Say Anything Blog

Ed Morrissey has an interesting point about Obama’s reaction to President Bush’s comments about appeasement in Israel.  Obama has been talking about it as if it were a “political attack” on him specifically, but the truth is that Bush never actually singled anyone out with his comments.

He didn’t even say if he was talking about an American.  Here are the President’s actual comments:

  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.

  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. Israel’s population may be just over 7 million. But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because the United States of America stands with you.

Morrissey notes:

No one in the US who runs for public office has suggested that the US break with Israel to appease terrorists. Obama certainly hasn’t suggested that, and perhaps apart from the really lunatic fringes of both Left and Right, that notion doesn’t get any oxygen at all here. Obviously, Bush wasn’t referring to American politicians in this passage, but instead politicians in Europe and elsewhere who have either an animus towards Israel or appreciation for dhimmitude. Nothing — and I mean nothing — in this speech points to any candidate or the Democratic Party, unless they identify themselves as the reference.

Which is exactly what Obama has now done.

What’s funny is that the Democrats are actually making the President a more effective critic of Obama’s foreign policy than he ever intended to be.  It’s clear that his comments weren’t aimed at any Democrat, or even any American, but by responding to his comments as they have they’ve interjected themselves into something that had nothing to do with them.