The General Election for President, Barack Obama vs. John McCain

[Big Swami]

Soros, D Kos, etc can't wait to fuel the hate machines.

Come on Tahoe. I believe you can do better than that. Dkos? Soros? "Hate machine"? Really?

[WTFchris]

Biden calls Bush comments 'bulls**t'
Posted: 02:22 PM ET
From CNN Congressional Producer Ted Barrett



(CNN) — The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden, D-Delaware, called President Bush’s comments accusing Sen. Barack Obama and other Democrats of wanting to appease terrorists "bulls**t” and said if the president disagrees so strongly with the idea of talking to Iran then he needs to fire his secretaries of State and Defense, both of whom Biden said have pushed to sit down with the Iranians.
“This is bullshit. This is malarkey. This is outrageous. Outrageous for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, sit in the Knesset…and make this kind of ridiculous statement,” Biden said angrily in a brief interview just off the Senate floor.
“He’s the guy who’s weakened us. He’s the guy that’s increased the number of terrorists in the world. His policies have produced this vulnerability the United States has. His intelligence community pointed that out not me. The NIE has pointed that out and what are you talking about, is he going to fire Condi Rice? Condi Rice has talked about the need to sit down. So his first two appeasers are Rice and Gates. I hope he comes home and does something.”
He quoted Gates saying Wednesday that we “need to figure out a way to develop some leverage and then sit down and talk with them.”

[Big Swami]

Crazy Joe strikes again.

[Tahoe]

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden, D-Delaware, called President Bush’s comments accusing Sen. Barack Obama and other Democrats of wanting to appease terrorists

I'd like to see where Bush names BO.

I think this is just something for the dems to get all pissy about.

[Uncle Mxy]

The amusing bit is -- as part of McCain supporting Bush's remarks, he starts talking about Iran and Reagan:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2...bushs-remarks/

I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.

Unless you buy conspiracy theories that imply that Reagan DELAYED the hostages coming home in order to win election, Reagan wasn't really involved with the hostage negotiations. The only reason those hostages came home after Reagan's inauguration was as a parting shot to Carter. And of course, Reagan certainly DID have interesting dealings with Iran over hostages. It's called Iran-Contra. McCain was in office during the time. Maybe he forgot. Reagan forgot a lot too.

[Tahoe]

Come on Tahoe. I believe you can do better than that. Dkos? Soros? "Hate machine"? Really?

Honestly, I couldn't. I don't visit them. I just name DKos cuz I heard they did something with the Bush Wedding pics. <--classy.

But I was kind of throwing some tooth picks (not spears) at you libs. Just pointing out that y'all have your own lil smear machines ready to go.

All I hear about is how the Repubs are the bad guys.

[Glenn]

All I hear about is how the Repubs are the bad guys.

Aren't you glad that you aren't one, then?

[Tahoe]

^ good point. How the Conservatives are the bad guys.

[Uncle Mxy]

The neocons have fucked the conservative label as surely as they have fucked the liberal label.

[Uncle Mxy]

Bwahahaha.... McCain flip-flops on Hamas:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...d=opinionsbox1

But given his own position on Hamas, McCain is the last politician who should be attacking Obama. Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News's "World News Tonight" program. Here is the crucial part of our exchange:

I asked: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"

McCain answered: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."

For some Europeans in Davos, Switzerland, where the interview took place, that's a perfectly reasonable answer. But it is an unusual if not unique response for an American politician from either party. And it is most certainly not how the newly conservative presumptive Republican nominee would reply today.

Given that exchange, the new John McCain might say that Hamas should be rooting for the old John McCain to win the presidential election. The old John McCain, it appears, was ready to do business with a Hamas-led government, while both Clinton and Obama have said that Hamas must change its policies toward Israel and terrorism before it can have diplomatic relations with the United States.

Even if McCain had not favored doing business with Hamas two years ago, he had no business smearing Barack Obama. But given his stated position then, it is either the height of hypocrisy or a case of political amnesia for McCain to inject Hamas into the American election.

And, there's video of the above event! Heh heh heh...

Obama's nuanced stance is that the U.S. President shouldn't be afraid to meet up with other heads of state directly and talk turkey, even if they have interests hostile to the U.S. Iran may be terroristic pricks, but they're pricks with a generally-recognized country and leadership herarchy, so we should have leader-to-leader relations. By contrast, the Palestinians don't have a real "state" by most definitions. So, the President meeting with the head pricks from some faction of a foreign non-country (Hamas in this case) all by himself (without Israel being involved) is bad in his world view.

I suspect Obama's nuance exists to reflect the political reality that a black needs to be more of an Israel hawk for domestic Jewish voters. But, it's a principled stance nonetheless, especially for a post-cold war landscape.