Ah, Context

For a candidate who likes to complain that quoting him accurately constitutes out-of-context foul play, John McCain sure does love distorting things Barack Obama has said. For example, Obama says "Iran, Cuba, Venezuela - these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us." This, it seems to me, is indisputably true. But in the Land of Straight Talk where you lie constantly, McCain says "The threat the government of Iran poses is anything but tiny" and that Obama calling it tiny "betrays the depth of Senator Obama's inexperience and reckless judgment." But of course they're only even disagreeing here at all if you leave out the part where Obama said Iran is tiny compared to the Soviet Union.

Similarly, it turns out that if you take a joke Barack Obama was making about duck hunting, and then change it around so that you have him saying that you hunt ducks with a six shooter, you can make a nice joke about how Obama thinks you hunt ducks with a six shooter. The one small problem in this narrative, of course, is that Obama never said you hunt ducks with a six shooter which makes a stump speech line about how he did say that pretty dishonest.

Comments

I'm said to say I used to give McCain a slight amount of credit for not being a total scumbag, but the cancer obviously ate out that part of his brain that stops the guy from acting like a raving asshole.

Posted by Helter | May 20, 2008 3:28 PM

Or it could be another senior moment for McCain - maybe he actually thinks that Iran is as big as the Soviet Union?

Factually, of course, the threat from Iran is actually tiny. Could the Iranian army even make it to California, let alone invade?

Posted by Andrew Edwards | May 20, 2008 3:39 PM

McCain's too senile to get it right.

Pass it on.
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | May 20, 2008 3:41 PM

Is "Yglesias" Spanish for hypocricy?

Obama has a glass law. Down he goes.

http://www.mpturner.net/audio/frazier.wav

Posted by Down Goes Obama | May 20, 2008 3:41 PM

Later in the press conference, McCain explained Iran scary cuz they gettin' nucular weapons!

Posted by Andruw | May 20, 2008 3:43 PM

Obama has a glass law [sic].

Does he also have an aluminum nostalgia?
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | May 20, 2008 3:44 PM

but he's such a mavericky liar.

Posted by cleek | May 20, 2008 3:45 PM

That anyone thinks it even matters whether Obama knows you don't hunt ducks with a six-shooter is enough to make you fear for this country.

Posted by Glenn | May 20, 2008 3:46 PM

Let the poor guy try to please his 200 year old mother with all these cute lies.

Posted by gregor | May 20, 2008 3:48 PM

I seriously hope that Obama's people buck up and start exposing this nonsense through their media connections. McCain's comments which intentionally leave out necessary pieces of Obama's statements are not errors of omission - they are lies created via intentional omission to swindle a general public who often does not pay much attention.

Between McCain's intentional lies, his feigned outrage over Obama's comments (such as Obama's willingness to negotiate with our enemies - a stance that McCain has shared in the past) and McCain's consistent memory lapses regarding exactly WHO we are fighting in Iraq, I'm wondering why on earth anyone would listen to this clown. He may have been a maverick once, but now he's an old, old politician who's playing the games old politicians play....with the caveat that given the aggressively warmongering policies McCain espouses, McCain's games are dangerous.

Who knows whether McCain misrepresents his opponent's views out of ignorance, mendaciousness, or creeping senility. Regardless, after the Bush debacle, does the US need a president where we have to worry about these three things?

Posted by edsbowlingshoe | May 20, 2008 3:49 PM

Dr. Rove: "Darth Cheney. The transformation is complete. We've replaced John McCain's soul with my Rovian Lie Generator. He can now produce bulls*** faster than any 'black hole' can absorb it."

Darth Cheney: "Yeeeesssss. Excellent. Luke Skytalker will be crushed. Wait. I feel a disturbance in the force. What the f*** is YouTube?"

Posted by LFC | May 20, 2008 3:52 PM

Come to think of it, that's the same NRA speech where McCain was ranting about "Obama's" plan for Iraq ...

... which turned out to be Hillary Clinton's plan for Iraq.

