Jesus – what’s next?
“Even Ronald McDonald said he wouldn’t meet with Ahmadinejad!!”
You know what? There’s a lot of folks who wouldn’t meet with Ahmadinejad. And there’s a reason none of them are contendors for the Presidency of the United States of America.
Though you’d never hear it from the right, there are literally millions of people who would prefer not to go to war. if sitting at a table and discussing ways not to do that is too hard for some people, then maybe some people should sit down, shut up, and let the grownups run the world.
Mmmkay?

meh, do you really think our only alternatives are going to war and going, hat in hand, to meet with anti-American dictators?
I can just picture Obama apologizing for the past behavior of the United States to a guy who thinks that gay teenagers should be executed.
Seriously, I believe the U.S. has committed many errors in the past, but let’s not compound them by erring in the opposite direction.

According to the NYT, Israel and Syria through Turkish intermediators were meeting to try and negotiate a peace:
“The talks in Turkey were coordinated with the United States, according to a senior Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity, though the talks come less than a week after President Bush, speaking to the Israeli Parliament, created a stir by criticizing those who would negotiate with “terrorists and radicals.” Mr. Bush’s remarks have become an issue in the American presidential campaign because they were widely perceived as a rebuke to Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic front-runner, who has advocated the kind of engagement that Israel and Syria are now undertaking.”
Now, these talks may fail, but they are talking. Just like Mao-Nixon and Reagan and the leader of the Evil Empire, they are talking.

There’s nothing wrong with back-channel diplomacy, or other kinds of diplomacy, in my opinion. But, Obama compared his promise to talk to Ahmadenijad without pre-conditions with Nixon’s trip to China.
In the words of Mr. Spock, “Only a Nixon can go to China.” Nixon was rather infamous for his anti-communism, had his own authoritarian tendencies, and was a hard a**, to put it bluntly. Obama certainly isn’t the same kind of politician as Nixon was, so the parallel doesn’t hold up.
Israel and Syria are talking, and yet, Israel just recently bombed what was apparently a secret construction site for a nuclear facility in Syria. To me, this sounds like negotiating from a position of strength, not from the “please meet with us, we’ll be good,” approach that Obama appears to be promising us. If he’s bucking for sainthood, fine, but that’s not the job of a president of the United States, IMO.

Let’s see…the right has us believe that there are two choices: to go to war or to go with “hat in hand.”
I guess that is because the only kind of diplomacy their President knows is to go hat in hand to folks like the Saudis, and to get treated like the red-headed step child. Maybe if their party actually had statesmen left in it, they might see how diplomacy should be the FIRST step and war the LAST.

HAGEE says HITLER was used by GOD to cause the HOLOCAUST. NICE ONE!

“Now, these talks may fail, but they are talking. Just like Mao-Nixon and Reagan and the leader of the Evil Empire, they are talking.”
Do you know that we have been meeting with Iran until they broke off negotiations?

There is nothing wrong with meeting with the little Muslim nutcase as long as the meeting makes it clear to him how many nuclear warheads it would take to totally wipe the entire population of Iran off the face of the earth and we have many times that many.

News flash- I have a sneaking suspicion that ‘the little nutcase’ is already well aware of that fact.
And he does not even have the authority to order them into a war- only the head ayatollah can do that.
Talking with somebody does not mean you go begging, and as Churchill said, jaw ,jaw is better than war, war.
To those who are so keen on war, we need to rebuild the military first. Obama has said that would be a priority for him , BTW.

RJohnson, if you read my first comment, I said war or “meeting without preconditions” are not the only options. I love being a moderate.
People on the left lambast me for being a member of the right, people on the Right for being a liberal. As a person who obviously embraces one extreme, do you really think that there are ever only two options in a foreign policy situation? Is it possible there might be a middle wa?.
We’ve just spent the past 8 years (many of us anyway) suffering through the Bush Presidency, IMO, one of the worst Administrations in our history. Is it too much to ask not to want to go to the opposite extreme with an idealistic, but naive and possibly ineffectual President Obama?

Regarding Richardson, and I know this is off the subject, but I hope one of the conditions in the deal that Hillary Clinton’s campaign eventually makes with the Democratic Party is no Richardson on the bottom half of the ticket! Anyone but that two-faced opportunist.

“Even Ronald McDonald said he wouldn’t meet with Ahmadinejad!!”
~giggle~
The interview on Here & Now ( http://www.here-now.org/ ) today with Fawaz Gerges, professor of International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is worth listening to. It will be available in ~ 30 mins. Plenty of fodder for remaining objectively critical of Bush’s failed foreign policies.
Here’s my guess at the audio URL: http://realserver.bu.edu:8080/ramgen/w/b/wbur/herenow/2008/05/hn_0522.rm

Perhaps Richardson and Ms. McGinty missed the newsflash from Time’s Joe Klien the other day. He confronted McCain with the fact that Obama NEVER said that he would meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It would be quite pointless since Ahmadinejad HAS NO REAL power in Iran and is simply a figure head. What Obama did say is that he would hold discussions with “leaders” in Iran, which is also what Sec of Defense Robert Gates and many others agree with.
The fact that everyone is fixated on Ahmadinejad, since he is an appropriate boogie man, is not consistent with what Obama actually said and shows that it is more important to some to whip everyone into frenzy without having any understanding of what the reality of world politics are.
That is how we ended up in Iraq on bogus information. I would hope that the more of the media would do a better job at pointing out the factual error of these arguments and that someone like McCain, who wants to be president, would have a better understanding of who the actual leaders of countries are and not perpetuate a misunderstanding because it suits his political argument.
See for yourself –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr6Va7PEBg8

I could have voted for Richardson, not only did he have executive experience, but some foreign policy chops and he was more centrist. Of course, that meant he had no shot in the primaries with the radical Democrats in charge.

Richardson got the “tacky person of the year” award for endorsing Obama so quickly, as far as I’m concerned. Whatever his strengths, loyalty doesn’t seem to be one of them.
Yes, I know, he’s a politician. But at least he could have had the decency to wait until summer to throw his endorsement behind the presumptive nominee. It just seemed like he was angling for the Veep spot, and like I said, I really hope he doesn’t get it.

do you hope he doesn’t get it because he’s not qualified, or because you believe that he slighted your favorite for the democratic nominee?
i happen to think that richardson is a good leader with a lot of foreign policy experience. unfortunately, i really doubt that having 2 minority races (or having a minority and a woman for that matter) filling the ticket would ever get off of the ground in this country… this primary has made it pretty clear that there are enough people who aren’t willing to have a minority and enough people who aren’t willing to give a woman a chance, put the 2 groups together and it’s a republican wet dream.
i see clinton’s and obama’s positions on the issues to be very similar. there’s also little difference in their experience (face it, to say that hillary’s experience as first lady alone qualifies her to be president, then the scary conclusion is that laura bush could be next – FRIGHTENING). the thing that hillary has in her court is bill’s experience with diplomacy. either one would certainly shore up their shortcomings with their choices for cabinet positions. their policies are worlds apart from the bush/mccain policies, and it will be either clinton or obama running against mccain. for that reason, i will wholeheartedly support whoever wins the democratic primary.

Anyone but that two-faced opportunist.
Wow, you support the Clinton campaign and disqualify someone for being an opportunist who betrays people? Are you serious?

… like mccain betraying his first wife? who do you support mr. taylor? alicia is free to choose the candidate she believes will do the best job, be it clinton, mccain or obama and do so based on her own criteria. none of them are perfect.