While speaking to the Israeli Knesset yesterday, President Bush compared those who advocate speaking directly to our enemies to Nazi appeasers, a comment interpreted as a hit at Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). Speaking on MSNBC this afternoon, Nancy Pfotenhauer, a policy adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), stood by Bush’s comparison even as she tried to claim that McCain had never used the word appeasement:

PFOTENHAUER: Senator McCain responded directly himself and said he took the president at his word, that those comments were not directed toward Senator Obama. [...]

SHUSTER: Nancy, does the McCain campaign believe that talking to our enemies is the same as appeasing them?

PFOTENHAUER: We have never used the term appeasement and you know that.

SHUSTER: But the president did. [...]

PFOTENHAUER: We have specifically not used the term appeasement.

Watch it:

Pfotenhauer needs to get her facts straight. First, McCain himself specifically used the word “appeasers” yesterday, insisting “the president is exactly right“:

Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain. I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.

What’s more, it’s unclear what Pfotenhauer was referring to when she said the McCain campaign “took the president at his words,” considering Bush never said that his comments were not directed toward Obama. In fact, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino confirmed that the comments did “include” him. CNN’s Ed Henry reported yesterday, “White House aides are acknowledging that this was a reference to the fact that Sen. Obama and other Democrats” support meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Sen. John McCain’s speech yesterday attracted a lot of media attention for what he said about Iraq –but it is what he DIDN’T say on Afghanistan and Pakistan that should worry most Americans.

Conservatives like McCain have demonstrated that they may be strong on rhetoric but actually lacking in clear ideas on how to truly tackle the continued threat posed by the global Al Qaeda movement.

As the threat from Al Qaeda becomes more diffuse, U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies have reached a strikingly unanimous conclusion that the core organizational leadership has reformed itself. Its location? Pakistan.

Al Qaeda has, in the words of the Director for National Intelligence’s February 2008 Annual Threat Assessment, “retained or regenerated key elements of its capability, including top leadership, operational mid-level lieutenants, and de facto safe haven in Pakistan’s border area with Afghanistan, known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or the FATA.” The CIA, State Department, and Joint Chiefs of Staff have all echoed this warning in recent months. The threat is not exclusive to America: terror plots in Denmark, Germany, and Spain, as well as a score of attacks within Pakistan itself, have all been traced back to the FATA.

If Pakistan represents the center of gravity in the fight against Al Qaeda, you would not be able to tell it from any policies put forth by a conservative political establishment still fixated on Iraq. As Congress’ independent non-partisan investigatory body, the Government Accountability Office, recently concluded, the Bush administration still lacks a unified strategy for dealing with the FATA that incorporates all elements of U.S. national power.

And for most of Bush’s tenure in office, a loyal Congress has abdicated any responsibility for holding the administration accountable for this. In its two years from 2005-2006, the 109th Congress managed to hold just one single hearing on Pakistan in all the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight committees of both the House and Senate combined. Since the shift in power that brought more progressives into the 110th Congress, there have been at least fifteen congressional hearings on Pakistan alone.

McCain, the presumptive leader of the American conservative movement, simply follows in the path of the Bush administration’s lack of attention to what is one of the most pressing national security challenges. Read more

During the 2000 presidential campaign, President Bush criticized the Clinton administration for high fuel prices and said that as president, he would take a much tougher approach — “jawbone OPEC members to lower the price“:

What I think the president ought to do [when gas prices spike] is he ought to get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say we expect you to open your spigots…And the president of the United States must jawbone OPEC members to lower the price.

Last January, Bush went to Saudi Arabia to “jawbone” King Abdullah into increasing oil production in an effort to bring rising gas prices down in the United States. But perhaps because the jawboning session occurred in the comforts of the King’s horse ranch, the King declined Bush’s kind request.

Bush was back in Saudi Arabia today meeting with the King to make a second appeal for the oil-rich nation to increase its crude output. But again, instead of jawboning, Bush took the horse farm approach and failed once again:

The White House says Saudi Arabia’s leaders are making clear they see no reason to increase oil production until customers demand it.

President Bush was in the oil-rich country Friday to appeal to King Abdullah for greater production to help halt rising gas prices in the United States. [...]

Bush was spending the day with Abdullah at his horse farm outside Riyadh, talking mostly out of public view over three tea services and two meals.

But Bush’s Saudi Arabia junkets are perhaps more symbolic than anything else. In fact, there’s evidence to suggest that even if the King had agreed to increase Saudi Arabia’s oil production, its effect on lowering gas prices in the U.S. would have been minimal to non-existent.

While “[n]obody has cracked the code” to the cause of high gas prices, there are other issues that contribute, such as a weak dollar. But seeing that the King of Saudi Arabia has little control of the dollar’s value, it seems Bush’s visits indicate his continued addiction to oil rather than any adherence to sound policy that helps Americans.

Brad Johnson breaks down other key components to high gas prices over at the Wonk Room.

Sen. John McCain (R-Z) has criticized Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) by disingenuously claiming that he “approved” of negotiations with Hamas. “It is a grave and dangerous mistake for an American leader to meet with a terrorist organization like Hamas,” McCain claims. But in an op-ed today, James Rubin, a former State Department official under President Clinton, revealed that in a 2006 interview on Britain’s Sky News, McCain supported direct diplomacy with Hamas:

RUBIN: Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?

McCAIN: They’re the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so…but it’s a new reality in the Middle East.

Interviewed on CNN today, Rubin said McCain’s “180-degree flip flop” on negotiating with Hamas was at the “height of hypocrisy”:

RUBIN: This is the ultimate flip-flop in American politics. When he was in Davos amongst the European crowd…he was talking as if it were appropriate and natural and reasonable to negotiate with Hamas, the new government of the Palestinian territories. And then, two years later, he’s taking a very, very different position, saying anybody who wants to talk to them is somehow an equivalent to terrorists … It was he himself who was prepared to talk to Hamas two years ago.

Watch it:

“The old John McCain, it appears, was ready to do business with a Hamas-led government, Rubin wrote. CNN said it contacted McCain’s campaign for reaction to Rubin’s comments but said, “We have yet to hear back from them.”