Redstate

You know, it never ceases to amaze me the amount of arrogance displayed by today's pols, as they bold-facedly deny having ever made statements that they made on film not long before.

I guess that hubris is played into by the fact that the MSM seems to have a mental block on the part of their collective brain that would tell them to go look at the tape when someone denies or radically changes positions in a comment, speech, or interview.

The 24-hr, ADD media we have today has clearly forgotten that those archive rooms in their studios are, you know, full of usable and researchable archives.

Yeah, I know. Research? What's that? After all, even Professors at prestigious universities don't have to do that in their publishing any longer.

Under the Issues\Foreign Policy section of Obama's campaign website, he says this:

Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions[boldface mine]. Now is the time to pressure Iran directly to change their troubling behavior.
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/foreignpolicy/

I'm less amazed that Obama is lying than I am about the way this is "reported." There's no reporting about it. It was a darn Obama-advocacy article.

I guess I'm not really amazed, but, well, really I am a little amazed.

The article was a postmortem on the Kerry campaign. In it, the reporter asked Kerry's staff why it took so long for them to respond to the SwiftBoat Vets. Their response: they had been confident the MSM would ignore them.

Some of that thinking must have trickled over to the Obama campaign. Dr. Rice must be thinking that the MSM will let her attempt to sanitize Obama's past on this issue go unchallenged.

Perhaps they will. But we won't.

"Who will stand/On either hand/And guard this bridge with me?" (Macaulay)

this.

I expect politicians to lie about what they've said. Some of them are just less artful about it ("I actually voted FOR the bill before I voted against it." vs. "I'll enforce the borders before we proceed with comprehensive immigration reform.") I judge by actions not by words, and when there aren't any actions your words are meaningless to me (granted, that's still better than being contradictory, but worth about a warm bucket of spit none the less).

And I've never really been overly concerned that Obama was willing to sit down and talk with anybody without preconditions, by which I assume he means preconditions relating to changes of a nation's policies as opposed to security preconditions for the meeting. Reagan was willing to sit down and talk to some pretty vile people if getting the job done required it.

Now, what I CAN get worked up about is what I expect Obama will do AFTER he sits down at the table. I expect him to go into full Jimmy Carter 2.0 mode and complete bullox up not only what Reagan fixed, but also what Carter managed not break the first time around. Reagan was smart enough, and probably more important, courageous enough to walk away from the table when the deal was bad. Obama wasn't even brave enough to face down his racist pastor. If Obama was willing to tell the kook from Iran he's got 24 hours to pull Hezbollah back or we start bombing, I'd have no problem with him being willing to sit down and talk with no preconditions.