White House on Nazi smear: Who, us?

May 15, 2008

In the morning, the president, in a speech to the Israeli Knesset, suggested that Democrats want to appease terrorists, the way some wanted to appease Hitler. In the afternoon, the White House thought it best to play dumb.

Q:There’s some question about his comment here about “some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong” — you know the passage. And he talks about the “false comfort of appeasement.” This is being seen in some quarters as a slam on Senator Obama. Is this in any way directed at Senator Obama?

PERINO: It is not. And I would think that all of you who cover these issues and have for a long time have known that there are many who have suggested these types of negotiations with people that President Bush thinks we should not talk to. I understand when you’re running for office you sometimes think the world revolves around you — that is not always true and it is not true in this case.

Q: But, so, not aimed at him — do they include him?

PERINO: He’ll have to speak for himself as to what his policy is and you guys can know it well.

Yes, of course, the Bush gang is completely innocent. Who, them? Travel to foreign soil to slander a U.S. political leader in the midst of a domestic presidential campaign? How could we have ever gotten such an idea in the first place?

Oh, right, I remember now — from White House officials who conceded this morning that this was precisely the point of Bush’s cheap and pathetic smear attempt. CNN’s Ed Henry reported, “White House aides are acknowledging that this was a reference to the fact that Sen. Obama and other Democrats have publicly said that it would be ok for the U.S. President to meet with leaders like the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.” And NBC’s John Yang also spoke with a White House official who said Obama was one of Bush’s intended targets.

In case there’s any doubt here, this is what Bush said, by way of the official White House transcript:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the 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 I could only have talked to Hitler, all 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.”

He went on to say, “Some people suggest if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away. This is a tired argument that buys into the propaganda of the enemies of peace, and America utterly rejects it.” Asked who the president may have been referring to, Dana Perino had no idea.

Taking a step back, I can’t help but notice that this painful incident is something of a dry-run for the presidential campaign. Bush, McCain, and Lieberman get together to launch a nauseating attack, and it’s up to Dems to respond and fire back. I have to say, the Dems have been pretty sharp today. The Obama campaign wasted no time in hitting the White House pretty hard, and immediately putting the onus back on failed Republican policies, noting that the Bush/McCain approach has actually made our enemies stronger, not weaker.

John Kerry has been everywhere hitting back, and party leaders have been duly aggressive.

In strong terms today, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, criticized President Bush’s remarks to the Israeli parliament that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Democrats favor a policy of appeasement toward terrorists. Biden said it was “bullsh*t” and “malarkey” for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country “and make this kind of ridiculous statement.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) directed sharp words towards the president as well, saying that Bush’s comments were “‘beneath the dignity of the office of the president and unworthy of our representation” at the celebration of Israel’s 60th anniversary. […]

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel also noted that Bush had broken from the tradition that “when a U.S. president is overseas, partisan politics stops at the water’s edge.” “President Bush has now taken that principle and turned it on its head: for this White House, partisan politics now begins at the water’s edge,” said Emanuel. He added, “Does the president have no shame?”

In a statement, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said: “Not surprisingly, the engineer of the worst foreign policy in our nation’s history has fired yet another reckless and reprehensible round.”

I would have much preferred that Bush not launch this disgusting attack. And it would have been far more encouraging to see McCain not cheer this slander on. But all things being equal, if this was a test of the Democratic response to Republican’s craven election-year demagoguery, I think Dems responded pretty well.

It’s just a little Bush family projection about the Nazis: Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, and Bush’s great-grandfather, George Herbert Walker, were both cheerleaders for Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s and the 1940s until FDR stopped their trading with the Nazis in 1942 by invoking the Trading with the Enemy Act.

  • This is from Truman’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, 15 July 1948: “As I have said time and time again, foreign policy should be the policy of the whole Nation and not the policy of one party or the other. Partisanship should stop at the water’s edge; and I shall continue to preach that through this whole campaign.”

    Bush is such a complete asshole.

  • Let’s take a poll of the Ameican people, to see whether they believe Bush’s press bimbo or their own eyes and ears.

    Kudos to the Obama campaign, who should never pass up an opportunity to point out that Bush has no credibility left, and his buddy McCain suffers by association.

    And I sure hope Lieberman is getting an earful right now from the people who actually know a thing or two about actual Nazis.

  • If McCain had more brains, he would be taking the high ground and condemning Bush’s remarks. What better way to bolster the “I won’t be Bush III” argument, and the image of being a maverick who doesn’t engage in blindly partisan politics?

    Fortunately, McCain doesn’t have a whole lot of sense, so he’s falling right into this easily-avoided trap.

  • Bush is desperate. He knows the “policy papers” of his administration are now only good for wiping where the sun don’t shine, and he stills wants to be relevant. Sooo, the only way to reproject his desire is to decry an obvious embellishment tied to despicable images. Mr. Bush – what a buffoon you are! -Kevo

  • why are you complaining ? why is he in office ? how much damage does he have to do ?

    if you or i commit a felony a week for seven years, and finally get caught when we only have seven months to live, are the prosecutors and police going to let us off the hook because we’re almost done ?

    why are you sitting there like pathetic fools while he does worse damage, says stupider things, steals more money, kills more people … all of which will escalate exponentially in the shrinking window of time he has left ?

    he shouldn’t be allowed to stay in office another day. you pussies just sit and complain. do something … he should be pursued, charged and impeached starting six years ago.
    you bitch and you gripe … but you’re perfectly willing to let him do it for another six months.

    and he’s obviously gone over the edge … he’s delusional, and bordering on retarded based on his statements and verbate speech patterns i’ve read over the past few weeks.

    do you not think he’s going to start a nuclear war with iran before he goes ? do you not think he’s going to plunder the treasury even more ? kill more people ? totally demolish the country’s reputation ? the next seven months will be worse than the previous seven years combined .. and still you’ll sit … and whinge .. and whine … and wring your hands, suggesting something should have been done.

    you deserve the destruction this freak has wrought. you have no one to blame but yourselves.

    you expect him to reign himself in ? perhaps cheney will set him right over the next seven months? you make me puke, everybody and everyone who bitches about him.

    good luck.

