There's no good reason why you should give one solitary hoot as to what the New York Daily News thinks about the recent Bush-Obama "affair," but since its editorial mirrored what a much larger community of neoconservative voices is saying and will persist in saying, it's worth taking a look at. It's a sad and early sign of what's to come, lots of it.
The paper said Barack Obama "is stuck with" a problem: "that during this campaign he did in fact say, and moreover did in fact say several times, that as President he would be entirely willing to sit down with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other rogues with no preconditions whatsoever." Just in case the flat "no" preconditions wasn't clear enough for you, "whatsoever" was added.
"That is why," the editorial continued, "for a second day Friday, the customarily unflappable Obama rather flappably chose to go on a tear over President Bush's remarks to the Israeli Knesset. He called those remarks 'appalling' and 'divisive' and much else, presenting himself as the victim of an untoward attack. He is no such thing."
In a way, the Daily News was correct on that last point. Because, as things soon became clear, Obama was far less a victim than a deliriously happy recipient of Bush's attack, since said attack was so mammothly stupid. Only afterward did the White House realize just how stupid, so only afterward did defensive rhetorical inventions such as the Daily News' neoconservative editorial become necessary.
Its principal invention in defense of Mr. Bush was the ho-hum approach. The president said, said the Daily News -- and this is stated emphatically three different times in three different ways -- nothing untoward. (The editors did not add "whatsoever," however, throwing their full-throated adherence to this claim into question.)
Raising the spectre of Hitler before the Israeli Parliament, denouncing domestic opposition abroad and characterizing that opposition's position as scurrilous "appeasement" -- none of this was deemed "untoward." It was, rather, or as the Daily News and similar outlets would have you believe, just another crack foreign-relations day at the office.
I'm still waiting for Bush's defenders to cite one specific example, or even one roughly similar occasion, in which a president of the United States stood on foreign soil and excoriated his own, or his would-be successor's, domestic political opposition as Chamberlainesque in cause and Hitlerian in effect.
None was offered by the Daily News, although one would think such offerings would abound -- it was, said the paper, "nothing that has not been said many times, by Bush and by others" -- in any legitimate defense.
Also stated as fact was that Ahmadinejad -- who, by the way, is not the ultimate power in Iran, which was left conveniently unstated -- "intends to attain nuclear weapons to get the job [of vaporizing Israel] done."
It's just as simple and straightforward as that, no questions asked or skepticism raised. This Superman of an enemy will single-handedly build or "attain" a bomb and single-handedly drop it on Israel, with no other Persians intervening at any time to avert his nationally suicidal behavior.
Ah, to live in the clean, simplistic, black-and-white world of the right, where never a complication arises in argument.
But I have saved the best of the Daily News for nearly last: "Obama has said he would treat unconditionally with Ahmadinejad. While far short of appeasement, that's a problem."
Sorry ... excuse me ... coming through ...
We were first told by the paper that what Bush charged -- "appeasement" -- was not only a rather commonplace attack for a president to launch, but, in this instance, an entirely appropriate one -- one that in no way was unfair or "untoward." Remember? Well, now, several paragraphs later, we're told that the policy which Bush attacked was, after all, something "far short of appeasement."
So it was appropriate for Bush to attack Obama for holding a position he doesn't hold and never has. And, it would seem, it's appropriate for Obama's opponents to belittle him as a "flappable" whiner when he quite appropriately strikes back. Furthermore, it's appropriate for the Daily News to write a blistering editorial based on an argument never made.
Given all that, here's the even better of the best from The Daily News: its final, three-word editorial judgment on this matter -- that Obama possesses "insufficiently formulated thinking."
Oh, the irony of it all. Do you see the irony? I see the irony. Or should we just call it sufficiently formulated claptrap.
Unfortunately, we're in for five, uninterrupted months of it.
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