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The Texas Blue
Advancing Progressive Ideas

News Roundup, 5/16/08: Diplomacy's For Wimps With Names Like Neville

I used to think of the Knesset as the body where Anwar Sadat brought his plea for peace in the Middle East — a place of diplomacy. Leave it to Bush to leave a dark mark upon it for me.

President Bush spoke yesterday before the Knesset, Israel's national legislature, on the 60th anniversary of Israel's establishment. What better time to politicize the event to make for an opportunity to insult Democrats and throw diplomacy under the bus?

"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,' " Bush said. "We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

The comment was quickly pinned as being an attack toward Sen. Barack Obama, though White House officials said he was referring to "a number of people" like President Carter and past UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Sure, he did. And he surely didn't know that McCain would seize that opportunity to also attack Sen. Obama. (Which he did, of course.) No word yet on whether the "false comfort of appeasement" applies to Reagan's negotiations with Iran during his presidency. Or to recent efforts over the past few years by Israel to negotiate with Syria, Egypt, and Jordan.

You may or may not know that Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the former head of the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, fled to seek asylum in the U.S. after nearly four dozen of his commission's staff were killed. Well, we let him in, apparently. But we didn't do much else for him — including give him any sort of legal status to be in the country, without which it is a bit hard to find a job. We are repaying the widely-commended head of an agency which discovered rampant corruption in the Iraqi government with destitution as an illegal immigrant. So it's apparently not only our troops that the White House cares nothing about once they return to the United States.

At least we seem to have done one thing right yesterday — the White House has finally disavowed Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi "informer" that gave us wave after wave of bad information about Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq. You would think the wildly incorrect claims he made would've been enough to discredit him in the eyes of his administration. But Chalabi remained in their good graces until just recently — not because of the bad info he gave, but because he is suspected of having unauthorized ties with Iran. "I am shocked — SHOCKED — to find gambling in here!"

In brighter news, the California Supreme Court yesterday ruled unconstitutional a law that prohibited gay marriage, even if it provided the alternative of civil unions. In that piece, you can find a link to Glenn Greenwald's column breaking down what the decision means for California and America.

Predatory lending is about to take a hit in Ohio, as the Ohio legislature gets ready to pass a bill (which the governor has indicated he will sign) limiting percentage yields on short-term loans to less than a tenth of what they currently are, making those lenders consider leaving the state.

Grace has an On The Record with James Schico, Democratic candidate for county commissioner in Ellis County, and Josh interviews Noriega online coordinator Karl-Thomas Musselman in this week's Who's Blue. As always, thanks for reading.

Bush did Obama a huge favor

The last day or two has seen a big foreign policy fight, with Bush and McCain on one side and Obama on the other. Obama is loving it -- there is no better way to win the hearts of Democrats than to lead a fight against the Republicans. And Clinton? She's said all the right things, in the background with Biden, Dodd and the rest. Last week, the story line was tough girl Clinton vs. wimpy snob Obama. Now it's tough guy Obama vs. Big Bad Bush, and everybody (including Clinton) is treating Obama as the leader of a united party,

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