That senile old fuck is just plain sad.
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | May 20, 2008 3:56 PM

Time to hit below the belt: Is McCain's hearing going, or is it early dementia?

Posted by space | May 20, 2008 3:58 PM

Is Iran in the same category as Cuba and Venezuela?

Are Cuba and Venezuela tiny threats?

Posted by Dave | May 20, 2008 4:00 PM

The only thing Obama called tiny was McCain's dick. He knows because Lieberman told him.

Posted by An Outhouse | May 20, 2008 4:08 PM

So now that Obama acknowledges, Matt, that the threat from Iran is "grave"--do you want to retract the indisputable truth that the threat is not "serious" the way the Soviet Union was? Or do you want to say that this is indisputably true in the way in which it is trivially true--that is, it's not an "identical" threat to the threat posed by the Soviet Union?

Obama should not have likened the threat from Iran (which he considers grave) to the "threat" from Cuba or Venezuela, which is probably non-existent, and certainly non-grave. But rather than acknowledge that he flubbed, you pretend that the interesting story here is McCain's purported "lying."

Anyone reading the NYTimes story would see that the exchange was fair: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/us/politics/20campaign.html?ref=politics

Posted by Bill | May 20, 2008 4:08 PM

McCain is worse than Bin Laden. Hopefully he will have a massive heart attack, die immediately, and spend eternity burning in the fires of hell, getting raped up the ass by Satan on a daily basis, the fucking evil war criminal.

Posted by LarryM | May 20, 2008 4:11 PM

Is Iran in the same category as Cuba and Venezuela?

Are Cuba and Venezuela tiny threats?

Obama did not say they are in the same category. He did say the threat from all of them is tiny compared to what the threat from the Soviet Union was.

These shouldn't be difficult concepts to grasp.

Posted by Jim W | May 20, 2008 4:13 PM

i swiped this from the carpetbagger. it seems even joe klien thinks mccain is being less than honest about what obama says.
-----------------------------
For U.S. political purposes, Joe Klein reports that Obama has said he’s open to diplomacy with Iran’s leadership, not necessarily Ahmadinejad.

On Friday, I promised to check into whether Obama had ever said that he would negotiate — specifically, by name — with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Indeed, according to the crack Time Magazine research department and the Obama campaign, he never has. He did say that he would negotiate with the Iranian leadership — but, on matters of foreign policy and Iran’s nuclear program, the guy in charge is the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

As of today, John McCain was still accusing Obama of wanting to negotiate with Ahmadinejad. Why doesn’t the McCain campaign and other assorted Republicans ever accuse Obama of wanting to negotiate with Khamenei? Well, because Khamenei isn’t quite the flagrant anti-Semite Ahmadinejad is … and, as we keep hearing, Obama has a Jewish problem.

So, Klein, to his credit, asked McCain about this at a press conference, inquiring as to why McCain keeps accusing Obama of reaching out to Ahmadinejad when that hasn’t actually happened. When Klein noted that it’s Khamenei who is “in charge of Iranian foreign policy and also in charge of the nuclear program,” McCain said he respectfully disagreed.

Posted by dj spellchecka | May 20, 2008 4:14 PM

Obama should not have likened the threat from Iran (which he considers grave) to the "threat" from Cuba or Venezuela, which is probably non-existent, and certainly non-grave.

What a fucking moron.

Obama said: "[Iran, Cuba, Venezuela] don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us." So (pay attention, now): USSR > Iran > Cuba & Venezuela > Bill's 3rd grade English teacher.
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | May 20, 2008 4:16 PM

So now that Obama acknowledges, Matt, that the threat from Iran is "grave"--do you want to retract the indisputable truth that the threat is not "serious" the way the Soviet Union was? Or do you want to say that this is indisputably true in the way in which it is trivially true--that is, it's not an "identical" threat to the threat posed by the Soviet Union?

Obama should not have likened the threat from Iran (which he considers grave) to the "threat" from Cuba or Venezuela, which is probably non-existent, and certainly non-grave. But rather than acknowledge that he flubbed, you pretend that the interesting story here is McCain's purported "lying."

