Bush: Not Doing McCain Any Favors

Yesterday, we chronicled Vice President Dick Cheney's first foray onto the 2008 campaign trail and its catastrophic conclusion: a loss in Mississippi's scarlet red First District for Republican Congressional wannabe Greg Davis... to a Democrat (shudder). Now Cheney's second-in-command, President George W. Bush, has injected himself into the race as well--and his debut is proving to be even more spectacularly disastrous than his not-so-better half's.

Dubya's first mistake? Choice of venue. Speaking earlier today before the Israeli parliament in honor of the country's 60th anniversary, Bush kicked off the festivities by acting more or less, you know, "presidential." He spoke of America's unwavering support for the Jewish State. He portrayed the future of the Middle East as a time of "tolerance and integration." He reiterated his belief that democracy would triumph over terrorism. Oh, and then he used the diplomatic forum to launch a veiled but stinging attack on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, breaking the unwritten rule of U.S. politics that partisan bickering stops at our water's edge. "Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals," he said in the Knesset, "as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along." The "some," White House aides privately confirmed to CNN, referred to Obama, who has said that as president he will engage in direct talks with the heads of hostile states--but has also made it abundantly clear that he will not sit down with "terrorists and radicals" like, say, Hamas. So much for seeming presidential.

And that was only the beginning. Digging his hole ever deeper, Bush went on to cast himself as Winston Churchill to Obama's Neville Chamberlain, implying that the Democratic senator favors "appeasing" terrorists much as some Western leaders sought to appease Adolf Hitler in the run-up to World War II. "We have heard this foolish delusion before," said Bush. "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." Nazis = never a political winner. Oy vey, indeed.

There is, of course, a valuable debate to be had over whether the U.S. president should agree to unconditional talks with, say, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. But by distorting Obama's stance beyond all recognition and using the charged context of the Knesset--along with a handful of inappropriate historical allusions*--to not-so-subtly raise further doubts about the Democratic candidate with Jewish Americans, Bush indicated that he's less interested in highlighting foreign-policy differences than in fear-mongering for political gain..."

http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/05/15/bush-not-doing-mccain-any-favors.aspx