Third Way Dispatch

It’s hard for George W. Bush to find a new low, but yesterday he managed. Going to a foreign parliament and issuing a fatuous political attack is perhaps the most classless thing that he has done in the course of a breathtakingly classless presidency. And what an attack it was – standing before the Israeli Knesset, Bush summoned the ghosts of Munich in a loathsome attempt to link Barack Obama to the appeasers of old.

John McCain, of course, made matters worse, by underscoring Bush’s charge and repeating his guilt-by-association claim about how Obama is Hamas’ favorite candidates. As Jamie Rubin makes clear in a Washington Post op/ed today, the Bush attack – and John McCain’s hilariously hypocritical response – were beneath the dignity of anyone, much less the President of the United States and the presumptive Republican nominee for President.

And it didn’t end there – Joe Lieberman chimed in from the peanut gallery, saying in a statement that Bush “got it exactly right” in his Knesset statement. He went on to trash Obama without naming him in terms similar to those used both by the President and by Lieberman’s BFF John McCain.

But beyond their appalling conduct yesterday, it is now clear that both McCain and Lieberman have gone another click around the circle; they have cycled past even the neo-cons and now resemble the rightwing fringe hysterics of the Cold War era. They are starting to sound like Barry Goldwater, who called Kennedy’s successful solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis “appeasement.” And their slander against Obama echoes Curtis LeMay, the retired Air Force Chief who ran with George Wallace on his American Independent Party ticket because, he said, Nixon was too soft on the Soviets and Wallace did not fear using nuclear weapons.

They are even getting close to LeMay’s fictional counterpart, General Buck Turgidson of Dr. Strangelove:

President Merkin Muffley: You’re talking about mass murder, General, not war!

General “Buck” Turgidson: Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

Whatever the appeal of McCain’s heroic past, when it comes to defending the country, Americans are sick and tired of rigid ideology, and they certainly are in no mood for extremism. So the Bush, McCain and Lieberman attacks on Obama yesterday were completely out of step with the mood of the country. That’s why, in the end, these reprehensible comments might end up being good news. Uh, depending on the breaks.