In the wake of President Bush's speech to the Knesset yesterday in which he criticized those who would negotiate with "terrorists and radicals" as delusional types who seek the "false comfort of appeasement," many on the left have had a meltdown. They've been so vituperative, one would have thought it was still last week, way back when the left's presumptive nominee Barack Obama supported meeting face-to-face with radical terror supporter Mahmoud Ahmadenijad (not to mention an additional rogue's gallery of the world's worst leaders, all within his first year in office).
The normally thoughtful and intelligent Josh Marshall commented,
In case you hadn't heard yet, the president attacked Sen. Obama as a terrorist coddler on the order of the late 30s Nazi-appeasers in a speech before the Israeli Knesset.
As the president who's probably done more to damage this country than any in 150 years, I can't say I'm exactly surprised that he'd do this. But it really was disgusting, even for him.
What's he talking about? Everyone knows Obama doesn't support meeting with radicals and terror supporters. This week anyway. Liberal talkmeister Taylor Marsh chimed in:
Will this ever end? George W. Bush, the most incompetent, bumbling, stubborn president talking about Democrats as if we are traitors? There isn't a political woman or man alive who could get through the political system who could either offer to "negotiate with terrorists", or sell Israel down the river. But bringing up the Hitler analogy is going some even for Bush.
After apologizing for his rash use of a barnyard epithet to attack the president's speech, perennially eloquent and thoughtful Senator Joe Biden offered some vintage Democratic whine.
Biden again did not mince words when discussing Bush's remarks, accusing the president of engaging in "long-distance swiftboating" with his speech in Israel. Biden also cited numerous examples of the Bush Administration reaching out to unfriendly regimes in Libya, North Korea and Iran, arguing that Bush's insinuation that the Democrats were soft on terrorism was "truly delusional ... and truly disgraceful."
As for Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer, one could almost sense him stamping his little virtual feet as he wrote:
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…Today, it's a whole new ballgame. I believe this treacherous statement by a U.S. president in Israel is a signal to the Democrats in the House in Washington, that it's time to play its Constitutional role in ending this trauma, before even greater acts against the interest of America are wrongly committed in our name.
It's nice to see that the idea of sitting down for a confab with Ahmadenijad no longer has a seat at the table of intelligent ideas. But someone better break the news gently to the Atlantic Monthly's Matthew Yglesias who lionized Obama's freshly abandoned plans in this month's hot-off-the-presses issue:
At the YouTube debate on July 23, 2007, when Obama was asked whether he would be willing to meet "without precondition … with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea," the right answer, conventionally speaking, was a qualified "no." But Obama answered in the affirmative. Initially, even sympathetic observers like The Nation's David Corn called this statement a "flub" at best…
Obama's team did not try to qualify (or, in political parlance, "clarify") his remark, and no one said he misspoke… Soon, on the stump, he was regularly referring to his willingness to meet with foreign leaders, unlike other top presidential candidates.
