When Cluelessness Attacks

By now, you've heard that Bush went to Israel and attacked Obama from afar (not by name, but that defense only convinced the extremely credulous). The attack is the usual Republican guilt-by-analogy. If you can't attack someone on the facts, you just say "they're like the Nazis" or "they're like the people who appeased the Nazis." The great thing about this tactic is that you can say anything you want -- make any analogy you want. It can be as groundless as you like, so long as you can get the whole echo chamber to repeat it.

In the coming months, remember this as one more example of how Bush and McCain are reading from the same script. If you vote for McCain, you're voting for a Bush 3rd term. McCain will have to enumerate all the ways he's different from Bush. Some of those will be manufactured, and the unspoken fact behind any such list is that pretty much everything he doesn't mention is all Bush all the time. This was a conscious metamorphosis on his part. Issue after issue, McCain has adopted, even embraced the Bush worldview. You can pick on minor differences, but it's that twisted worldview that earned Bush his unpopular status by way of leaving the country a mess.

Back to this specific story, after Bush used his elected pulpit to travel abroad and launch a purely political attack (it's good to be the King, eh?) McCain wasted no time jumping on Bush's coattails.

But wait! It turns out that if you scratch McCain, there's bullshit underneath. As recently as two years ago, McCain expressed his view that we're going to need to deal with Hamas through diplomats.

[...] 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 toward 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."

Today, McCain wants you to ignore his previously expressed views and accept his constantly-shifting foreign policy. Fine, Senator McCain; you're trying so hard to be Bush 2.0 falling all over yourself. This was your chance to be honest and distance yourself from a Bush clumsy political attack. Instead, you want Bush-McCain to be firm in our minds. Have it your way.

For purely entertainment purposes, here's a fun video of Chris Matthews putting the screws to a NeoCon who wants to scream his head off over how horrible Obama is, but he has no idea what his analogy actually meant. This video really started to crack me up about halfway through. Literally, I laughed out loud.

Technorati : boneheads, bush, clueless neocons, mccainbush08, republicans