McCain and the terrorists
McCain and his campaign is out making a big deal over a spokesperson of Hamas saying nice things about Obama, and painting himself as their "worst nightmare".
“…I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States,” said McCain. “So apparently has [Sandinista leader] Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare
. . .
McCain adviser Steve Schmidt told CNN's Dana Bash that the Hamas view was "a fair issue for the American people to ponder should he be the Democratic nominee for president."
“Hamas has said they want Barack Obama to win. The reason for that is his policy. He wants to negotiate with the terrorist-funding, nuclear-aspiring, holocaust-denying, Israel-threatening dictator of Iran.
More of the, "Vote for me or the terrorists win" and smear by association kind of claptrap we've all grown used to hearing from the Republicans. (I'll await the Clinton campaigns attacks along the same lines in the near future.)
There is, of course, a worse kind of implication in this kind of thinking, one that Matt Yglesias does a good job of expounding:
. . . this way of looking at the world reveals a seriously flawed foreign policy outlook. Consider Saddam Hussein. He's a bad dude. And which American president is his worst nightmare? Well, it's George W. Bush. Thanks to Bush, Saddam got booted from power and killed. Compared to George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Dubya was a disaster for Saddam. But of course Dubya's Iraq policy has also been a disaster for the United States of America, whereas Clinton and Papa Bush ran policies that made us better off.
Add to that the fact that Dubya's policies have also proven to be one of al Qaeda's biggest recruiting boons, and you get the idea that designing your foreign policy solely to annoy specific enemies generally doesn't make your country safer. But c'mon! Saddam is dead! That has to be worth a few trillion dollars, tens or even hundreds of thousands of American casualties, and uncounted, (literally), Iraqi dead, not to mention lost American prestige, influence and deterrence value, doesn't it? It had better, because at the rate the Democratic fratricide is going, soon-to-be-President McCain will be keeping the US there for the foreseeable future.
While we're at it, maybe Senator McCain can tell us all why he thinks it best to allow bin Laden to control US foreign policy? Because if you think what Hamas thinks of Obama's foreign policy is important, I'm pretty sure you should wonder why McCain says we should do exactly what Bin Laden wants us to do.
