Protesting Too Much

Now that I've fully read Bush's speech before the Knesset, I really can't understand why Obama, Pelosi, Clinton and others who've protested it have a problem. Bush didn't name any names and his argument--

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all 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

--is one he's been making since 2001. Even the specific words have been said before. By Rummy, back in 2006, when he said

Someone recently recalled one U.S. senator's reaction in September of 1939 upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II. He exclaimed:

“Lord, if only I had talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided!”

I recount that history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism. Today -- another enemy, a different kind of enemy -- has made clear its intentions with attacks in places like New York and Washington, D.C., Bali, London, Madrid, Moscow and so many other places. But some seem not to have learned history's lessons.

Bill Kristol and Powerline have more on the "protesting too much" angle. Meanwhile, it's an excellent, moving speech. The only thing I take issue with is the equation of Israel with the fulfillment of God's covenant with the Jews:

Centuries of suffering and sacrifice would pass before the dream was fulfilled. The Jewish people endured the agony of the pogroms, the tragedy of the Great War, and the horror of the Holocaust -- what Elie Wiesel called "the kingdom of the night." Soulless men took away lives and broke apart families. Yet they could not take away the spirit of the Jewish people, and they could not break the promise of God. (Applause.) When news of Israel's freedom finally arrived, Golda Meir, a fearless woman raised in Wisconsin, could summon only tears. She later said: "For two thousand years we have waited for our deliverance. Now that it is here it is so great and wonderful that it surpasses human words."

I'm not saying Israel isn't part of the Lord's providential plan, but I don't think we can baptize (well... give a bris to?) the political actions of men so easily. The Old Testament covenant is with the Jewish people, not with a particular political entity necessarily --not with the Knesset, certainly. Be that as it may, I could wish people like Abraham Foxman would contemplate this speech and see how little they have to fear from evangelical protestantism, whose position the President is here representing.

On another topic entirely, Fr. Z. protests that protesting too much doesn't mean what we think it does. He says in context "protesting" meant something more like declaiming. The lady makes too many loud pronouncements, methinks. Hmm.

Update: Deja vu: Not only has the Administration alluded to Sen. William ("if only I could have talked to Hitler") Borah before (he was Republican by the way), the usual suspects have been up in arms about it before too.

Update 2: Oo, burn. Asked on the plane to Riyadh about whether the President was taking a swipe at Obama, Ed Gillespie replies in essence: Actually, it was Carter we were thinking of.

Update 3: Isn't it depressing that Bush has managed to anger the Democrats more with one paragraph than John McCain has in a series of major policy speeches?