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The Obama Campaign Goes Completely Insane
- 05.15.2008 - 11:12 AMIf you look a few posts below, you will find the text of President Bush’s powerful and moving speech to the Knesset today. In the course of it, he says something very general:
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. We have heard this foolish delusion before. 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.
Bush here is arguing in very broad brush against a generally meliorist view of foreign policy — one, moreover, that is held by many people who work inside his own government. For some reason, people who work for the almost-certain nominee of the Democratic party have decided that Bush was attacking him. As Kate Phillips writes on the New York Times website:
In a telephone interview on CNN just a few minutes ago, Robert Gibbs, the communications director for Senator Barack Obama, called Mr. Bush’s remarks “astonishing†and an “unprecendented political attack on foreign soil.â€
An “unprecedented attack on foreign soil”? That is completely deranged. Not only did Bush not mention Obama by name, it is doubtful he or his people were thinking about Obama. The argument that negotiating with terrorists is appeasement akin to Europe’s appeasement of Hitler is a standard view among hawks on the Right — decades old, dating back even before Barry Obama found the audacity to hope in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s church. It is exactly the sort of thing a man with Bush’s politics would say in a speech before the Knesset, whether Obama had run for president or not.
The Obama campaign has even issued a statement on the matter in Obama’s name:
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. It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel. Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power - including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy - to pressure countries like Iran and Syria. 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.
I’m not sure what this all says about Obama. Is this smart politics, getting his base riled up on his behalf? Is he trying to use Bush as a wedge to make the case to the Jewish community in the United States that the bad man in the White House is mischaracterizing him and therefore Jews should like him more? Is he trying, for the millionth time, to rule any criticism of himself out of reasonable bounds by complaining about something that isn’t even criticism of him?
Or is this just another example of Obama’s thin-skinned-ness?
May 15th, 2008 at 11:21 AM
Obama is probably trying to project strength and toughness. He is trying to get a headline saying that he is fighting back… to counteract the idea that he is a weak, ineffectual appeaser.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:25 AM
If the shoe fits…
I guess, to the Obamans, it does fit, which confirms our grave concerns about Obama’s foreign policy direction.
However, Bush and Olmert need to reflect on their whitewashing of Abbas and Fatah, who are every bit the terrorists we’re supposed to fight and not appease.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:28 AM
I can see why Obama thought Bush was talking about him, because that is exactly what Obama claims to believe. That he, because of the middle name Hussein, and his diverse skin color, and his eloquence can persuade Amidejinad to give up his nuclear aspirations and beat swords into plowshares, and that whole 12 Imam thing, a misunderstanding, he was talking about Texas A and M’s 12th man.
What I can’t see is why Obama would want to draw attention to that. Perhaps it is because he thinks John McCain will jump to Obama’s defense and tell Bush that he cannot speak to Obama like that, because John McCain doesn’t campaign that way.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:31 AM
Given the fact that most American Jews despise Bush, it makes political sense to point out that Bush is advocating the idea that Iran=Hitler. There is no better way to convey the fact that a political position is wrong than to point out that Bush advocates it.
The argument that negotiating with terrorists is appeasement akin to Europe’s appeasement of Hitler is a standard view among hawks on the Right
You say that like it’s a good thing. Let’s call it what it is: Holocaust denial. When Bush talks about Iran’s government as it it is indistinguishable from the Nazis, he is downplaying the massive evil of the Nazis in order to co-opt the Nazi terror for his own bizarre belief that Iran is some kind of super-colossal global threat (even as he works to ensure an Iranian victory in Iraq).
The amusing thing is that conservatives really think this Holocaust denial, this denial of the evil of Hitler by making him interchangeable with the militarily-weak, bad but not-nearly-as-bad Iran, is appealing to most American Jews. Clearly it is not, since most American Jews have political views that are to the left of Bush, the Holocaust denier.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:41 AM
According to Mark Halperin at TIME, the White House confirmed that Bush was talking about Obama so that sort of blows your argument John.
I think this actually plays into Obama’s hands. Let the fight be between him and the most unpopular president in modern history while McCain is relegated to the sidelines.
If I was McCain I’d be pissed because this stepped all over his speech today.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:50 AM
If Bush wants to attack Obama before the Knesset, let him, if that’s what he was doing, as opposed to, say, digging at “Honest” Ehud Olmert for his indirect palaver with Hamas. My problem is not that Bush is being mean to poor Barack, but that Bush’s statement is a complete misreading of history and a misapplication of that history to the present moment. In a word, poppycock.
The unenforced security guarantee to Czechoslovakia, followed by the unenforceable one to Poland, brought Britain and France into a war they were unprepared to fight, while the United States sat the whole thing out until Pearl Harbor.
Bush, with his hollowed-out military, wants to deter Iran, but won’t, and fresh from the dismemberment ot Serbia, wants to extend NATO guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia, or all places, whose security he can’t guarantee by conventional means. Meanwhile, apparently serious people on this blog want to (1) invade Burma; (2) intervene in Darfur; (3) confront China and North Korea; (4) Bomb, bomb Iran. All these bloody schemes are put forward in the name of human rights and democracy.
This is all preening arrogance, abysmal ignorance, and doomed hubris. The problem with Obama is not that his version of the foreign policy consensus is tinged with liberal metrosexual cant, but that fundamentally, he adopts the consensus. Tea with Ahmadinejad? BFD, nothing will come of it, and there will be no systematic rethinking of our obsolete, overextended, and unsustainable strategy.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:09 PM
[…] I said earlier, this is what might be called anti-terror boilerplate. Bush is criticizing a mindset, one that has […]
May 15th, 2008 at 12:10 PM
Nonsense, Old Man. The U.S. Army and Marines have annihilated everything the Iranians and Al Qaeda have thrown at them. Bush is actually dealing from a position of relative strength compared to 2006, precisely because of the success of Petraeus’ campaign in Iraq and Maliki’s offensive in Basra.
The problem with Obama’s reaction is simple: he doth protest too much.
He just showed the Republicans his soft side. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The man is thin skinned. He should have ignored Bush.
If I were McCain, I’d attack him along this line all summer. Of course, McCain is an idiot and won’t do this. That’s why he’s going to lose.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:11 PM
It’s a good thing GW didn’t mention Case White and the anchoring of Tehran’s Shia Crescent on the Med, it would have been taken as an attack on Obama for being an elitist and lacking all culinary acuity in white wines(whines(?)).
May 15th, 2008 at 12:13 PM
“The wicked man flees, though no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.”