Speaking in Jerusalem, President Bush has condemned proposals to negotiate with Hamas, Iran, and any other group associated with terrorism. Invoking analogies to appeasement of Hitler, the President remarks injected himself abruptly into the 2008 election season where no member of his administration is a candidate. In response, DNC Chair Howard Dean demanded that Senator John McCain repudiate the President for having taken a partisan position while overseas.

This is ridiculous. There is an important debate to be had and both partisan sides bear responsibility for twisting it into nothing more than cheap opportunism.

The beginning of the problem lies with bald misrepresentation on both sides. President Bush starts the falsehood parade with his claim that supporters of negotiation believe that “some ingenious argument will persuade them that they have been wrong all along”. No one is so naive as to advocate that. Negotiations serve to clarify positions, identify limited areas of common interests, and explore the possibility of limited accommodations compatible with both sides’ interests. No serious analyst believes that negotiations can serve to dramatically alter what those interests are. After 7 years of experience with complex negotiations processes in North Korea overseen by his own State Department, President Bush certainly knows that “negotiations” are not the magic-wand caricature he is using for rhetorical effect in Jerusalem.  It is not helpful to begin a debate by stating a fundamental misrepresentation and caricature of the other side.

President Bush’s misrepresentation is matched, however, by the partisan obfuscation and selective memory of Howard Dean. Dean’s claim that politics should stop at the water’s edge is laughable in an age where his party daily demonizes the President for every imaginable foreign policy position and even purely made-up scenarios. And Dean’s silence in regards to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s explicitly anti-Bush visit to Syria last year makes his sudden concern for partisanship while overseas look nothing less than ludicrous. Furthermore, Dean’s demand that McCain repudiate something that neither he nor any member of his campaign said is an unfortunate extension of a dishonest practice that has become routine from Democratic campaigns as they seek to link anything and everything Bush to their Republican opponents without regard to whether those Republican opponents actually even heard about it beforehand.

The debate about whether and, more precisely, where negotiations might be productive is essential to have, given the overextension of American military forces and their counterproductive quality to many situations. That debate is impossible to have, however, if every statement and criticism immediately is seized upon as an excuse to demand an apology. If debating issues is deemed offensive by default, we will have no one but ourselves to blame when we elect candidates on purely trivial grounds.