If it was a political attack against Obama or dems, he’d have said, “some people in my country.” Fact is, he was talking about people around the world who have this idea that one can sit down and say hi to Ahmadinejad, and everything will be happy go lucky. You talk about the Gates quote…what he’s saying is that if someone’s gonna talk to Iran, then that someone is either going to have to have leverage against them, OR HAVE TO GIVE THEM SOMETHING/appease them. Got leverage? No? Then how are “talks” w Iran gonna make magic things happen w/out giving them something/appeasing them?

I guess Gibbs must have changed the channel when Carter and Clinton were attacking Bush on foreign soil.

Geez! The more you Dems WHINE about this the more obvious it is that the truth hurts.

You have a weak candidate, with no experience and even less understanding of how the world works. He is dangerously naive and would risk America’s nationals security for the sake of his enormous ego.

When it comes to Obama: JUST SAY NO!

GIBBS: Obviously this is an unprecedented political attack on foreign soil. It’s quite frankly sad and astonishing that the president of the United States would politicize the 60th anniversary of Israel with a false political attack. I assume he also is going to come home and fire his secretary of defense who was quoted in The Washington Post just yesterday saying we need to figure — quote, “We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage and then sit down and talk with them.” Them being Iran. Look, we have come to expect, and we’ve seen from this administration over the last eight years this type of cowboy diplomacy. Again, we’ve come to expect it. But over the past eight years it’s made this country far less safe than we were.

CNN again aired that clip of Gibbs — except that it edited out the reference to The Washington Post about firing Gates, in which Gibbs pointed out the Bush administration’s hypocrisy. Several other times, CNN aired a portion of Gibbs’ comments, without the references to Gates.

Except for the 10%ers on this site and others like it the rest of the country is aware of the utter hipocracy in Bush’s statment! We have always, always, always, negotiated with our enemies until the chimp got into office!

Reagan and Andropov, while the Soviets had thousands of warheads pointed in our direction! Over and over again Breshnev told Nixon that he would destroy us as did Mao but Nixon had the courage to talk to them.

Crap, Reagan sold weapons to these very same Iranians immediately after the Ayatolla kidnapped our diplomats!

Bush is the idiot who appointed Brownie and tried to get Harriet Miers into the SCOTUS! He is an utter, complete and total boob who is going to not only ruin McCain’s chances to get elected but he is going to ruin the GOP brand for decades.

MA - why are you so stuck on the word negotiations? Who is (of relevance - not Jimmy Carter) suggesting any negotiations? This is about talk. When Bush and Powell engaged Libya in talk Qaddafi caved. Why did we stop there?

Why won’t this idiot just shut his mouth? Fine, quit golfing because you do not want to be seen having fun but keep dancing with drummers from Africa and dancers from the Rep of Georgia you unimaginable @hole.

It applies here too. McCain wants the same idiomatic construction in the video. We can see it in his body language as he’s speaking. I think anyone looking at the first part of the clip finds McCain is implicitly making a case for a open-ended negotiation with Hamas. Then he wants to eat his cake too, and puts a condition on negotiations.

While “one way or another” can mean a measure of things, I think it’s fair to say that McCain was more open then to negotiating with Hamas than his present self.

The United States has engaged in diplomacy with Iran, it’s subsidary agents Hamas and Hezbollah by intensive indirect means in conjunction with our allies FOR DECADES.

The idea that we are not using diplomacy is LAUGHABLE.

You apparently ignored the portion of my post at Flopping Aces where I summarize the memoirs of Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz, who conducted some of the most intense diplomatic maneuvers to address the crisis in Lebanon.

Because we only “spoke softly” but threw away the “big stick” through the pullout mania which seems to be the mantra of Democrats we have lost much of the leverage we have to bring about diplomatic success.

It is a direct consequence of the hopelessly flawed and historically ignorant world view of people like yourself that has handcuffed the effectiveness of U.S. diplomatic power.

What do you negotitate?

They are KILLING AMERICANS.

As the U.S. do you say: OK, we’ll compromise, you can kill half the number of Americans you are currently killing in Iraq?

The only negotiation that should be going on here is with our European partners. We should make it clear to them that the EU-3 negotiating team of Britain, Germany and France has FAILED to bring about any positive result in stopping Iran’s nuclear development. Therefore, it’s time for them to join us in SANCTIONS against Iran and prevent Iran’s access to western technology.

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/05/16/mccains-hamas-comments-context-restored/

I do not know how “leverage” equates to “appeasements and concessions”. Leverage means we give Iran an offer they cannot refuse, just as we gave the Sunni in Iraq. We crush their forces in Iraq, capture their weapons they gave to the terrorists (on all sides) and weaken them to a point where they face two choices: Surrender and negotiate or fight to the death and lose.

Sky and John,

In a sense you are correct, the Republicans have soured their brand, but not as you or your programmers at KOS and DU believe. The RNC for some reason decided to become “democrat light” and let the leftists walk all over them as they abandoned principles and went left. As such, conservatives like me complained and when ignored, quit the party. We are now “independents” but will NEVER vote for the socialist democrat party (DNC). Maybe the RNC will wake up and return to conservatism or maybe they will continue to be “democrat light” and fade away.

The same holds true for the Democrat Party. It too may fracture into the “democrat light/current republican party” and the radical socialist/militant left. The Obama/Hillary voter split could drive upset dems to McCain as some polls suggest.

America would then have four parties in reality (though the Democrats and Republicans may still exist, there will be little difference): Libertarian, Conservative, the RNC/DNC (pastel differences), and the Socialists (WWP, Sparticus League, ANSWER, et al along with their extremes like Black Bloq types and Stormfront).

Step up, tell us how it would work. Bush or Clinton or Obama or a SecState go to Tehran, sit down, and a fairy godmother waves her wand, then everything is good; Iran smiles, recognizes Israel, stops killing Americans in Iraq, and begins dismantling their nuclear bomb factories? What? No fairy godmother? Ok, then what makes Iran do all this once they sit down and “talk”?

There’s all kinds of brand anxiety over in the House GOP right now — In his outraged memo to the party yesterday, GOP Rep. Tom Davis wrote that “Members instinctively understand that the Republican brand is in the trash can. I’ve often observed that if we were a dog food, they would take us off the shelf.”

And we’ve had one message: STOP KILLING AMERICANS if you want relations betweeen us to improve.

Nothing Gates or Baker suggested would lead anyone to believe that Presidential level talks without preconditions like Obama is campaigning on would be a good idea.