The way things work in our country never ceases to amaze me.
Just last week in Israel, President Bush committed what much of our
media and all of our leading Democrats considered a great offense;
comparing people who seek a rational dialogue with irrational
Islamists to Neville Chamberlain and others who sought conciliation
with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. To liberals, this is the ultimate
insult and one that cannot be taken lying down.
This is most interesting coming from a party whose backers from
day one have compared Bush to Hitler himself, and one that spawned
a presidential candidate who compared American soldiers to Pol Pot,
the purveyors of the Soviet Gulag, and naturally, Hitler. But
perhaps the latest and greatest of these accusations comes from
another erstwhile presidential candidate, Gary Hart, who warns that “radical forces,
usually called neoconservatives, [have] perverted language as
recommended by the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany.”
He claims that the right’s strategy is: “Continue to demonize
liberals, blame them for all social and economic problems, and soon
enough no one will be willing to admit to being a liberal. Claim
that liberals and Democrats are too soft to combat terrorists and
soon enough a majority, even in the oldest democracy on earth, will
believe it.” Would that this truth were so easy to convey!
If Hart’s charges weren’t so pompously humorless, you’d have to
laugh at his calling conservatives “radical perverters of
language,” coming as it does from the former darling of a party
whose most recent president had us scrambling to define the meaning
of the word “is.” It’s no wonder that its current darling, a great
speechifier we are told, has had trouble refuting what he perceived
as Bush’s attack on his foreign policy, particularly his promise to
conduct unconditional talks with Iran.
ALTHOUGH HIS NAME was never mentioned — many think that the
president’s real target was the ever-delusional Jimmy Carter —
Barack Obama seems to be developing a bad case of what my father
used to call “rabbit ears.” In a classic demonstration of, “if the
shoe fits, wear it,” he snarled that Bush “accused me and other
Democrats of wanting to negotiate with terrorists, and said we were
no different from the people who appeased Adolf Hitler.”
Of course, that’s not what the president said, although you’d be
hard-pressed to discover that by watching your network news,
especially if your flavor of preference is of the NBC variety. The
White House took NBC News to task in a letter
which points out the network’s deception in an interview graciously
granted them by President Bush on this subject. When asked by NBC’s
Richard Engel if he was referring to Obama in his remarks to the
Israeli Knesset, Bush said:
People need to read the speech. You didn’t get it
exactly right, either. What I said was is that we need to take the
words of people seriously. And when, you know, a leader of Iran
says that they want to destroy Israel, you’ve got to take those
words seriously. And if you don’t take them seriously, then it
harkens back to a day when we didn’t take other words seriously. It
was fitting that I talked about not taking the words of Adolph
Hitler seriously on the floor of the Knesset. But I also talked
about the need to defend Israel, the need to not negotiate with the
likes of al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. And the need to make sure
Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon.
All but one sentence of this response was edited out of the
televised interview as was the president’s answer to Engel’s
follow-up question in which he stated, “And I have made it clear to
the Iranians that there is a seat at the table for them if they
would verifiably suspend their enrichment.”
Obama’s shrill and angry reaction to a perceived slight and
NBC’s gross bias in distorting President Bush’s message only serve
to highlight Obama’s weakness in foreign policy matters and the
fact that the media realize this as well. And we right-wing radical
forces didn’t even need to pervert any language to do it.
