A May 15 NewsBusters post by Ken Shepherd whacks CNN’s Ed Henry for “hack[ing] out 29 paragraphs on his network’s Web site dedicated to the proposition that ‘President Bush launched a sharp but veiled attack Thursday on Sen. Barack Obama and other Democrats.'” by suggesting that some Democrats were acting in the same way some Western leaders did when they appeased Hitler in the runup to World War II. Why? “Obama’s presidential campaign Web site itself lays out in pretty simple terms the Illinois Democrat’s view about engaging the Iranian regime in “direct” negotiations with no preconditions,” Shepherd writes.
But the statements Shepherd quotes don’t say anything about appeasement. Heck, they don’t even say “negotiations.” Here are the statements Shepherd highlighted:
- “tough, direct presidential diplomacy”
- “willing to meet separately, without precondition”
- “the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them – which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration – is ridiculous.”
None say anything about appeasement or negotiation. Diplomacy is not appeasement or even negotiation.
Meanwhile, on the same subject, a May 15 NewsBusters post (and May 16 MRC CyberAlert item) by Brent Baker responded to Obama’s statement that “Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and even Reagan also negotiated directly with America’s enemies” by saying, “But Mikhail Gorbachev hadn’t promised to nuke Israel.”
Um, didn’t Gorbachev’s Soviet Union have thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at the U.S., which trumps the crap out of a threat from a country that has no nuclear weapons at all?