1 Boring Old Man

dark days…

Tomorrow, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly will explain to us that what Bush said today is fine, maybe even courageous.

PMO: U.S., Israel see need for ‘tangible action’ on Iran nukes
Haaretz Correspondents and Haaretz Service

… as a former Knesset speaker, MK Reuven Rivlin, put it Thursday, "I wish our leaders would make speeches like this." Rivlin described Bush as "manifesting the Zionist vision."

… Hendel issued a statement calling on Olmert "to learn from the president of the United States what Zionism is."

ANALYSIS: Who wants to stop Iran?

… Bush did not waver Thursday from the policies that have guided his administration since September 11, 2001. His position on Iran is longstanding. But on Thursday, when he again spoke of the naivete of those who believe dialogue can block Iran’s nuclear program, it blipped on America’s political radar. Barack Obama’s campaign was quick to respond, calling it "extraordinary politicization of foreign policy." If those who want to talk to Iran are like those who wanted to talk to Hitler - then Obama is Neville Chamberlain or Senator Borah.

But Bush should be measured by the same yardstick. Meetings will not stop Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but neither will speeches in Knesset. Bush may not be as naive as Obama, but U.S. foreign policy under his leadership has failed time after time on the Iranian issue. International sanctions are too skimpy to mount any real pressure against Iran’s uranium enrichment program, and Tehran is gaining.

… And here is what he said Thursday: For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. And he added: "America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions." Bush’s declarations could be seen as a calming expression of support: The U.S. president clearly does not favor a nuclear Iran. But one can also wonder about the wording he chose in this speech. Does relying on what the "world" does - or standing with Israel, which might take action itself - mean that America does not plan to be the one to stop Iran?

I just didn’t know about such things - Neoconservatives, the Project for the New American Century, the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society, the Hudson Institute, etc. Those of us who read the blogs do know that history, about the rise of  the Neoconservatives and their incorporation into the Bush Administration. We know about the plan to unseat Saddam Hussein that antedated Bush’s election. We know about Paul Wolfowitz’s Defense Guidance of 1991 that morphed into the Bush Doctrine. We’ve read about Michael Ledeen and Laurie Mylroie, some of the early anti-Iranian anti-Iraqi Hawks. We’ve read first hand the early venom of John Bolton, or the place of Richard Perle, or the Kagans or the Kristols. To us, it’s a coherent picture of a right wing takeover of our government with a long history and a lot of key players. But many, maybe most have no idea of the places where all of this craziness originated.

Over the last few years, I returned to http://www.newamericancentury.org over and over. While I was usually looking up something like who signed the Clinton letter? or who were the P.N.A.C. founders?, I think a lot of my visits were for a reminder that this whole neoconservative lunacy was real. Somehow, seeing it there in black and white helped me to not get concerned that I was making something up. Those people really did do what I thought they did.

After the Press Conference, the blonde lady commentator asked some guy named Major to analyze Obama’s responses. He interpreted what Obama said in terms of campaign ploys, but stayed more or less on the topic. But then the blonde woman put on quite a show. She feigned confusion, and reframed everything Obama had said into that he would negotiate with Terrorists and kept up the appeasment talk. In essence, it was a sort of low level job of ignoring everything Obama said and getting it back to the Bush version. It was neither reporting, nor analysis - more like propoganda. I expect that this is the refrain throughout the day on America’s number one news channel.

Hypocrisy on Hamas
McCain Was for Talking Before He Was Against It

If the recent exchanges between President Bush, Barack Obama and John McCain on Hamas and terrorism are a preview of the general election, we are in for an ugly six months. Despite his reputation in the media as a charming maverick, McCain has shown that he is also happy to use Nixon-style dirty campaign tactics. By charging recently that Hamas is rooting for an Obama victory, McCain tried to use guilt by association to suggest that Obama is weak on national security and won’t stand up to terrorist organizations, or that, as Richard Nixon might have put it, Obama is soft on Israel.

President Bush picked up this theme yesterday. Without naming Obama during his speech last night to Israel’s Knesset, Bush suggested that Democrats want to "negotiate with terrorists" while Republicans want to fight terrorists. The Obama campaign was right to criticize the president for his remarks and for engaging in partisan politics while overseas. Many presidents have said things abroad that could be construed as violating this unwritten rule of American politics. But it is hard to remember any president abusing the prestige of his office in as crude a way as Bush did yesterday…

McCain, meanwhile, is guilty of hypocrisy. I am a supporter of Hillary Clinton and believe that she was right to say, about McCain’s statement on Hamas, "I don’t think that anybody should take that seriously." Unfortunately, the Republicans know that some people will. That’s why they say such things. But given his own position on Hamas, McCain is the last politician who should be attacking Obama. Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News’s "World News Tonight" program. Here is the crucial part of our exchange:

I asked: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"

McCain answered: "They’re the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it’s a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."

hy·poc·ri·sy (h-pkr-s) n. pl. hy·poc·ri·sies 1. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness. 2. An act or instance of such falseness.

