Last week, it was announced that President Trump had accepted an invitation from North Korea's Kim Jong-un to meet in the near future.

Reasonable people are hoping for a positive outcome, while unreasonable people, blinded by their hatred for the president, have gone off the deep end.  That brings us to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow:

Kim Jong-un makes a request, you want to meet? You might think like another president in this circumstance, you can imagine a president asking himself or herself, why has no other American president ever agreed to do is this? Why has no sitting American president ever met with a leader from North Korea? ... I think a lot of people probably suspect tonight those are not the kinds of questions that this president asked himself before agreeing to this meeting. But this is the president we have and he said yes to North Korea.

One could reasonably question this move: the desired goals to be achieved, the points of discussion to be covered, the suddenness of the decision, or any of several aspects of the announcement.  (Maddow does cover some of that later.)  But to wrongfully go into high dudgeon over the fact that this is an "unprecedented move" betrays Maddow as one who attacks Trump because...well, because he is Trump.

This is not the first time in history that a president has chosen to break with tradition by meeting with a cruel and vile despot of an isolated country.  Indeed, that action was taken in the prior administration, when President Obama visited Kim Jong Fidel in Cuba.

Some will claim there is no comparison between the two nations, North Korea and Cuba.  Those who say that are uninformed, are sympathetic to the cause, or wear their Che shirts with prideful ignorance.

Humberto Fontova, a syndicated columnist and former resident of Cuba, commented:

Castro jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror, murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six and came closest of anyone in history to starting a worldwide nuclear war.  In the above process he converted a nation with a higher per-capita income than half of Europe and a huge influx of immigrants into one that repels Haitians and boasts the highest suicide rate in the hemisphere.

If a news analyst were to be fair and objective, one would expect that Obama's trip to Cuba would also have been questioned.  But we are talking about MSNBC and Rachel Maddow.  Here is how MSNBC described Obama's announcement:

In the not-too-distant past, the very idea of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba seemed fanciful. The suggestion that a sitting American president would set foot on Cuban soil as part of a diplomatic trip was almost impossible to imagine.

And yet, here we are.

Barack Obama will become the first sitting American president to visit Cuba in nearly 90 years, in what would be a crucial turning point between the Cold War rivals that recently shed their decades-old hostilities.

From the transcript of the Rachel Maddow show of March 21, 2016:

[N]obody knows who will get to write the history of this moment in  Cuban history, but in American history, we know, that President Barack Obama will be forever the American leader who got done what every other Democrat since Jack Kennedy tried and failed to do. He got it done. (BAND PLAYING STAR SPANGLED BANNER)  

Such patriotic flair there at the end, closing the segment with the National Anthem: Obama the hero, the patriot, achieving what no other president was capable of.   

In his book Flim Flam Man, Benicia Herald columnist Jim Pugh stated:

Every president in the last 40 years has simply thrown [the Kims] a bone when [they] puffed up [their] chest[s] and threatened war.  It is a duck and dodge strategy that has been used by four presidents and doesn't appear likely to change soon.

Let's hope Trump's meeting with Kim Jong-un will be the change in course that is needed.  If it is, then Trump-haters like Maddow will really be driven crazy.