Anyone reading the NYTimes story would see that the exchange was fair: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/us/politics/20campaign.html?ref=politics

Posted by Bill | May 20, 2008 4:17 PM

Bill, you incredible nincompoop-- can you read?

Obama should not have likened the threat from Iran (which he considers grave) to the "threat" from Cuba or Venezuela

And he didn't, as you would know if you even read Matt's post or the article you link to.

Is it all those wingnut talking points shrieking inside your head that makes this so difficult for you?

Posted by calling all toasters | May 20, 2008 4:17 PM

I was remarking to my partner this morning that it seems to me only people who never lived through the Cold War -- roughly those under 30, 35 maybe (by "live through" I really mean had any real political awareness) -- could possibly begin to believe that Iran posed a threat similar to that of the USSR (or, at least the threat as we were told it was). And since this doesn't seem like much of a McCain demographic, I thought it was likely to be an ineffectual argument on McCain's part. But then my partner said, no, you're forgetting the large number of extremely stupid people in this country, and sadly, I think he's right.

Posted by Glenn | May 20, 2008 4:18 PM

Larry, this is your doctor again.

Time to take your meds.

Posted by LarryM's Doctor | May 20, 2008 4:18 PM

Bill,

Saying the same thing over again doesn't make it any less stupid.

Posted by Jim W | May 20, 2008 4:20 PM

Bill, you incredible nincompoop-- can you read?

Obama should not have likened the threat from Iran (which he considers grave) to the "threat" from Cuba or Venezuela

And he didn't, as you would know if you even read Matt's post or the article you link to.

Is it all those wingnut talking points shrieking inside your head that makes this so difficult for you?

Posted by calling all toasters | May 20, 2008 4:22 PM

JimW--seems to be a problem with the site that the comment repeated. I only sent it once.

Calling all toasters: "I mean, think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us"--how is it that this is not lumping the Iran threat in with the Cuba and Venezuela threats on some "nonserious" (yet grave) side of a divide with the old Soviet threat?

Posted by Bill | May 20, 2008 4:28 PM

Bill doesn't have to read, or tell the truth; he's doing what McCain is doing. he's catapulting the propaganda.

Posted by cleek | May 20, 2008 4:28 PM

McCain is also the guy who can't tell the difference between al Qaeda and Iran.
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | May 20, 2008 4:29 PM

Actually the threat posed by Iran, wait for it, is tiny, even if you don't compare it to anything else. And anybody seriously worried about nuclear threats, should worry about Pakistan instead.

Posted by novakant | May 20, 2008 4:29 PM

dj spellchecka,

Go to Andrew Sullivan's website, and see the youtube posted there where Barack Obama does say that he would meet with Ahmadinejad.

Posted by torourke | May 20, 2008 4:31 PM

how is it that this is not lumping the Iran threat in with the Cuba and Venezuela threats on some "nonserious" (yet grave) side of a divide with the old Soviet threat?

Jesus Humping Christ on a Magical Crouton, Bill, it's no wonder you're a conservative. You're just not capable of anything better.

23 is greater than 15, 8, and 2.

This DOES NOT MEAN THAT 15 = 8 = 2.

Deadweight ignorant filth.
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | May 20, 2008 4:35 PM

Novakant,

I agree with you on Pakistan. Not so sure I agree on Iran, but my point was that Barry does not agree--he says the threat from Iran is "grave"--which sounds "serious" in my book. Certainly serious enough that it should not be spoken of in a list of three threats the other two of which are Cuba's and Venezuela's...but perhaps "calling all toasters" will explain to me how it is that Barry did not in fact include it in such a list...

Posted by Bill | May 20, 2008 4:36 PM

Barry does not agree--he says the threat from Iran is "grave"--which sounds "serious" in my book.