I’m not sure what to make of all this. I actually don’t like this side of politics very much. The Republicans do it all the time - finding some conflict between something said in the past and some recent statement and blowing the disparity into absurdity. But we read  about these McCainisms daily. His recent new math is an example: 2013 - 2008 = 100 years. We were going to stay in Iraq for as long as it took [100 years]. Now we’re coming home in five years.

"They’re the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it’s a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."

“I think Barack Obama needs to explain why he wants to sit down and talk with a man who is the head of a government that is a state sponsor of terror that is responsible for the killing of brave young Americans and wants to wipe Israel off the map and denies the Holocaust,” McCain said, “That is what I think Senator Obama ought to explain to the American people. It is a serious error on the part of Senator Obama that shows naivety and inexperience and lack of judgment to say that he wants to sit down across the table from an individual who leads a country that says that Israel is a stinking corpse, that is dedicated to the extinction of the state of Israel,” McCain said. “My question is what does he want to talk about?

I don’t know how to say what I think precisely. Ever since McCain suddenly became Bush’s best friend after what Bush/Rove did to him in South Carolina in the 2000 election, I’ve felt that John McCain sold out, struck a Faustian bargain with Bush/Cheney. That seems to me to be fanciful. But every time another one of these turn-arounds happens, I think it again. My fantasy is that he said to himself [or they said to him], "You can’t win on your own. You have to get on the bus."

That’s actually how I think of Bush, riding the Neoconservative bus. The difference is that I don’t think he has opinions that have to be over-ridden to stay with the Talking Points. John McCain does have opinions, but he renounces them. He’s an enigma because a lot of us want to like him. We like his Maverick ways. I even understood his "100 years" comment, though I didn’t agree with it. But he’s become something of a puppet. This example [Hamas] is absurd. Bush had equated sitting down to talk with appeasment - an absurd equation. I thought it was a campaign maneuver, to insure the American Jewish vote. Or to throw gasoline on the fire of Obama’s middle name - Hussein. But McCain’s response sounds "prepared."

All of that said, I’d like to have a shot at the answer to McCain’s question, "…what does he want to talk about?." I’d like for Obama to talk to Hamas about the dead-ended-ness of their current stand-off with Israel. I’d like to explore ways in which the Palestinians might be helped by the U.S. and Israel to bring better lives to their people that would be mutually acceptible to all three parties. I’d like him to talk about some way to keep dialog open, even if there is no contemporary agreement. I’d like for him to establish diplomatic channels. I’d like for him to make the point that we can remain Israel’s ally and still have a respectful dialog with Hamas. I can go on and on, but you get my drift. We’re Israel’s ally, not Israel’s Foreign Policy Department.

President Bush committed political treason today

I’ve seen a lot of sad things in American politics in my lifetime — the resignation of a president who became a national disgrace after he oversaw a campaign of break-ins and cover-ups, another who circumvented the Constitution to trade arms for hostages, and yet is now hailed as national hero. And those paled to what we have seen in the last seven years — flagrant disregard for the Constitution, the launching of a "pre-emptive" war on false pretenses, and discussions about torture and other shocking abuses inside the White House inner sanctum.

But now it’s come to this: A new low that I never imagined was even possible.

President Bush went on foreign soil today, and committed what I consider an act of political treason: Comparing the candidate of the U.S. opposition party to appeasers of Nazi Germany – in the very nation that was carved out from the horrific calamity of the Holocaust. Bush’s bizarre and beyond-appropriate detour into American presidential politics took place in the middle of what should have been an occasion for joy: A speech to Israeli’s Knesset to honor that nation’s 60th birthday.

But here’s what he said:

 JERUSALEM (CNN) – In a particularly sharp blast from halfway around the world, President Bush suggested Thursday that Sen. Barack Obama and other Democrats are in favor of "appeasement" of terrorists in the same way U.S. leaders appeased Nazis in the run-up to World War II.

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," said Bush, in what White House aides privately acknowledged was a reference to calls by Obama and other Democrats for the U.S. president to sit down for talks with leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said in remarks to the Israeli Knesset. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American Senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of 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."

As a believer in free speech, I think Bush has a right to say what he wants, but as a President of the United States who swore to uphold the Constitution, his freedom also carries an awesome and solemn responsibility, and what this president said today is a serious breach of that high moral standard…

But what Bush did in Israel this morning goes well beyond the accepted confines of American political debate, When the president speaks to a foreign parliament on behalf of our country, his message needs to be clear and unambiguous. Our democracy may look messy to outsiders, and we may have our disagreements with some sharp elbows thrown around, but at the end of the day we are not Republicans or Democrats or liberals or conservatives.

We are Americans…

Tomorrow, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly will explain to us that what Bush said today is fine, maybe even courageous. This weekend, the Talking Heads on the Sunday T.V. shows will rally behind his speech. Fox News will join in the support. Dick Cheney will amplify on Bush’s statement. Maybe some of those West Virginia voters I saw on television tonight will get interviewed again agreeing with the President.