Jaw-Jaw Is Better Than That Other Thing

I don't think I hate anyone. I hope I don't hate anyone. One of the things about our friends the Decents is that they keep talking about 'enemies' as if they can't tell the difference between a difference of opinion and a war. I don't hate Harry's Place (mostly, I think they're all puffed up fools). But, ho hum, here we are again.

In a nutshell: George Bush made a speech in Israel. It was the sort of thing we've heard a lot of from various sources since 2001: we would have opposed the Nazis; our opponents would not have. Nasty, silly, and indefensible. Readers have probably worked out for themselves that I'm partial to Barack Obama, so I don't like this sort of attack.

Gene Zitver is an American, so he probably understands the US electoral system a lot better than I do. However, I can see no rational reason for Bush to attack the Republican presidential candidate. Yes, Bush and McCain both challenged for the nomination in 2000. I don't see how McCain was Bush's "nemesis" - Bush won, after all. I think Bush is an idiot, but I don't believe he wants the Democrats to win in November.

Mike Power takes a different angle on the same story and remembers that Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power. That Guardian article does note in the third last paragraph, however:

The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that "rumours about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush ... have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated ... Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser."

And what did Bush say?

“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said. “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.”

Harry's Place commenters compare this sentiment with Carter. Ben last week said, The reason I became a “Decent” in the first place is because of the values that made me Labour to start with. As far as I can tell, Ben and the others are pretty much Blair supporters. And the position Bush is deprecating is, in fact, the Jonathan Powell line, which Blair very clearly supported while in office. And Powell, anyway, is really quite unequivocal.

"It's very difficult for democratic governments to do - talk to a terrorist movement that's killing your people," he said. "[But] if I was in government now I would want to have been talking to Hamas, I would be wanting to communicate with the Taliban; and I would want to find a channel to al-Qaida."

He's right too.

Update Sat 17 17:02. Kudos to Gene, he added the following video to his post.



Which, I agree, is very entertaining, in a shouty way. IMO, it makes my point: Obama compares himself to Kennedy and Roosevelt and Mark Green of a radio network throws in Yitzhak Rabin. Nothing like Chamberlain. A lot more like the (very sensible and rightfully successful, IMO) diplomacy of Blair and Powell. Real politics, in other words. Not the fantasising and name-calling and dark allusions of certain bloggers.