Bill, when you finish coloring in your book, you'll be able to see the magical rainbow unicorn. It was hiding behind the leprechuan all along!
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | May 20, 2008 4:40 PM

Grand Moff Texan,

You seem to let your anger get the better of your thought. I did not say that Barry equated the threats as one might equate figures. I said that it was an error for him, when contrasting the threat posed by Iran to the threat posed by the Soviet Union, to speak of it in a set with the other two countries. It is sufficiently unlike them that he had to issue is clarification, later, that the threat posed by Iran is "grave." I accused him of unhelpfully "lumping" the threats together, which he does, which has the effect of likening them to one another. To be clear, since your rage may not yet have abated, GMT, to liken one thing to another is not to posit their mathematical equivalence.

You are correct that this isn't all that complicated. You just managed to get it wrong nonetheless, I'm afraid.

Posted by Bill | May 20, 2008 4:53 PM

This reminds of the time John Kerry told the NYT magazine that we need to bring terrorism down to the level of a nuisance. And W said - my opponent thinks terrorism is a nuisance!! You can turn any statement into the opposite if you rely on the press not to call you on it.

Posted by bobbo | May 20, 2008 5:03 PM

You seem to let your anger get the better of your thought.

Bill, as a moron, you're not in a position to evaluate thought. I'm certainly not the only one on this thread to point that out to you.

I did not say that Barry equated the threats as one might equate figures.

No, that was my comparison. In fact, it was my second attempt to show that you were making shit up.

I said that it was an error for him, when contrasting the threat posed by Iran to the threat posed by the Soviet Union, to speak of it in a set with the other two countries. It is sufficiently unlike them that he had to issue is clarification, later, that the threat posed by Iran is "grave."

No, you characterized it as a clarification when in fact Obama is still following idiots like you around with a psychological pooper-scooper because you can't get thing one right.

Believe it or not, Obama is going to keep speaking, and you (apparently) are going to keep being confused. Obama is not speaking to you, or because of your difficulties in comprehension.

I accused him of unhelpfully "lumping" the threats together, which he does, which has the effect of likening them to one another.

Does your strawman talk to you all the time, or only when the moon is full?
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | May 20, 2008 5:09 PM

GMT,

Here you have cutely adopted the format of reply known as "fisking." But the format works best when the clever intertextual commentary is responsive to, and indeed refutes, what it purports to comment upon. It also helps when there is cleverness. At a minimum, it is best to use proper syntax.

A final piece of advice, resort to the ad hominem is generally recognized in polite society as an admission of the weakness of one's argument, as well as one's character. You might want to work on that as well.

Cheers.

Posted by Bill | May 20, 2008 5:18 PM

Obama, I hope, will soon start making it an issue that McCain wants to use Bush's parameters for foreign policy. Bush has been doing his best to get his foreign policy idiocy reproduced over the next four years. It will be, and not necessarily just by the GOP, if the Dem position isn't clear and unequivocal that the policy is against U.S. interest. So instead of talking about what a threat Iran is, big or small, Obama has to change the field. He has to talk about the threat the continuing, security driven speculation in oil is to the U.S., and how it is fed by a blindly aggressive policy in the Middle East that doesn't even target U.S. enemies. Obviously, the terrorist force that is closest to getting a nuclear device given to them is Al Qaeda in Pakistan, with their allies in high places in Musharref's government, and their use by the Pakistani intelligence service to train the Taliban. Every time McCain mentions Iran, Obama should be talking about eight years of failure in the war on Al Qaeda. Think of it - in just four years, the Japanese leadership that decided to bomb Pearl Harbor was captured and some its members executed. Hitler's lieutenants were captured in the same time period. Well, the man and the inner circle that directed the largest attack on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor has now gone twice as long as Tojo - and he has spent about a thousandth of what Tojo spent, being protected by a force that is laughable by any real military standard. His real protection is that our supposed ally, Pakistan, would stand in the way of a U.S. government that actually aimed to take him out (I'm excepting the Bush white house, a crewe of morons and traitors who quite intentionally let Osama go, having no intention of crushing a useful threat upon which they could distribute trillions to their Defense Industry buddies and leverage other wars). Of course, as al qaeda merrily trains the Taliban, the U.S. pays tribute to his protectors, the Pakistanis, such is the wonderful system of the "tough" GOP leadership.

