Tonight, Fox News’ Hannity and Colmes did a segment about the supposed “fall out” over Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) minister’s connections to Rev. Louis Farrakhan. During an interview with Rev. Al Sharpton, Sean Hannity argued that Obama should distance himself from his minister and denounce his associations with Farrakhan.

But when Sharpton challenged Hannity to similarly condemn the anti-Semitic statements of Rev. Billy Graham, Hannity claimed to have no knowledge of Graham’s anti-Semitic past and warmly praised the minister.

Despite Hannity’s ignorance, Graham’s anti-Semitic comments were widely publicized in 2002, after the National Archives released transcripts of conversations between Graham and President Richard Nixon. Graham, who has since publically apologized for his remarks, made the following statements during a 1972 meeting in the Oval Office:

GRAHAM: This [Jewish] stranglehold [on the media] has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.

NIXON: You believe that?

GRAHAM: Yes, sir.

NIXON: Oh, boy. So do I. I can’t ever say that, but I believe it.

GRAHAM: No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something.

[…]

GRAHAM: A lot of Jews are great friends of mine, but they don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.

Hannity’s selective disgust with anti-Semitism exposes his true motives. His charges are part of an orchestrated conservative smear campaign designed to portray Obama as a radical. In reality, Obama has repeatedly denounced Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic remarks and has said that he sometimes disagreed with his minister.

Even Dick Morris, who appeared after Sharpton, criticized Hannity for trying to smear Obama with “guilt by association.” But Hannity remained undeterred, arguing that his attacks against Obama would allow the McCain campaign to focus on the issues and “stay away from this other stuff.”

According to an advanced manuscript of former undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith’s upcoming book, War and Decision, President Bush decided that war with Iraq was “inevitable” on December 18, 2002,”weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.”

Feith’s revelation contradicts the president’s public statements. Throughout late 2002 and early 2003, Bush repeatedly claimed that “every measure has been taken to avoid war” and that by disarming and complying with UN Resolution 1441, Saddam Hussein can avoid war.

December 31, 2002: “I hope this Iraq situation will be resolved peacefully. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to work to deal with these situations in a way so that they’re resolved peacefully….I hope we’re not headed to war in Iraq. I’m the person who gets to decide, not you. I hope this can be done peacefully.”

January 2, 2003: “First of all, you know, I’m hopeful we won’t have to go war, and let’s leave it at that.”

February 10, 2003: “But Saddam Hussein is—he’s treated the demands of the world as a joke up to now, and it was his choice to make…He’s the person who gets to decide war and peace.”

March 6, 2003: “Hopefully, this can be done peacefully…I want to remind you that it’s his choice to make as to whether or not we go to war. It’s Saddam’s choice. He’s the person that can make the choice of war and peace.”

March 8, 2003: “We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force.”

March 17, 2003: “Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war, and every measure will be taken to win it.”

Feith’s claim also supports earlier press reports and accounts which dated Bush’s decision to invade Iraq to early 2003. In his book Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward claims that in January 2003 Bush told then Secretary of State Colin Powell that “The inspections are not getting us there…. I really think I’m going to have to do this.” Similarly, on February 23, 2003, Bush reportedly told Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar that “we have to get rid of Saddam.”

Earlier today, during a campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that he would not consider Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) for the VP slot, despite being offered the position on Kerry’s ticket in 2004.

After the event, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller confronted McCain with a May 2004 New York Times story in which McCain denied ever meeting with Kerry to discuss a joint ticket.

In a testy exchange, McCain questioned Bumiller’s source and denied ever considering Kerry’s offer.

Everybody knows that I had a private conversation. Everybody knows that, that I had a conversation….And you know it, too. No. You know it, too. No. You do know. You do know…John Kerry asked if I would consider being his running mate and I said categorically no, under no circumstances. That’s all very well known.”

Watch it:

- “Asked if Senator Kerry had made such an offer, Mr. McCain said no without hesitation. But asked if the two men had ever discussed it, even casually, he paused for a moment.” ”No,” he said finally. ”We really haven’t.” [NYT, May 15, 2004].

