Motes and beams
I never had sex with that woman! said President Clinton about Monica Lewinsky.
I never said I would talk to terrorists! protested presidential hopeful Barack Obama, after President Bush said in his address to Israel’s Knesset:
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.
How dare he! shrieked the Obamanables, who for some reason seemed to think that a course of action which they all support was a grievous insult when applied to their hero (whose name had never in fact passed Bush’s lips). But in any event Obama has said he would talk to Iran, a key sponsor of terrorism and whose terrorist activities are even now killing American soldiers in Iraq. Watch the video here to see Obama’s lips move. Indeed, Obama’s own website boasts:
Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.
But that’s ok cos as we all know, if you’re a Democrat what you say doesn’t have to correspond to reality — reality has to correspond to you.
Bush may or may not have been talking about Obama; but he could equally have been addressing the ‘realists’ in his very own administration who are pressing to talk to Iran and Hamas. Like for instance his very own Defence Secretary, Robert Gates who, the Washington Times reported,
said in a speech Wednesday that he agreed with liberal New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that ‘we need to figure out a way to develop some leverage with respect to the Iranians and then sit down and talk with them.
Indeed, the President could even have been talking about himself. For although he declared to the Knesset that
no nation should ever be forced to negotiate with killers pledged to its destruction
that’s exactly what he is forcing Israel to do with Fatah: indeed not just forcing Israel to talk to killers pledged to its destruction, but to give them a state of their own from which to do it.