Pound this - it is relatively cheap, actually, to focus on Afghanistan. It is relatively beneficial, bringing down the price of a barrel of oil as nothing else will, to negotiate with Iran. It is expensive to indulge the sad withered woodies of the moronic warmonger set, and their constituency, who subsist on the corrupt defense industry dole.

When September 11 comes round again, Obama needs to make a major truth telling speech laying this out. He should at least hint that he might make an issue of the Saudis supporting the killing of two thousand U.S. soldiers over the last four years - which would crack the wall in a way the D.C. power elite would not like at all.

Posted by roger | May 20, 2008 5:27 PM

Obama did not make any error at all in his statement not matter how many times you say he did Bill. No one really cares how "unhelpful" you found his "lumping", what Obama said was perfectly true.

McCain, on the other hand, clearly lied about what Obama said.

Also, you might want to look up what ad hominem really means and reflect on whether commenting on your opponent's rage and weakness of character might qualify.

Posted by Janet | May 20, 2008 5:29 PM

Janet,

It is not to adopt the ad hominem fallacy to note that name-calling is not a proper substitute for argument, or to note that namecalling reflects badly on the namecaller. Nor is it ad hominem to note that a person who is typing in all caps and throwing about profane phrases seems to be letting the anger get in the way of argument.

My replies to the substance of GMT's remarks were on point and logical; noting the unhelpful tone of his remarks is neither out of bounds nor inappropriate, and certainly is not ad hominem.

I have not defended John McCain's misstatement of what Barry said--he should get it right, and Barry never called the threat itself tiny. Fair enough. But his misstatement is slight--it's clear that Obama was minimizing the threat posed by Iran, and that he later called that threat grave. It's also clear that he now thinks that there should be some sort of non-condition conditions before a sit-down meeting with Ahmadinejad (sp?). That's a shift from his previous position, and one that he does not fully acknowledge (he tries to contrast "preparations" with "conditions" so as to claim consistency).

Both of these men are politicians, and in the heat of the campaign they have both distorted things the other has said. I do not believe that all such distortions amount to lies, and I do not believe that constantly playing "gotcha" with them is terribly productive. (Today's ridiculous Joe-Klein-failure-to-search-Youtube is but the latest example, as noted in this very thread.)

The idea that McCain's slight misstatement here should cause everyone to go into vapors about his supposed dishonesty is just silly. This is particularly so when the very same crowd hasn't lost faith in Barry after his weeks of distorting the "100 years" line.

The two men have differing views about how to deal with Iran--McCain is not lying about that. He may be right, he may be wrong. But while he was wrong to say that Barry called the threat "tiny," he was not dishonest to note that a nuclear armed Iran is a serious threat indeed, and that Barry's idea of unconditional talks with them is naive, and seems to be predicated on an underestimation of the threat posed by Iran--a threat more like that posed by the Soviets than like that posed by Venezuela (in that Iran threatens to destabilize a vital region and to wield nuclear weapons--to key elements of the Soviet threat, however "tiny" Iran might be).

Posted by Bill | May 20, 2008 5:54 PM

Bill, you're a liar and a cad. Please take your sophistry elsewhere.

Posted by dob | May 20, 2008 6:12 PM

Dob,

Very convincing.

You all really know how to build a community of inquiry!

Posted by Bill | May 20, 2008 6:17 PM

Bill, you're a liar and a cad. Please take your sophistry elsewhere.

Posted by dob | May 20, 2008 6:20 PM

I'm happy to engage those with whom I disagree, when they argue in good faith. Bill, you've demonstrated repeatedly in this thread that you're merely trolling.

Posted by dob | May 20, 2008 6:30 PM

holy shit,

Lumping items together in a "some of these things are not like the other ones" scenario does not automatically render the "like" items identical.

A truck, a car, and a lawnmower are tiny in comparison to a supertanker.

A truck is still bigger than a lawnmower.

See?

Posted by tbag | May 20, 2008 7:43 PM

Ignore Bill. He's had his ass handed to him and thinks if he throws in enough misdirection people won't notice. It's the Gob Bluth school of debate.