  • George W Bush has no class, no brains and no future. He had better move to Paraguay or somewhere where he can’t testify. What a slimy thing to do. I still don’t believe that he was actually elected either time. How low can we go?

  • Huggy-bear Joe Liebermann (Traitor, Conn.) has jumped into the fray with both feet in his mouth, as well (as noted, in the prior post, looks like).

    Evidently, he needed to make certain that the imbecile faction had a quorum in all of this:

    “President Bush got it exactly right today.”

    Which is a sterling example, logically, of a proposition that can NEVER be true.

    Ahh, the further adventures of the Kissing Bandit.

  • Memekiller, thanks for the link to the Guardian article — I’d never read that before.

  • “Some people suggest if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away.”

    Anybody who uses straw men to make his or her case is, intellectually speaking, a pussy. But we knew that about Bush.

  • Biden’s response was the best. I would have preferred “fuck that asshole,” but “bullshit” was close enough.

  • In the afternoon, the White House thought it best to play dumb.

    The people in this White House don’t have to play dumb.

  • The question that should have been asked: “Then who is Mr. Bush referring to?”

  • Interestingly the quote from the senator who wanted to negotiate with Hitler was William Borah, A Republican senator from Idaho.

  • Aren’t these the same schmucks that have been conducting back channel talks with Iran for the last five years regarding Afghanistan and Iraq? Six party talks with North Korea, a regime several degrees worse than the mullahs in Tehran? Israel talks back channel with Hamas, quietly of course, and also with Syria.

    Appeasement is not the act of discussion and negotiation. It’s in the deal you cut from them.

    Morons. Morons in January 2001, morons through January 2009.

  • Is this in any way directed at Senator Obama?
    PERINO: It is not.

    If not Obama, then who? Gates?

    I would also like for some prominent *Jewish* Dems to contribute to demolishing of Bu..$h..’s idiocy. Chuck? Chuck Schumer? Are you there? Or, as Hillary’s supporter, you’re OK with it?

  • Just can’t understand how anyone could imagine that international relations etc. could improve if we don’t talk to other countries. So far the Bush way hasn’t brought peace to the Middle East or settled the Israeli and Palistanian issues. TALK to each other and find some sort of middle ground. And if not, then at least you did try.

  • Someone should point out the extreme irony of the situation — probably the most fertile ground for the growth of democracy in the Middle East was in the country of Iran. But our policies and the bellicosity of Bush have strengthened the standing of the radicals and reduced the chances for the moderates to promote democracy. But, if you point out the obvious you will get labeled as an appeaser or a hate america firster. We may not have created these pit bulls but we sure have been feeding them raw meat and poking them with sharp sticks. Continuing down Bush’s path can only bring the lethal injection.

    The stakes of another war are entirely too high and may be just the spark needed to start the cascade to global collapse.

    250 days …………….

  • It is irrevocably laughable to witness the spawn of Hitler’s financial enabler refer to the descendants of those who brought about Hitler’s destruction as “appeasers” of 21st-century Hitlerism. How the people of Israel can even stomach having Bush in their country—let alone allowing themselves to be governed by Likud vermin***—is beyond ludicrous.

    ***Your history lesson for today is about the Israeli political party, Likud. They are the current incarnation of the original “revisionist Zionism” movement that sought to overthrow British control over Palestine in 1940 by negotiating with Nazi Germany to form a “both sides of the river” pact, which would have taken all of present-day Israel “and” present-day Jordan to establish a Jewish homeland, and then to evacuate all European Jews to the new protectorate. Likud is to Israel as Bush’s “28%’er base” is the United States, or “Mad Vlad” Putin’s Russia Party is to Russia.

  • I found this little bit of infomation at oldmanmccain.com:

    “McCain seems to be forgetting something kind of important that happened during the Reagan administration.

    It’s called the Iran-Contra Scandal.”

    http://www.oldmanmccain.com/2008/05/huge-mccain-blunder-says-reagan-didnt.html

    Obama was saying that he be willing to TALK with Iran, and Reagan actually DID appease Iran. Talking with them is NOT appeasement, actually GIVING them some thing in exchange for them to do something IS appeasement. LOL

  • Dafydd ab Hugh, of Big Lizards, had a great take on this:

    Dynamic 1: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth“

    Bush attacked appeasement — and Obama instantly recognized himself, reacting angrily and defensively.

  • @24,
    Or as many of us non religious types would say. Guilt as Prescott Bush had an indirect helping hand killing a lot of Jews by financing the Nazis. Or perhaps projection as Bush has been a weakling all his life. Nice try.

  • Yeah, right. Meet with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

    Where would our country be if FDR had talked with to brutal, murderous, dictator Joseph Stalin, huh?
    At most, you would just send your representatives like John McCain says you should. You’d NEVER talk with him personally.

    You give all fascists the stiff arm and cold shoulder, by Godfrey, and we’ll be just fine.
    It worked with Fidel Castro, it’ll work for Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. By the time John McCain’s war is over, he’ll be in his last throes.

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