I completely concur with John. The President’s speech was a beautiful, eloquent address celebrating the birth of the Jewish state. Here is the offending passage:

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is–the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

Obama’s faux anger in reaction to Bush’s speech is ludicrous. For one thing, the President did not even mention Senator Obama in his speech. What the President was rebutting was a (fairly prevalent) cast of mind, one which is shared by Obama but by many others–including Jimmy Carter, who just returned from the region, as well as a people serving in Bush’s own State Department.

For Obama’s communications director to call the President’s remarks an “unprecedented political attack on foreign soil” is utter nonsense. More than that, though, Obama’s reaction is exactly the kind of “distraction” that he constantly complains about–even when the issues raised are legitimate ones to discuss (like his association with the Reverend Wright). To take a serious address like the one President Bush delivered in Israel today and shoehorn it into a campaign is exactly the kind of thing that drags down political discourse in America–and is the opposite of what Obama claims to represent.

With every passing week, it seems, the gap between what Obama says he is and how he acts is widening. His campaign’s latest attack looks contrived, petty, and stupid–unworthy even of our “old politics.”