where was the outcry when Bush invited Karimov to the White House in 2002?

For those of you who don't know Karimov, he's (still) Uzbekiztan's dictator, and makes Ahmadinejad look like a shy school boy. Torture and state violence and repression were horrendous and recognized by the US State Department's human rights report in 2001. [1] After 911, the US government decided that he wasn't that bad after all (Uzbekistan was of strategic importance for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan) and the US government and Uzbekistan became close friends. Karimov hadn't changed, only the US government's opinion had – and the media followed suit. You'll actually find that torture under his rule went so far as boiling people to death.
Pictures of Bush and Karimov can still be found on the net of course, shaking hands and laughing. So where was the outcry?

More examples could be cited, e.g. Saddam, before he fell from grace (but that was after he massacred his own people) and others. No outcries.

Yes, Ahmadinejad is authoritarian and undemocratic, getting worse and worse, but he's nothing compared to many of the US' friends and allies.
And I'm not saying that you can compare Bush and Obama, but would you be surprised if Obama met Colombia's Uribe? Would there be an outcry in the media? And there's no doubt about his human rights records, if you look at his military's and para-military's tortures and killings.

What would all this tell you about the "vibrant democracy" of the US, if you followed your own logic?

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[1] Excerpt from http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2001/eur/836… :

…, both police and the NSS routinely tortured, beat, and otherwise mistreated detainees to obtain confessions, which they then used to incriminate the detainees. Police also used suffocation, electric shock, rape, and other sexual abuse. Neither the severity nor frequency of torture appeared to have decreased during the year.