Bush Wasn't Talking About Obama Specifically…
Just his mindset. John Podhoretz is 100% right: Bush’s speech–especially the bit drawing fire–was pretty much anti-terrorist boilerplate, the purest distillation of the Bush Doctrine. He and his surrogates and the press have been saying this stuff for years. Five minutes on Nexis brought up the following examples of similar comments/thoughts in the past, none of which had anything to do with Barack:
From the Nov. 28, 2004 LA Times:
Snapshots of the Conservative Camps
Neocons
What they’re reading: Israeli Cabinet member Natan Sharansky’s new book “The Case for Democracy,” which argues that the world is “divided between those who are prepared to confront evil and those who are willing to appease it.” Sound familiar? Sharansky met with President Bush and Middle East advisor Elliott Abrams on Nov. 11 to discuss his book, which Bush is reading.
From the Nov. 20, 2004 NY Times:
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. The Bush administration creates a false sense of urgency about a nuclear menace from a Middle Eastern country. Hard-liners talk about that country’s connections to terrorists. They portray European diplomatic efforts to defuse tensions as a feckless attempt to appease a rogue nation whose word can never be trusted anyway. Secretary of State Colin Powell makes ominous-sounding warnings about new intelligence, which turns out to be dubious.
October 19, 2004, NY Daily News:
A scornful Bush branded Kerry a do-nothing senator who would try to appease terrorists and expose Americans to greater danger.
Kerry would lead America into “a major defeat in the war on terror,” Bush told a wildly cheering audience of about 1,000 who rocked a basketball gym in South Jersey.
September 1, 2004, The Irish Times:
Mr Giuliani, who enjoys hero-status among Republicans for his post-9/11 leadership in New York, told delegates that terrorists had learned they could intimidate the world community, “and too often the response, particularly in Europe, was accommodation, appeasement and compromise”. Under the Bush doctrine the war would not end “until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated”, he said.
What all this nonsense comes back to is the fact that both of the candidates in ’08 (and their campaigns) are trying to take every single issue on the table and label it as “out of bounds.” So Bush isn’t allowed to criticize Obama’s weak-willed and naive foreign policy. McCain’s critics aren’t allowed to bring up the fact that he’s older than chocolate chip cookies. No one can mention the fact that Hamas wants Obama to win. And on and on. It’s silly and it needs to stop. These aren’t smears or attacks (or, in Bush’s case, even about the election). Just drop it already and get to campaigning. It’s going to be a long enough six months as it is without constant whining about below-the-belt attacks that are neither below the belt nor attacks.