Posted by Reality Man | May 20, 2008 7:56 PM

No, no tbag. Obama was clearly trying to mislead us into believing that the threats posed by Venezuela, Iran and Cuba are precisely equal.

Also, as Bill helpfully points out, The Maverick is being a lot more straight shooting than Obama about Iran. A nuclear-armed Iran would just be absolutely pants-peeing scary. (Almost as bad as a nuclear-armed Pakistan...) If Iran ever starts to try to embark on a 5 or 10 year plan to build maybe one or two nuclear weapons, the North American continent will probably turn to glass just from fright alone. This is something we must work very hard to prevent. By NEVER talking to them.

Of course, both candidates are still being fantastically disingenuous in failing to acknowledge the monstrous hypothetical threat posed by antimatter-warhead-armed Moon people.

Posted by jack lecou | May 20, 2008 8:04 PM

It is very possible to hunt with a 'six-shooter'. I'm not entirely convinced by this guy's hyperbole about cartridge size, but the page is a good illustration of the hunting revolvers I've seen.

http://www.biggamehunt.net/sections/Firearm/Beginners_Guide_to_Big_Game_Handgun_Hunting_10120412.html

Posted by Schwa | May 20, 2008 8:41 PM

This guy has a pretty good discussion of energy vs. usefulness for bullets.

http://www.chuckhawks.com/revolver_killing_power.htm

Posted by Schwa | May 20, 2008 8:44 PM

If a six-shooter is all you have, and you shoot a duck with that six-shooter, the duck will end up just as dead as if you shot it with a rifle.

Posted by Jet | May 20, 2008 10:11 PM

Listen asshole, the people who need meds are the people who DON'T want to see McCain die of a massive coronary, and the people who DON'T want him to burn in hell and get raped in the ass by Satan.

Posted by LarryM | May 20, 2008 10:15 PM

So let me get this straight; he wouldn't meet with the elected (although there were some gross irregularities involved)of a theocratic state, but he would meet with the unelected theocrat of said state, who controls, foreign and domestic policy; to whom all elected politicians have to defer to ; under vedak fagih "rule of the clerics"
Thanks I feel much better now.

Posted by narciso | May 20, 2008 10:40 PM

Bill, are you the drooler you appear to be? Or do you just like a fight? What Obama said should be fairly clear to anyone with an eighth grade education, especially if they don't have a poltical ax to grind. There are some genuine areas to criticize Obama, but this ain't one of them, unless, of course, you're just trying to clean up after your senile candidate McCain.

And what's with this "Barry" shit? He a friend of yours?

Posted by Publius | May 20, 2008 10:50 PM

"So now that Obama acknowledges, Matt, that the threat from Iran is "grave"--do you want to retract the indisputable truth that the threat is not "serious" the way the Soviet Union was?"

Uh, sorry, Matt can't comment on Iran.

Bad form to ask him to.

That makes you a threat.

The fact that Obama thinks Iran is a "threat" at all makes him unqualified for the Presidency - but that's just me. McCain is infinitely worse on that score, and so is Clinton, as her "obliterate Iran" rant showed clearly.

The problem here is that Matt apparently thinks Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and he also apparently continues to believe - from his Iraq war supporting days - that the US - or the UN - will have to act militarily to prevent this from happening.

But he can't SAY that here because it would make him look as stupid as he was in supporting the Iraq war. For Matt, "liberal hawk" has to be transformed into "liberal internationalist", so his book sells.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 20, 2008 11:14 PM

Bill,

First off, I agree with you that several of the commenters on this post have been unnecessarily vituperative in employing ad hominem arguments and insults against you.

Second, your comments are misstating facts with the seemingly sole purpose of misleading, so I have to say I sympathize with the posters angry about your incorrect summation and analysis of Obama's statements.

Very simply put, Obama said that Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela, all countries that the current administration refuses to talk with, are "tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, ‘We’re going to wipe you off the planet.’ ”

Obama also said in a different context that "Iran is a grave threat."

