US Negotiates with Terrorists

Will McCain attack Bush and Rice for negotiating with terrorists?

News reports indicate that the US State Department, under Dr. Condi Rice, has been talking to Libya to try to negotiate away a US court verdict that the Libyans don't want to pay and get them to finish payments for the Pan Am Flight 103 victims.

Will the right wing bloggers and Fox News pundits go ballistic over this? Not so far. All Fox did was report it from the wire story. Imagine what would have happened if a Democrat had suggested doing this? Yet all remain silent as Bush and Rice make a deal with a terror state.

Note added on 1 June:
Not to be outdone, we see that Israel is negotiating with Hezbollah. Clearly they did not take Bush's speech to the Knesset very seriously.

Elsewhere, we see yet another example of political mendacity, as CNN gets spun by the McCain spinners. After Obama attacked McCain for yet another major error, the assertion that there are now fewer US troops in Iraq than before the surge, CNN blandly reported a false statement by the McCain spokesman.

The McCain camp fired back with a statement from spokesman Tucker Bounds. "Barack Obama is ignoring facts," Bounds wrote.

That, as a response to Obama's statement that "We don't need more leaders who can't admit they've made a mistake, even about something as fundamental as how many Americans are serving in harm's way.", is a flat out lie from the McCain camp. The facts are that there are still more troops in Iraq than before the surge. The only facts cited by this spokesman (who history suggests would become the next Scott McClellan or Ari Fleischer if McCain is elected) concerned whether "American troops have surged toward significant gains in Iraq", not how many troops are actually there. (And that statement also tries to spin the fact that those "gains" have not resulted in the political change that was the actual purpose of the surge, only fewer deaths of our troops in the last month.) Yep, McCain offers four more years of Bushisms.