Prometheus 6

McCain, meanwhile, is guilty of hypocrisy. I am a supporter of Hillary Clinton and believe that she was right to say, about McCain's statement on Hamas, "I don't think that anybody should take that seriously." Unfortunately, the Republicans know that some people will. That's why they say such things.

But given his own position on Hamas, McCain is the last politician who should be attacking Obama.

Not only is this correct, it is a smart thing to say in just this way.

I've seen a bunch of "now is not the time for Obama supporters to gloat." What I haven't seen is "now is not the time for Clinton supporters to issue excessive bitchitude. Not that you want them to vanish. What you want is what Mr. Rubin just brought...calm support for Obama using Hillary's words, from self-declared Hillary supporters.

Um, don't push that self declared part too long though, okay? Your politics are all conceptual anyway, so you can acknowledge that division so hard that it becomes a permanent feature. You don't want to do that. 

Anyway, let's look at what Mr. Rubin is talking about.

Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News's "World News Tonight" program. Here is the crucial part of our exchange:

I asked: "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 answered: "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."

For some Europeans in Davos, Switzerland, where the interview took place, that's a perfectly reasonable answer. But it is an unusual if not unique response for an American politician from either party. And it is most certainly not how the newly conservative presumptive Republican nominee would reply today.

Given the number of positions McCain changed simultaneously, I think Mitt Romney would be a hilarious veep choice for McCain. It would be like one of those fantasy novel war scenes, where the warrior blocks a flight of arrows with a nearby corpse. It will confuse us..."No, I didn't flip-flop, that was Mitt. You got us mixed up again."

It seems all of McCain's current positions were expediently assumed.