Hoo Boy

May 16th, 2008

Man.

I’m going to blog more on this later, but Bush & McCain really outdid themselves today with sheer idiocy and hypocrisy.

Really. Imagine Bill Clinton, in mid-2000, going to Israel and comparing then-Governor Bush with Hitler appeasers. Republicans would have gone nuclear with rage, not the least of which would have been at the idea of an American president going overseas and using a foreign podium to slam another American politician.

And then there’s McCain, whose big day was trounced on by Bush’s speech. Personally, I think Bush did McCain a favor by eclipsing his “Magic Pony” speech, in which he’s finishing his first term in office and he presides over a world of winsome faeries and prancing unicorns. All McCain could do in Bush’s shadow was to agree that that nasty Obama man was indeed an appeaser.

And then the wingnuts, apparently attracted to stupidity light moths to flame, chimed in. Reserving further comment for later, I will simply let you watch Chris Matthews utterly annihilate the right-wing talking head as an unimaginably blustering moron. It is literally breathtaking.

Some days you can be so thoroughly stupid that even your pals in the media come out and call you a laughable moron.

  1. Geoff
    May 16th, 2008 at 13:35 | #1

    Well, here is the exact text of Bush’s comments:

    “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Bush said. “We have heard this foolish delusion before. 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.”

    If Obama (or Jimmy Carter) see themselves as slammed in those words, I think that says more about them than it does about Bush. Bush didn’t “compare [Obama] with Hitler appeasers”; he didn’t even mention him at all. Anyway, Bush is mostly right. Do a search on “hudna” for the true value of a Middle-East “truce agreement”. It certainly puts Carter’s foolishness in meeting with Hamas into perspective.

  2. May 17th, 2008 at 16:27 | #2

    Hmm…not a lot to be proud of on either side of that Hardball segment. Is this really what passes for political discussion these days?

  3. Luis
    May 17th, 2008 at 23:24 | #3

    Oh, Sako, heck, Matthews may not have been smooth or refined, but the talking head deserved every bit of that and more. I don’t think it should be reserved to situations like this or to just conservatives or liberals: if someone appears on national TV and cannot defend their argument, they should NOT be let alone on it. This guy was directly likening Obama to Chamberlain, saying Obama was an appeaser, and yet he didn’t know anything about Chamberlain except his reputation as an appeaser. Without know what Chamberlain did or why, it was moronic of him to make the comparison. What the talking head was counting was what usually happens on these shows: speakers are not challenged to back up their words. Matthews saw that this guy was making a false analogy, so tested the speaker, who he knew would either be making a false accusation and would have to at least backtrack, or he simply didn’t know what he was talking about.

    It hardly passes for political discussion, but that’s th point: at least Matthews was putting guests on notice that they had to have facts and knowledge on their side, and that will lead to better political discussion in the future.

    Geoff: you should know better than that. You are trying to claim that if Obama saw the remarks as being directed at him, then the accusations had some merit, and that just doesn’t fly at all, not even a little bit. If I were to write a blog post about “some commenters on my blog who have recently taken issue with what I say,” and then make some outlandish claim like, “they are on heavy medication,” you would be aware that you are one of the only people taken issue with what I say, and despite having absolutely no association with medication at all, you would know perfectly well that the comment was directed at you. A slam does not have to have even the barest shred of truth to be recognizable as to whom it is lobbed at. Obama and Carter were so obviously the recipients, everyone saw it immediately–I saw it right away, and yet I knew that the statement was utterly false.

    Hitler may have been beyond placating, but Hitler is not every single antagonistic leader. Talking with leaders of antagonistic countries has a long and hallowed tradition; almost every president of note has done it. Was Reagan an appeaser for talking with the heads of Soviet government? Was Kennedy? Was Nixon for talking to China? So forth and so on, the practice not only has precedent but is recognized as sometimes being incredibly constructive. Wars are prevented that way. And simply shutting off that option is as foolish as it is arrogant. Ironically, Bush is not that foolish–as was pointed out, he himself has “appeased” foreign leaders from time to time.

    The accusation was horrifically flawed, both in terms of what it suggested and who it was aimed at. It spoke to Bush’s state, and Bush’s state only, and McCain’s chiming in (as well as Leiberman’s) spoke to their states of mind similarly.

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