Back in August, John McCain tried to make an issue out of the fact that one of Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer, had attended a legal conference in Damascus in July. The attempt never went anywhere — in addition to being a total non-story charge, the geniuses working for McCain fumbled the press call by hanging up on a reporter who was asking inconvenient questions about the lobbying work of various McCain staffers and surrogates.

Today, the Huffington Post’s Murray Waas reports that one of those staffers, William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist heading up McCain’s presidential transition team, “aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime“:

The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein’s government.

During the same period beginning in 1992, Timmons worked closely with the two lobbyists, Samir Vincent and Tongsun Park, on a previously unreported prospective deal with the Iraqis in which they hoped to be awarded a contract to purchase and resell Iraqi oil. Timmons, Vincent, and Park stood to share at least $45 million if the business deal went through.

Timmons’ activities occurred in the years following the first Gulf War, when Washington considered Iraq to be a rogue enemy state and a sponsor of terrorism.

Waas also reports that “proposals that Timmons himself circulated to U.S. officials as part of the effort were written with the assistance of…Iraqi officials, and were also sent ahead of time with Timmons’ approval to [Saddam Hussein's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq] Aziz.” Interestingly, a few years after Timmons worked with Iraqi officials to implement U.S. legislation to ease sanctions on Saddam Hussein, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann worked with Iraqi exiles to implement U.S. legislation to remove Saddam Hussein. Now that’s diversity!

In 1993, President Clinton launched strikes on Saddam Hussein’s regime in response to Iraq’s alleged plot to assassinate former President Bush. At the time, Sen. John McCain staunchly supported striking Iraq:

I support the Presidents decision to launch this action against Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein’s failure to comply with United Nations resolutions. His continued failure to comply with international law merits a condemnation of the world and this decisive action by the world community.

It is thus particularly ironic that William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who heads McCain’s presidential transition team, was involved in a lobbying effort on behalf of Saddam Hussein around the same time as Clinton launched strikes against Iraq “to ease international sanctions against his regime,” as Murray Waas reports today on The Huffington Post:

Talking points that Timmons produced for the lobbyists to help ease the sanctions, for example, were reviewed ahead of time by [Saddam aide Tariq] Aziz, [lobbyist Samir] Vincent testified in court. Proposals that Timmons himself circulated to U.S. officials as part of the effort were written with the assistance of the Iraqi officials, and were also sent ahead of time with Timmons’ approval to Aziz, other records show.

Beginning in 1992, Waas adds, Timmons “worked closely with the two lobbyists, Samir Vincent and Tongsun Park, on a previously unreported prospective deal with the Iraqis in which they hoped to be awarded a contract to purchase and resell Iraqi oil. Timmons, Vincent, and Park stood to share at least $45 million if the business deal went through.” On September 19, 1991, however, McCain said Iraqi oil revenue should “go to the people that need it”:

KING: But the U.N. did approve today his selling of oil. I think they’re going to let him sell a billion and a half dollars worth of oil this winter. Did that surprise you?

Sen. McCAIN: No. There are starving people in Iraq and the American people and people throughout the world want to make sure that children don’t die. The key to it, though, is to make sure that those revenues don’t go to Saddam Hussein but they go to the people that need it. That’s what we’ve got to make sure of.

The people who were supposed to receive the benefits of Iraq’s oil, however, ended up being people like Timmons. Did McCain know Timmons was “palling around” with Saddam’s friends?

Just to add to Ali’s post on David Frum’s attempted scolding of Rachel Maddow last night for not running her show precisely as he thinks it should be run, I think merely noting the laughably false equivalence that Frum posits between the rage of McCain-Palin supporters and the playful sarcasm of Rachel Maddow lets Frum off too easy.

The anger and fear of the conservative base that is now burning out of control did not light itself, it has been tended and stoked for years by people like David Frum. True, Frum is not as deranged as an Andy McCarthy or thuggish as a Sean Hannity, but that’s not really saying much. As one of the leading theorists of the war on terror, Frum has been a herald for some of the most vicious and destructive foreign policy ideas in the last decade. Frum’s own words have been quoted approvingly by Osama bin Laden himself — for the very simple reason that Frum’s ideas ideas about the clash between Islam and the West mirror bin Laden’s own. When McCain’s supporters express fear of the Muslim other, they are responding to an atmosphere that Frum — the author of the “Axis of Evil” — helped create.

If one is to take his comments last night seriously, Frum thinks that just because he bewailed the Islamofascist menace and delivered his exhortations to global war with an appropriate lack of sarcasm somehow excuses this. It doesn’t, and no amount of sanctimony larded on top of his false equivalences will make it so.