Rev. Hagee is a time bomb waiting to happen
I think that the Rev. Wright frenzy (not the Reverend, the frenzy) was horrible, which is why I was reluctant to really hammer on the Parsley/Hagee relationships with John McCain. However, these two pastors are far more destructive than Rev. Wright ever could be.
I’ve already written about the role of Pentecostals in the false and vicious “unpatriotic Muslim smear” (and doesn’t it bother you just a little that those missionaries are working in AFRICA?). Listen to the words of Reverend Hagee in this video.
After listening, if anyone here can explain why John McCain would actively court this man’s endorsement, I’d welcome hearing it.
John Hagee, the controversial evangelical leader and endorser of Sen. John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that the Nazis had operated on God’s behalf to chase the Jews from Europe and shepherd them to Palestine. According to the Reverend, Adolph Hitler was a “hunter,” sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God’s will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.
Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: “‘And they the hunters should hunt them,’ that will be the Jews. ‘From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.’ If that doesn’t describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can’t see that.”
In other words, the Jews were persecuted by Hitler to drive them to Palestine and re-establish the nation of Israel. Or put differently, the Holocaust was some sort of necessary persecution to restore the state of Israel.
I am not a biblical scholar, but I’m married to one, and I’ve done enough studying to know this is utterly false and incendiary. So I ask once again, what is Senator McCain thinking when he chose to court this lunatic?
h/t Crooks & Liars
Diplomacy or Death?
That’s the fundamental choice we all have in the general election. If anyone still believes that John McCain’s inner hawk isn’t dangerous, his statements today should remove all doubt.I. George W. Bush equates diplomacy and appeasement in a cheap effort to smear Barack Obama abroad.
Of course, diplomacy is not the same as appeasement at all, no matter how hard the gaseous and despicable George W. Bush may twist it. Literacy matters. Bush must have been the child left behind. Here are some definitions, for clarity’s sake:
The distinction in that last definition is worth highlighting. In order for there to be appeasement, there must first be peace. Appeasement is the act of offering concessions to maintain peace.
Diplomacy, on the other hand, has no such restriction. Diplomacy is the art of intercession and negotiation. It can be a trade agreement or a peace agreement. It is not conditioned upon military victory, economic performance, or anything other than two parties coming together to negotiate a mutually satisfactory agreement.
Joe Lieberman, George W. Bush, and John McCain forgot to check their dictionaries before going off half-cocked today. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Bush is illiterate, but it’s a pity that it has infected Senators McCain and Lieberman with an infection as rapid as the rise of the SARS virus.
II. What they said:
George W. Bush
Some seem to believe we should negotiate with 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 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.
McCain takes it one step further:
“Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain,’’ Mr. McCain told reporters on his campaign bus after a speech in Columbus, Ohio. “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.’
(Note to John McCain: The hostage release was not anything that Reagan did or didn’t do. The hostages were released about an hour after Reagan’s inauguration, and was timed to humilate Carter, mostly because Carter would not engage in any form of discussion with them, choosing instead to launch a failed rescue operation and then ignore them.)
Finally, the pile-on by Joe “hawk-boy” Lieberman:
President Bush got it exactly right today when he warned about the threat of Iran and its terrorist proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah. It is imperative that we reject the flawed and naïve thinking that denies or dismisses the words of extremists and terrorists when they shout “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” and that holds that — if only we were to sit down and negotiate with these killers — they would cease to threaten us.
Because somehow, words become terrorism and war and diplomacy is appeasement.
III. John McCain was for diplomacy before he was against it.
Two years ago, when interviewed by James P Rubin, Senator McCain said this:
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 [Hamas] 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.”
During a follow-up conference call with bloggers, he added the following embellishment:
In a reference to Obama’s declared willingness to meet with the leader of Iran, McCain said:
“I think [it] is an unacceptable position, and shows that Senator Obama does not have the knowledge, the experience, the background to make the kind of judgments that are necessary to preserve this nation’s security.”
Yet, I could find no references to McCain’s objection to Iran President Ahmadinejad’s visit to the US last year, nor any objection to Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University during that same visit. Not one press release. Not one public speech. Nothing. Was that visit not “talking”? Why isn’t Columbia held to the same standard?
