John McCain, rewriting history:

“I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.’’

Actually, Senator, not only did Reagan negotiate with Iran, he sold them weapons. He sold them weapons after it was known that Iran was responsible for bombing the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American soldiers. All of this came to light in a little flap called the Iran-Contra scandal; perhaps you’ve heard of it?

You know who else Ronald Reagan negotiated with? Iraq. In fact, there’s that famous picture of special envoy Donald Rumsfeld, appointed by Reagan himself, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein:

This friendly meeting happened after the Reagan administration found out that Hussein ordered chemical weapons to be used against both the Iranians and the Kurds.

So it was okay for Ronald Reagan–the patron saint of modern conservatism–to negotiate with and sell weapons to rogue states, yet it’s not okay for Barack Obama to support simply talking to those same states? What kind of upside-down bizarro world do John McCain and his Republican Party live in?

UPDATE: Then there’s this:

RUBIN: “Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?”

McCAIN: “They’re the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it’s a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.“

[Emphasis Added]

So, as late as 2006, John McCain supported diplomacy with Hamas, which Barack Obama opposes.  Does that mean McCain is more of an ‘appeaser’ than Obama? Or does that just mean that all this talk about ‘appeasement’ is nothing more than right-wing theatre, carried out by Republicans who have no good arguments left to make on foreign policy?

Something tells me it’s the latter.