Lesson of Bush speech to the Knesset: Appeasers really hate being called appeasers

Even if they’re only pretending, those politicians who suggest an all-talk approach to tyrants and terrorists are appeasers.

Talk never did anyone any good when it was with totalitarians whose total power depends on an ideology of world conquest, repression and death to all foes.

But while appeasers are seldom angered by totalitarian cruelty, nothing steams them so much as for someone to call them what they are. Nevertheless, I’m a little surprised at how much President Bush’s anti-appeasement comments to the Knesset today upset the Barack Obama campaign.

Foolish delusion. What did Bush say today? He said:

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”

“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said at Israel's 60th anniversary celebration in Jerusalem. “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.”

(That senator was isolationist Sen. William Borah, a Republican from Idaho.)

Fairy tale cynicism. Obama called Bush’s speech “a false political attack,” but alas, no. Bush is right. Talking to Hitler wouldn’t have worked. In fact, it was tried. Talking to Saddam Hussein also was tried without success for a dozen years, as hundreds of thousands died in chains. Why should anyone expect talking with Mahmud Ahmadinejad or his ayatollah boss would change the theocratic dictatorship’s view of democracy, freedom or peace?

Much as I admire Obama, I know he is stuck in a political party that has based so much of its policy on fairy tale cynicism that it almost believes it can wish away the world’s thugs, to the point that the Democrats now resist any practical steps to block or stop tyranny.

Wake up, Obama, and wake up your Democrats. Pop the appeasement balloon. There is no liberalism without liberty, and those who make a career of crushing liberty are seldom talked into liberation.

Frank Warner

Comments

[Christopher Taylor]

This was particularly effective, because it got all the people to howl and draw attention to themselves who are exactly who he's referring to. If they'd kept their pie holes shut, nobody would have noticed who he meant.

Senator Obama - who recently lied and said he wasn't for talking to tyrants and monsters - is in particular in the spotlight now.

Never play poker with President Bush. Not if you want to win.

[Frank Warner]

When the totalitarians know the democracies will do nothing more than talk, they imprison Czechoslovakia every time.

[Kevin]

Best. Title. Ever.