Those are rhetorical questions, of course. The fact is that there was no political capital to be gained by giving attention to it. President Bush and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain are for democracy until they’re against it. In other words, they’re for democracy as long as the elected party is one they agree with. The Palestinians elected their government, which includes Hamas. It’s democratic, like it or not. The Iranians elected Ahmadinejad in a democratic election, like it or not. John McCain and George Bush do not get to pick and choose the democracies they like. Well, maybe they do, but it exposes the sock puppet argument about the conflict in Iraq being about making Iraq into a democracy. They’ll be for Iraq as long as they agree with the leadership, just like they were for Pakistan until the recent elections put people they don’t like into power.
The fundamental conflict here is not about appeasement. It is about how Republicans pervert ideas like diplomacy into appeasement. It’s about how they make democratic processes into wars.
Refresh your palate with a bit of Joe Biden, straight out of a Senate session and outraged at Bush’s illiteracy:
“This is bullshit, this is malarkey. This is outrageous, for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, to sit in the Knesset … and make this kind of ridiculous statement.”
and this:
Biden noted that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have both suggested that the United States ought to find a way to talk more with its enemies.
“If he thinks this is appeasement, is he going to come back and fire his own cabinet?” Biden asked. “Is he going to fire Condi Rice?”
As a final thought point, consider John McCain’s surrogate Joe Lieberman’s statement yesterday with regard to his feelings on bombing Iran:
BENNETT: Listen, I give her credit. She has found her…three things. She’s found her voice. He is very much in the background now, it’s not this, you know, ventriloquial thing, it’s definitely her voice.
LIEBERMAN: That’s true.
BENNETT: And Joe, you know, this is my style. This is a girl who puts on her pearls, goes down, throws down a shot of liquor and bombs Iran, you know. This is…lookout Mrs. Bennett, this is my kind of girl.
LIEBERMAN: Hehehe, it does have an appeal to it.
Diplomacy = Progress toward peace. Why doesn’t John McCain want peace?
Food for thought.
Technorati Tags: diplomacy, appeasement, democracy, iran, iraq, israel, bush, illiteracy, lunacy, mccain=hawk
I’m shocked — SHOCKED– that Republicans lie
What Obama said:
JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?
BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable. I am absolutely convinced of that, and some of the tensions that might arise between me and some of the more hawkish elements in the Jewish community in the United States might stem from the fact that I’m not going to blindly adhere to whatever the most hawkish position is just because that’s the safest ground politically.
I want to solve the problem, and so my job in being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth and say if Israel is building settlements without any regard to the effects that this has on the peace process, then we’re going to be stuck in the same status quo that we’ve been stuck in for decades now, and that won’t lift that existential dread that David Grossman described in your article.
The notion that a vibrant, successful society with incredible economic growth and incredible cultural vitality is still plagued by this notion that this could all end at any moment — you know, I don’t know what that feels like, but I can use my imagination to understand it. I would not want to raise my children in those circumstances. I want to make sure that the people of Israel, when they kiss their kids and put them on that bus, feel at least no more existential dread than any parent does whenever their kids leave their sight. So that then becomes the question: is settlement policy conducive to relieving that over the long term, or is it just making the situation worse? That’s the question that has to be asked.
How House Republican Leader (architect of the anti-mothers vote last week, BTW) John Boehner lied:
“It is truly disappointing that Senator Obama called Israel a ‘constant wound,’ ‘constant sore,’ and that it ‘infect[s] all of our foreign policy.’ These sorts of words and characterizations are the words of a politician with a deep misunderstanding of the Middle East and an innate distrust of Israel”
Boehner was spurred along by the Republican Jewish Coalition:
“Once again, Senator Obama demonstrates his questionable grasp of America’s foreign policy. Senator Obama manages to excuse the inexcusable actions of anti-American militant jihadists by putting the blame for their actions on America’s foreign policy. America stands with Israel because it is one of our strongest allies and the only democracy in the Middle East. Senator Obama naively believes that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will solve the global scourge of radical Islamic extremism. Yet Senator Obama never says how he will reign in Hamas’ daily onslaught on Israel or Iran’s scurrilous condemnations of Israel. Is it any wonder Hamas has endorsed him for president?”
And so, the Nixonizing now moves to a new arena. John McCain and his surrogate Republican in Democrat’s clothing calling himself independent Joe Lieberman, have already begun the memeorizing of the “Hamas endorsement”. But Boehner and the GOP Jewish Coalition have now just lied. Flat-out lied.
This isn’t even twisting. It’s a lie. Read it for yourself. In context.
I really hope all the voters think in this election. This is not an election that can be punditized. As Obama said, politics doesn’t do nuance well, but voters can.
Technorati Tags: lies, Republicans, Boehner, Nixon, Israel, Palestine
