Chicken

Returning Chicken

I suspect that if John McCain asked Reverend Wright why he (McCain) had such a terrible week, the good Reverend might well respond, "Senator, your chickens are coming home to roost." Of course, McCain probably won't be asking for advice from pastors any time soon.

The good Reverend would be right. As Cliff Schecter, author of The Real McCain, Sarah Posner, and many others have documented, McCain's pastor friends should be shunned, not sought out.

It was entirely predictable McCain would eventually be forced to repudiate Pastor Hagee's endorsement, given that Hagee had insulted Catholics and preached that Hitler's holocaust was God's chosen instrument for herding Jews towards Israel. And within hours after repudiating Hagee, McCain was also forced to denounce his "moral compass, spiritual guide," Pastor Rod Parsley, whose hate-filled views that America was founded for the purpose of destroying the religion of Islam are at least as vile at Hagee's, and more dangerous to America.

Americans have seen the Parsley/McCain videos, and more importantly, Muslims worldwide are watching them too. No President should have a Rod Parsley anywhere near the White House if he/she hopes to deal with a billion Muslims. But McCain has no one but himself to blame that the men whose extremist views were well known but whose endorsement he deliberately sought are now revealed to everyone as intolerant extremists and morally repugnant demagogues.

Emperor’s Chicken

More Emperor Chickens

We see the same pattern of courting those whom he must eventually repudiate in McCain's belated attempts to purge his most embarrassing lobbyist advisers. But it's too late for McCain to recover the mantle of political reformer; he's already been forced to dismiss the first five of dozens of lobbyists working on his campaign, some of whom lobbied on behalf of the world's worst despots. (h/t Josh at TPM) The next to fall may well be McCain's campaign manager, Charlie Black, who only two months ago was conducting his lobbying business from McCain's Straight Talk Bus. Did John McCain, one of Washington's most experienced politicians, really not know what his closest advisers did for a living?

Then yesterday, Bush/McCain and their dwindling allies suffered a stinging defeat when the Senate voted 75 - 22 to attach Webb's GI Bill and other domestic spending to the Iraq funding bill. McCain couldn't hold his own party for a President at 23 percent.

But the most curious of McCain's returning chickens involved the revelations that Israel has been secretly negotiating with Syria over a possible peace settlement. That bombshell undermined McCain's absurd attempts to turn Barack Obama's willingness to talk to adversaries into an election issue. As Joe Biden notes in today's WSJ, it's a foolish, self-defeating policy for McCain to align himself with George Bush's intransigence against negotiations. [And see Yglesias on the "appeasement" argument.]

As Attaturk noted yesterday, the Israel-Syria revelation forced reporters to note that lots of adversaries talk to each other, and whoops, even the Bush Administration had been talking directly or indirectly to countries it routinely demonized.

Yet the strangest thing about that revelation is the story America's media hardly covered, even though, as Steve Benen suggests, it was staring them in the face. Every media outlet covered President Bush's "appeasement" speech to the Israeli Knesset; it drew almost universal condemnation (except, of course, for John McCain and Joe Lieberman), both for misrepresenting and conflating talking with appeasement and for using a foreign speech to engage in America's domestic politics. But to whom was Bush's message directed?

As soon as Bush returned home, Israel's Olmert confirmed reports of Israel's discussions with Syria. Subsequent stories also revealed that the Bush Administration had known about these discussions for months and was unhappy they were occurring. And yet knowing that Olmert was trying to negotiate a peace with Syria, an agreement that would undoubtedly involve Israel giving up all or most of the Golan Heights in exchange for peace and other commitments, the President of the United States was telling the Israeli Parliament that talking to adversaries was equivalent to the historic appeasement of Hitler.

While American media focused on the apparent hit on Obama, an interpretation the Administration leaked to reporters even though Dana Perino tried to deny it, it's now apparent that the major target was not just Obama but Olmert and his Syria talks. Was Bush (probably at Cheney's urging) trying to torpedo the Israeli-Syria peace talks?

So the questions the Washington media might ask is why did President Bush make a statement to the Israeli Knesset that he knew or should have known would be understood by them as a public condemnation of their government's peace efforts? And since it's clear that John McCain has been coordinating his campaign initiatives with the White House, how much did McCain know and understand about the Bush effort to undermine the Israeli government? Even if McCain didn't know what was going on, what does McCain have to say about Bush's interference now?

Photo via flickr of Lovely Tufted Hen, by diego fern 17