Appeasers in Denial Over Bush Statement
Speaking to the Israeli Knesset last Thursday President George W. Bush reminded all who would listen that appeasement in the face of aggression has a history of failure. While Bush failed to name anyone in particular a whole flock of birds raised their heads as if to heed the call at a county fair turkey shoot. Among those who took offense at the President’s statement was Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama whose reaction was as though the statements were directed specifically at him, stating
“It is sad that President Bush would use a speech on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack.”
The progressive movements last political debacle, John Kerry, thought it necessary to ad
“George Bush should be making Israel secure, not slandering Barack Obama from the Knesset.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi added
“We have a protocol, sort of a custom, informally around here that we don’t criticize the president when he is on foreign soil. One would think that that would apply to the president that he would not criticize Americans when he is on foreign soil.”
What exactly did the President actually state that provoked such a paranoid response:
“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious arguement will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We’ve heard this foolish delusion before. As 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.”
Senator Joseph Biden took the presumption that the President was attacking Senator Obama even further speaking on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” when he stated
“This is raw, raw politics, demeaning to the presidency of the United States of America… I mean, literally, imagine what our friends, even our foes in the capitals from Paris to Tokyo thought, seeing the president of the United States in the Knesset, attacking another senator.”
Bush could have had President Jimmy Carter in mind after the former commander in chief decided to meet with Hamas leaders in Damascus, Syria last month despite pleas from the Administration and Israel not to meet with the terrorists. He could have been referring to Speaker Pelosi’s shameful visit to Damascus in April of last year where she submitted to wearing Muslim garb to meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad whose regime joins Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad in supplying Iraqi insurgents the arms to kill U.S. and Iraqi troops, rockets to Hamas to kill Israeli citizens on a nearly daily basis, and the means for terrorist factions in Lebanon to destabalize their democracy and assassinate anti-Syrian elected officials at will. He could have been referring to any number of Senators who have planned trips to Syria in the last couple of years to embarrass the Bush administration at the expense of American interests including Senators John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Arlen Specter, and Bill Nelson. In every instance the attention given the state sponsor of terrorism has only given them international credibility that hampers Administration efforts in the war on terrorism and encourages their efforts to destabalize western democracies.
If Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership want to perceive this as an affront to the party’s presumptive Presidential Candidate then let him make his position clear rather than letting him escape with scathing criticism of the Bush Administration as the mainstream media has let him get away with for the better part of the primary season. Obama did, in fact, state he would meet with the regimes of state sponsored terrorism without precondition during the highly publicized YouTube Debates where he was asked
“…would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?”
His response was “Yes I would” from which he has been trying to repel ever since. Progressives are constantly criticizing the failed Bush policy which has kept us in Iraq for five years despite the recent success of the Iraqi Military and the fact we are decimating al-Qaeda in Iraq. They continue to deny the failure of our policy of the past 30 years of appeasing terrorists in the middle east that would eventually result in the 9/11 attacks 8 months into the Bush Presidency. Subsequent attacks against U.S. interests has been limited to the theatres of engagement, not on U.S. properties at home or abroad.
September 4th, 2008 at 9:25 am
[...] former nemasis in this coming November. As President Bush tried to remind us earlier this year appeasement in the face of aggression has a history of failure. We can only stave off the fate of Putin’s aggression if we do more to develop and secure our [...]