Conservative Donnybrook

The Senator doth protest too much, methinks.

In a speech to Israel’s Knesset, President Bush said:

“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,” Bush told the Knesset in Jerusalem on May 15, 2008.”

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

Obama immediately took umbrage and began firing back, questioning the President’s patriotism.

“The president did something that presidents don’t do,” he told a crowd of some 2,100 in South Dakota. “And that is launch a political attack targeted toward the domestic market in front of a foreign delegation.”

Obama followed up his criticism of the Commander in Chief by saying,

“On a day when we were supposed to be celebrating the anniversary of Israel’s independence, he accused me and other Democrats of wanting to negotiate with terrorists, and said we were ‘appeasers’ - no different from people who appeased Adolf Hitler,” Obama said.

“That’s exactly the kind of appalling attack that has divided our country, and that alienates us from the world.”

Obama went on to criticize presumptive Republican nominee John McCain for embracing Bush’s comments shortly after giving a speech about elevating civility in politics.

“So much for civility,” Obama said, adding he was ready to debate McCain and Bush over how to best protect the country.

It is nice to see Barack Obama finally gin up so much emotion about the issue of terrorism. It would just be nice if he would turn that passion against our enemies instead of heaping it on his fellow countrymen. Obama is the person who is always talking about “unity” (and Jonah Goldberg had a great piece regarding Obama and Unity in the May 5, 2008 issue of National Review):

“Unity is the great need of the hour,” insists Barack Obama. Unity and the hope for unity and the need for unity in the pursuit of hope and the hope that our unified hopefulness will carry us to ever greater heights of hopeful unity until each and every one of us is the person he longs to be: That’s what Barack Obama is all about. And don’t you dare say otherwise. These are not “just words.”

One might be forgiven for asking, What the heck do these words mean? Specifically, what’s so special about unity? Unity for what? Unity around what? Obama has an answer: We need unity “not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential [empathy] deficit that exists in this country.” HIs wife, Michelle, dilates on the subject: “We have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.”

But, as it turns out, President Bush was not referring to Obama, but rather was chastising former president Carter for his appeasement of Hamas. His comments in front of the Israeli Knesset were singularly appropriate as the United States’ policy is not to appease Israel’s enemies, who have threatened the entire nation with annihilation. Unfortunately, Carte,r in an act of brazen disunity, has taken it upon himself to publicly thwart his nation’s foreign policy. And, Obama, who apparently seems to think everything is about him, does not decry the disunity that Jimmy Carter represents, but instead pops off against the United States government while it engages in foreign relations. And he got it wrong.

Obama’s intemperate, knee-jerk, it’s-all-about-me reaction should reveal to one and all that he is unfit to lead this nation. He should certainly not be allowed to head up this nation’s foreign policy where diplomacy and tact in dealing with foreign leaders is of paramount importance. Furthermore, his rhetoric about the need for unity is so much hot air, given the fact that he defends the person who is doing most to undermine his nation in the person of Jimmy Carter and excoriates his government for speaking to foreign forums about the United States’ policy.

In the end, even though Bush took a swipe at Carter, Obama’s narcissistic reaction reveals that he is manifestly unfit for the position he seeks. Bush seems to have hit a nerve with the junior Senator from Illinois. The McCain campaign should set about exposing that nerve. Obama, it is certain, will become unnerved.