If the bad guys could vote.....

October 22, 2008
If the bad guys could vote.....
Posted by Warren Strobel
McClatchy Blog

National security policy, which has been somewhat dormant in the U.S. presidential campaign recently thanks to the financial meltdown, has reared its head again. And true to the tenor of the campaign in its closing days, the arguments are getting ugly.

First came Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden's remark, at a Sunday fundrasier, that a President Barack Obama would be tested by U.S. adversaries early in his tenure. "Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy," Biden said, in remarks that undoubtedly did little to endear himself with the man at the top of the ticket.

Republicans gleefully seized on the remark, and pointed to what they see as one of GOP nominee John McCain's top selling points, his foreign policy experience.

At a news conference in Richmond today, Obama said of his running mate: "Joe sometimes engages in rhetorical flourishes." He went on: "A period of transition to a new administration is always one in which we have to be vigilant .. We have to be careful, we have to be mindful that as we pass the baton in this democracy, that others don't take advantage of it. That is true whether it's myself or Senator McCain."

But compared to the next installment, that was just child's play.

This morning, the Washington Post reported that al Qaida-related Web sites were not only trumpeting the U.S. financial crisis, but that at least one poster had suggested that a McCain win would be good for the terrorist network, because the Republican would further expand U.S. military commitments, exhausting America.

The McCain-Palin campaign sensed a problem. Or an opportunity. Or both. What did they do? Schedule a conference call with reporters for this morning, naturally. On the line were former CIA DIrector James Woolsey and McCain senior foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann. (Being from McClatchy, we can't help but note that both men were major figures in the invade-Iraq crowd right after 9/11. Woolsey, as we were the first to report, went to the United Kingdom weeks after the attacks, on a trip arranged by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, in search of evidence that Iraq has been behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a theory long discredited by the FBI and CIA).

While Scheunemann lambasted the Post article, and its headline, Woolsey took a different task, suggesting that if terrorists were endorsing McCain, it was because they wanted to hurt him. "This individial (blogger) knows that the endorsement of people like him is a kiss of death, figuratively and literally, so it seems to me it's pretty clear that by making this statement ... he is clearly trying to damage John McCain, not speaking from his heart."

Scheunemann tried a different tack, reading quotes from a virtual rogue's gallery of Middle Eastern bad-guys who have said nice things about Biden and Obama. They included a spokesman for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, Ahmed Yousef; Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who merely said: "We do prefer to have relations (with the United States) whereas one of the candidates in this election would prefer that"); and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. (Last we checked, Qaddafi's country is off the State Department's list of terrorist-sponsoring states, and was visited by none other than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently).

Scheunemann drew a line at declaring that the terrorists support Obama for president. "I am not going to characterize (the remarks), I will let others judge whether they amount to expression of support or opposition, whether they amount to expressions of endorsement or opposition," he said.

Asked directly whether he was saying that al Qaida would like to see Obama elected, Scheunemann demurred. "I'm not saying that at all," he said, adding that if Obama's preferrred policies in Iraq had been followed, al Qaida in Iraq (which is not the same as bin Laden's al Qaida) would be celebrating.

Here's a link to the audio of the conference call.
http://blip.tv/file/1386036

This is what passes for a serious national security and foreign policy debate in the campaign, these days.

OK, back to the economy and today's 514-point Dow Jones drop...