1 Boring Old Man

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.