

But when Chavez handed him Galeano's 30-year-old communist diatribe, Obama could only say, "I think it was, it was a nice gesture to give me a book. I'm a reader." Being obsessed with himself, Obama also said he should have given Chavez his books. He added that Chavez's harsh rhetoric didn't mean they couldn't engage in civil dialogue. There's only one thing wrong with that sentiment: It's not civil dialogue for Chavez to demand that Obama read about how his country is bleeding the Americas to death.

Yet one more powerful -- oh, never mind.

American reporters saw this as a glorious moment. Time's Tim Padgett said the hate-America gift was appropriate, because Obama "proved at the Trinidad summit to be the first U.S. president to get it." Obama "gets" the America-haters. But how would he respond to the charge that Franklin Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor Policy" or John Kennedy's "Alliance for Progress" was just more imperialistic aggression? Is it simply inappropriate to defend American presidents, even when they're Democrats? The "evil empire" narrative must always be listened to with respect -- and without rebuttal?

Only Obama deserves respect, apparently. Padgett thought the Latin leftists should show respect by reading the president's own masterful books in order to admire his "common-sense, post-ideological political philosophy."

To glimpse at the warped worldview of our media elite, look no further than a news "analysis" by Steven Hurst of the Associated Press, who compared Obama favorably to ... Mikhail Gorbachev. Apparently, like Gorbachev, Obama presides over a corrupt and crumbling empire: "During his short -- by Soviet standards -- tenure, he scrambled incessantly to shed the ideological entanglements that were leading the communist empire toward ruin. But Obama is outpacing even Gorbachev."

The leftist media look at Obama and see themselves. There are no "ideological entanglements." They're just out to make the world a better place, insisting that America needs to shrink itself into a smaller, quieter, less "judgmental" partner, and do so while the Western hemisphere goes off a left-wing cliff.