Pres. Bush attacks Pres. Bush

Rove may be gone, but spreading lies by false juxtaposition has not ended, Pres. Bush announced today in Israel. In a speech equating "talking" to an enemy with "appeasement", the President is now on the record as charging his own administration, not to mention that of President Reagan, with appeasement in the middle east. Along the way he attacked a fellow Republican, the late Sen. Borah of Idaho, and fellow preppie John Simpson McCain III.

It is well known that Reagan negotiated with the terrorists who took Americans hostage in Iran and helped arm Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Similarly, Bush had no qualms about negotiating with Iran to get their assistance when the time came to attack bin Laden in Afghanistan, just as he is now negotiating with North Korea. Interestingly, McCain implicitly attacked Bush for both of these actions while trying to jump on the Half-Lie Bandwagon once driven by Karl Rove. Or maybe McCain simply doesn't remember what Bush did in 2001, or more recently with Korea.

Obama was quick to counterattack, and even got support from wannabe VP Hillary Clinton, showing he doesn't plan to lie down and take it like candidates have in past elections. That forced the White House to state publicly that this attack was not directed at Obama and was not '08 politics ... so maybe the President was directing it at Condi Rice and others in his administration who want to engage Iran? If Bush wasn't trying to attack Obama, or create the misimpression that he was attacking Obama, then was he really just trying to deflect attention from how far he has gone to appease America's enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

And anyone who has read the report of the 9-11 commission from cover to cover knows that it was the Bush administration that backed off on the pursuit of the people who attacked a US warship in 2000. Someone with that record should not be talking about appeasement of our enemies.

Updated 16 May 2008:
It didn't take people who own libraries of videotaped and audiotaped interviews to find that McCain was also attacking himself yesterday for proposing that the US talk to Hamas "because they're the government" that was democratically elected in Palestine. Given an opportunity to say "No, American diplomats should not work with Hamas because they are radicals", he did nothing of the sort. Two years later he calls his former position on Hamas "appeasement". Even today, the best his spin experts can come up with is a different interview where he made a conflicting policy statement, adopting the current Obama/Clinton position that it is OK to talk to Hamas if they accept Israel's right to exist. That gets around the "terrorist" part of the Bush-McCain attack, but not the "radical" part.

It was also interesting to see a commentary supporting my recollection that Rice supported talking to Iran, and adding Defense Secretary Gates to the list of "appeasers" ... and Khadafy in Libya to the list of "rerrorists and radicals" that Bush has negotiated with.

Meanwhile, the people who told the press (off the record) that Bush was referring to Obama continue to avoid answering the real question: If Bush wasn't talking about Secretary of State Rice or Senator Obama, who was he talking about? Name names. Whose actions did he think constituted appeasement, and why?