FROM MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA
During a speech to the Israeli parliament yesterday morning, President Bush attacked Barack Obama, comparing him to Nazi appeasers for the Illinois senator’s willingness to hold discussions with Iran.
One problem: Bush’s speech came just hours after The Washington Post reported that Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, said that the United States needs to “sit down and talk with” Iran. Not only that, Gates added, “We can’t go to a discussion and be completely the demander.”
Oops.
McCain Was For Talking To Hamas: Before He Was Against It…
Naturally, then, a media firestorm erupted, with the Bush administration and its political allies questioned all day about whether Bush has any idea what he is talking about, whether he has lost control over the Pentagon, whether Gates will be fired, what Gates thinks about Bush’s comparison of those (like Gates) who advocate dialogue between the United States and Iran to appeasers of Adolf Hitler, and whether the fiasco will remind voters that the Bush administration’s foreign policy has been marked by incompetence and dishonesty, thus doing irreparable electoral damage to John McCain and other Republican candidates.
Sorry — what was I thinking? That didn’t happen.
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Obama Hits Back: Debate With McCain And Bush Over Foreign Policy Is One “I Will Win” By Greg Sargent, May 16, 2008
In remarks in South Dakota just now, Barack Obama hit back hard at George Bush’s and John McCain’s foreign policy attacks yesterday, stating flatly that a debate with the two Republicans over foreign policy is a debate that “I will win.”
“George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for,” Obama said.
The fight is one that the Obama campaign is eager to have, because it accomplishes two things. First, it forces McCain to stand by Bush, making it easier to tie them together. And second, it puts Obama, sans Hillary, on the same stage as the current Republican president and his would-be successor, making the Dem primary seem a bit like a distant memory.
“If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America, that is a debate I am happy to have any time,” Obama said. “That is a debate that I will win.”
He proceeded to rattle off all the things Bush and McCain have to “answer for.” The unnecessary Iraq War. The phantom WMDs. The strengthening of Iran. The fact that “Hamas now controls Gaza.” And the fact that Osama Bin Laden is “sending out video tapes with impunity.”
Obama also slammed the notion that he’d ever supported any sort of negotiations with terrorists. “They’re trying to fool you, trying to scare you, and they’re not telling you the truth because they can’t win a foreign policy debate on the merits,” he said.
At times, Obama hit what I think is the right tone — ridicule and bemusement, rather than outrage. At one point, for instance, he noted that McCain has now promised an end to the war in 2013, after repeatedly suggesting a much longer open-ended commitment might be necessary.
“I think he noticed that it wasn’t polling well,” Obama joked.
THE DRIVER’S SEAT By JEFF SABATINI, May 16, 2008
The 1-Series is the German auto maker’s smallest and least expensive model. In Europe, BMW sells 3- and 5-door hatchback version of the 1-Series and offers four-cylinder gas engines as well as diesel engines.
I have become somewhat disaffected about BMW of late, disliking the overriding design theme of this decade’s newest models. From the “flame surfacing” look of asymmetrical and unbalanced curves and lines to the myriad electronics that sully the man-machine interface, I pine for the purity of BMWs past.
So it was with much excitement that I hopped behind the wheel of the 2008 BMW 135i coupe for my weekly test drive. The new 1-Series is being cast as a car for a big group of BMW fans: enthusiast drivers who love the communicative steering, nimble handling and rear-wheel-drive layout of Bimmers, but feel the beloved 3-Series has become too big and heavy, too feature-laden and too expensive.
By JOE QUEENAN, May 16, 2008; Page A13
Journalists like to pretend that it makes no difference to them who gets elected president, but this is a lie. A few years ago, I disclosed in print that I had two handwritten notes from Steve Forbes that would vastly increase in value were he elected to the highest office in the land. Yes, I admired my ex-employer’s pluck and thought he had some wonderful ideas about simplifying the tax code. But the main reason I supported his candidacy was because of those two collectibles I could cash in. I may be venal and morally rudderless, but at least I’m honest.