Those two statements are not even *close* to being mutually exclusive. It's not even GMT's nice, simple, consistent interpretation of BHO's statements as USSR >> Iran >> Cuba or Venezuela. It's the fact that BHO is saying two different things entirely, each of which eminently makes sense:

1) The USSR was a massive, massive global presence that immediately threatened US hegemony and arguably our and our allies' existence. Yet we talked to them. Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela aren't even massive presences that threaten us etc etc. If we could face the USSR in diplomacy without fear, we can face these little guys.

2) Iran is a grave threat, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't talk to them. We talked to the USSR, which was a grave threat. If we could face one grave threat, we can face another.

Those statements are completely mutually consistent, unless you insist upon an extraneous formulation that is NOT present in anything Obama has said, namely:

"A country must be as big a power as the USSR to pose a 'grave threat.'"

Since he didn't say that, or even come close to implying it, your comments make no sense. Sorry.

Posted by Mayur | May 21, 2008 12:50 AM

Mayur,

Which facts did I misstate? How did I intend to mislead? I accused BHO of unhappily lumping together things in such a way as to lend his statement to the interpretation that he was minimizing the Iraq threat. I did not accuse him of making statements that were mutually contradictory.

Thus, I disagree with nothing that you have written. Only people bending over backwards to defend BHO, however, and to accuse McCain of "lying" (as you have accused me of intending to mislead) would read his statement about Iran without seeing that he was goofily minimizing the threat.

If you want to talk about the foreign policy point more deeply, since you have been civil and substantive, unlike the silly name callers above, his point is a bit off to me. To wit, we had to deal with the Soviets because they were too damn big to ignore--we have more tools (including a level of ostracization) with smaller powers, and we ought to employ those too. We currently deal with Iran--we just don't honor them with state visits because they behave in roguish fashion. This is not new or confusing. It is not unique to GWB, and BHO has now acknowledged (with his new "preparations" pivot) that he will do likewise.

His point of view is legitimate, but mistaken. The contrast drawn by JSM is perfectly legitimate, even if he seized upon the wrong bit of BHO's rhetoric. It is in any event far truer to what BHO's views are than BHO's disingenuous attacks on the hundred year comments, which, again, I suspect you have not railed against.

Please do tell me where I have misstated, and what clues you in to my intention to mislead.

Cheers,

Bill

Posted by Bill | May 21, 2008 1:44 AM

Matt, this is a terrible, dishonest post. Here is the relevant text of what McCain actually said (note that you did not link):

“Before I begin my prepared remarks, I want to respond briefly to a comment Senator Obama made yesterday about the threat posed to the United States by the Government of Iran. Senator Obama claimed that the threat Iran poses to our security is “tiny” compared to the threat once posed by the former Soviet Union. Obviously, Iran isn’t a superpower and doesn’t possess the military power the Soviet Union had. But that does not mean that the threat posed by Iran is insignificant. On the contrary, right now Iran provides some of the deadliest explosive devices used in Iraq to kill our soldiers. They are the chief sponsor of Shia extremists in Iraq, and terrorist organizations in the Middle East. And their President, who has called Israel a “stinking corpse,” has repeatedly made clear his government’s commitment to Israel’s destruction. Most worrying, Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. The biggest national security challenge the United States currently faces is keeping nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists. Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, that danger would become very dire, indeed. They might not be a superpower, but the threat the Government of Iran poses is anything but “tiny.”

“Senator Obama has declared, and repeatedly reaffirmed his intention to meet the President of Iran without any preconditions, likening it to meetings between former American Presidents and the leaders of the Soviet Union. Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator Obama’s inexperience and reckless judgment.

1) McCain specifically agreed with the statement that Iran is tiny relevant to the Soviet Union, and then said that's no reason for us to downplay the threat.

2) McCain's comment about Obama's "inexperience and reckless judgment" was with regard to his position on meeting with Ahmadinejad, and had nothing to do with his characterization of the Iran threat as "tiny".

Those are two points of blatant dishonesty in your post. I expect much better from you.

Posted by right | May 21, 2008 6:50 PM