In a rare moment of relevancy, President Bush made headlines today for a speech he gave in Israel which stated that those who would negotiate with America’s enemies are no different from those who appeased the Nazis. This is of course an attack on Senator Obama who has said he would be willing to negotiate with Iran(though the Bush White House denies that they meant this much like a 5 year old denies stealing from a cookie jar.) In his speech President Bush said:
“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history,”
Of course, what Bush failed to mention was that the Senator he was referring to was a Republican.
Howard Dean demanded that Senator McCain show himself to be a decent man with integrity and denounce the President’s hateful and inappropriate comments. The Senator from Arizona refused and showed his true colors, resorting to fear:
“This does bring up an issue that we will be discussing with the American people, and that is, why does Barack Obama, Senator Obama, want to sit down with a state sponsor of terrorism?”
McCain also brought up Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who ceded part of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, furthering Bush’s pathetic attempt at “Guilt By Analogy.”
Senator Obama wasn’t campaigning today but his campaign responded that:
“It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack, George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the president’s extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.”
However, others such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee described the comments for what they were. Sen. Clinton said:
“President Bush’s comparison of any Democrat to Nazi appeasers is both offensive and outrageous on the face of it, especially in light of his failures in foreign policy. This is the kind of statement that has no place in any presidential address and certainly to use an important moment like the 60th anniversary celebration of Israel to make a political point seems terribly misplaced. Unfortunately, this is what we’ve come to expect from President Bush.”
Senator Biden said:
“This is bullshit, this is malarkey. This is outrageous, for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, to sit in the Knesset … and make this kind of ridiculous statement. He is the guy who has weakened us,” he said. “He has increased the number of terrorists in the world. It is his policies that have produced this vulnerability that the U.S. has. It’s his [own] intelligence community [that] has pointed this out, not me.”
Senator Biden also later described the President’s tactics as a “long-distance swiftboating.”
The Democrats did the right thing, but John McCain has shown again that he’s not a “maverick”. He’s simply yet another fear-mongering Rovian Republican.
