‘Obama Fires Back at Bush’

I just caught the headline above emblazoned on The Washington Post website. At issue, of course, is the speech President Bush delivered before the Israeli Knesset that apparently has Sen. Obama tied up in knots. To set the table, here are the president’s remarks:

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Bush told the Israeli lawmakers. “We have heard this foolish delusion before. 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.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

For his part, Sen. Obama called the remarks “dishonest, divisive attacks.” Sorry, senator, I don’t believe the president mentioned you by name or intended to call attention to you.

But while we’re at it, didn’t Sen. Obama state that he would meet, without pre-condition but with “preparation,” leaders in countries hostile to the United States such as Iran, Cuba and Venezuela during a debate with Sen. Clinton on Feb. 8? While I don’t believe for a second the president had Sen. Obama in mind when he uttered his remarks, it does seem that negotiating with radicals and trying to persuade them of the error of their ways is exactly what the presumptive nominee for president from Illinois is suggesting.