Journalists, and especially humorists, need to come clean and admit that none of us ever really wanted to see Hillary Clinton in the White House. No, it isn’t her hair or her know-it-all attitude or her inexplicable marriage or her pitiful attempts to portray herself as a tribune of the working class or the fact that she went to Wellesley that puts us off. She’s just no fun, and politicians who are no fun are hard to write about. A barrel of monkeys is fun. A barrel of dead monkeys is no fun. Hillary is less fun that three barrels of dead monkeys. Maybe 300.
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McCain Was for Talking Before He Was Against It by James P. Rubin, Friday, May 16, 2008; A19
If the recent exchanges between President Bush, Barack Obama and John McCain on Hamas and terrorism are a preview of the general election, we are in for an ugly six months. Despite his reputation in the media as a charming maverick, McCain has shown that he is also happy to use Nixon-style dirty campaign tactics. By charging recently that Hamas is rooting for an Obama victory, McCain tried to use guilt by association to suggest that Obama is weak on national security and won’t stand up to terrorist organizations, or that, as Richard Nixon might have put it, Obama is soft on Israel.
President Bush picked up this theme yesterday. Without naming Obama during his speech last night to Israel’s Knesset, Bush suggested that Democrats want to “negotiate with terrorists” while Republicans want to fight terrorists.
By NATHAN KOPPEL and T.W. FARNAM , May 16, 2008; Page A1
The California Supreme Court opened the door to same-sex marriages in the nation’s largest state, reigniting a hot-button social issue amid a presidential election campaign so far dominated by economic issues and the war in Iraq.
The ruling makes California the second state, after Massachusetts, to give gay and lesbian couples the right to marry. But lawyers said the state’s national influence and size — representing 12% of the country’s population and one-fifth of the electoral vote need to win the White House — make the decision the most important legal victory to date for proponents of same-sex marriage. The decision, coming six months before the presidential election, also could galvanize voters on a topic that in this campaign cycle has largely been on the sidelines.
“The California Supreme Court is a famous and respected court, and [same-sex couples] have lost more legal challenges than they have won, so this is big news,” said attorney Jeffrey Trachtman, who lost a 2006 case that attempted to overturn New York’s ban on same-sex marriages.
A handful of states, including California, Vermont and New Jersey, allow same-sex couples to enter civil unions or domestic partnerships that afford many of the rights of marriage. But the California court, which was considering whether state law prohibiting gay marriage violates California’s constitution, voted 4-3 that such protections didn’t go far enough.
“[R]etaining the designation of marriage exclusively for opposite-sex couples and providing only a separate and distinct designation for same-sex couples may well have the effect of perpetuating a more general premise — now emphatically rejected by this state — that gay individuals and same-sex couples are in some respects ‘second-class citizens,'” wrote the court.
The president, speaking to Israeli lawmakers, takes apparent aim at Obama in saying that negotiating with some dictatorships amounts to ‘appeasement.’ Obama calls it a ‘false political attack.’ By Johanna Neuman,Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, May 15, 2008WASHINGTON — Addressing the Israeli parliament, President Bush set off a political firestorm today with an apparent criticism of Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential hopeful, over his position on negotiating with some dictatorships.
Obama, who has pledged to talk to regimes in Iran, Cuba and North Korea, promptly accused the Bush White House of launching “a false political attack” for suggesting such outreach amounts to appeasing dictators.
In a speech to Israel’s Knesset marking the 60th anniversary of that country’s independence, Bush said, “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,” Bush said. “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.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Friday, May 16, 2008
Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr says that when it comes to gay marriage, what happens in California is California’s own business. He’s a states’ rights man.
Here’s the statement Barr’s issued, which — one week before the Libertarian national convention in Denver — is likely to generate some talk:
“Regardless of whether one supports or opposes same sex marriage, the decision to recognize such unions or not ought to be a power each state exercises on its own, rather than imposition of a one-size-fits-all mandate by the federal government (as would be required by a Federal Marriage Amendment which has been previously proposed and considered by the Congress).
The decision today by the Supreme Court of California properly reflects this fundamental principle of federalism on which our nation was founded.