Later On

Politicians on the Right regularly fulminate and denounce certain actions of President Obama. The question always is: are they serious, or are they just trying for cheap political shots. One way to tell: if President Bush did quite similar things and those same politicians seemed quite accepting of Bush’s actions. Two recent examples:

First, from the Center for American Progress in an email:

This past Wednesday, U.S. Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell — who successfully brokered peace in Northern Ireland — suggested to a PBS host that the United States could "withhold support on loan guarantees to Israel" as one tool to pressure the Israelis to seriously engage in peace efforts. Mitchell’s remarks have sparks an "uproar" among the Israeli right, which has been intransigent on the issues of settlement expansion and the economic blockade of Gaza. Additionally, a group of American senators — John McCain (R-AZ), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), John Barrasso (R-WY), and John Thune (R-SD) — appeared at a press conference in Jerusalem and slammed Mitchell’s openness to using all available tools to forge a Middle East peace. Lieberman said that "any attempt to pressure Israel, to force Israel to the negotiating table by denying Israel support, will not pass the Congress of the United States." McCain said that "this type of pressure would not be helpful ‘and I don’t agree with it.’" What right-wing critics of Mitchell’s suggestion do not acknowledge is that threatening to freeze loan guarantees is hardly unique to the Obama administration. In fact, the last time such a threat was made was under President George W. Bush. In 2003, Bush made the explicit threat to withhold loan guarantees from the Israelis due to the expansion of their "security fence" deep into Palestinian territory. Bush’s father went even further. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush briefly cut off loan guarantees to the Israeli government over their settlement policies, successfully forcing "Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir … to attend the Madrid Peace Conference." As the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss notes, threatening to suspend aid to Israel "is the only thing likely to change Israel’s behavior."

Second, Faiz Shakir at ThinkProgress (videos at the link):

In their eagerness to place blame on President Obama for the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack, Republicans have argued that the president waited too long to talk publicly about the matter. Karl Rove began the assault by complaining that Obama waited “72 hours before” addressing the American public. RNC Chairman Michael Steele and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani have piled on with a similar criticism.

Liz Cheney’s neoconservative political attack organization, Keep America Safe, is out with a new ad titled “100 hours.” Replete with images of Obama golfing, the ad — which imitates the TV show 24 — ends with the question, “How long did it take you to realize the system failed?”.

Of course, while Obama wasn’t speaking publicly about the terrorist incident, he was directing an immediate federal response.

Moreover, as Huffington Post’s Sam Stein documented, President Bush didn’t utter a single word about shoe bomber Richard Reid’s terrorist attack for six days, whereupon he simply said that he was “grateful for the flight attendant’s response, as I’m sure the passengers on that airplane.”

On ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos confronted Cheney about her hypocritical attack. “As many Democrats and others have pointed out, President Bush waited I think six days before doing much about Richard Reid, the shoe bomber,” he noted. Cheney evaded the question entirely, pretending not to hear it. “The point of that ad,” she said, “was this notion that you cannot win a war if you’re treating it as sort of an inconvenient sidelight.”

This sort of thing is completely non-serious and shows how little interest the GOP has in responsible governance.