- During an interview with Fox News Radio’s The Tony Snow Show, McCain claimed that Kerry “never offered” him the VP slot. [Fox News, July 8, 2004]

The media’s constructed image of McCain as a straight talkin’ maverick is looking thinner than ever.

Answering a question about the U.S. relationship with Cuba in the aftermath of Fidel Castro during today’s press conference, President Bush equated Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL)”willingness to talk with foreign leaders (both allied and adversarial) to ‘embracing’ tyrants.”

Sitting down at the table — having your picture taken with a tyrant such as Raul Castro, for example, lends the status of the office and the status of our country to him. He gains a lot from it by saying, ‘look at me, I’m now recognized by the President of the United States.’ Now, somebody will say, well, I’m going to tell him to release the prisoners.

Well, it’s a theory that all you got to do is embrace and these tyrants act. That’s not how they act. That’s not what causes them to respond. So I made a decision quite the opposite, and that is to keep saying to the Cuba books people, we stand with you. We will not sit down with your leaders that imprison your people because of what they believe. We will keep an embargo on you. We do want you to have money from people here in the homeland, but we will stay insistent upon this policy until you begin to get free.”

By Bush’s own logic, he himself has repeatedly ‘embraced tyrants.’ During a recent trip to the Middle East, Bush awarded Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, all of which received a “not free” or “partly free” rating from a recently released Freedom House report, with a $20 billion arms deal and avoided publicly criticizing the regimes’ poor political rights and civil liberties records.

In fact, according to a recent report in ‘Arms Control Today,’ a publication of the Arms Control Association “in the last six years, Washington has stepped up its sales and transfers of high-technology weapons, military training, and other military assistance” to tyrannical governments. “All that matters is that they have pledged their assistance in the global war on terrorism.”

Noting that U.S. aid is growing “at the same time as human rights conditions are worsening,” Stohl cites the example of Ethiopia, “which is carrying out a brutal counterinsurgency campaign within its own borders” and Nepal, whose security forces “opened fire on peaceful strikers and anti-government demonstrations.” Bush is also funneling millions into Uzbekistan, where thousands of Muslims have been imprisoned without due process and many tortured to death.

[…]

CDI documented U.S. aid in foreign military, and direct commercial, sales to the 25 soared 400% over the five years prior to 9/11. This despite a 2006 U.S. State Department finding of “serious,” “grave,” or “significant” abuses committed by them against their own citizens.

Below are some pictures of President Bush embracing tyrants.

President Bush with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia

President Bush and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. On the far left sits Prince Abdullah Bin Abd Al Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and on the far right sits King Hamad Bin Issa Al Khalifa of Bahrain.

President Bush and President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan.

President Bush and Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethopia.

After President Bush’s recent trip to the Middle East, many analysts criticized Bush for failing to live up to his pro-democracy rhetoric. Bush spoke of the importance of freedom in the Middle East, but he praised autocratic Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and didn’t meet with “one Saudi dissident or political activist, much less a democrat.”

Today in Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2008, HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth argues that Bush’s disingenuous freedom rhetoric has retarded the global spread of democracy. Rather than “support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture” — as Bush promised to do in his second inauguration address– Bush’s policies have convinced “autocrats that mere elections, regardless of the circumstances, are sufficient to warrant the democrat label.”

In a troubling parallel to abusive governments around the world, the US government has embraced democracy promotion as a softer and fuzzier alternative to defending human rights… As such unworthy claimants as the leaders of Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria wrap themselves in the democracy mantle with scant international objection, the concept of democracy gets cheapened, its human rights component cast aside.

The report also found that the administration’s efforts to rationalize “the invasion of Iraq in terms of democracy promotion,” has also emboldened autocrats “to equate pressure on them to democratize with an imperial, militarist agenda.”

Dictators have learned that conjuring up visions of Iraq can be a useful way to blunt pressure to democratize. And governments that might have defended a more robust vision of democracy are reluctant to do so for fear of being seen as joining the Bush agenda.

Roth argues that “to prevent the appeal of ‘democracy’ from being abused,”there is an “urgent need to reclaim the full meaning of the democratic ideal. Beyond elections, democracies must contain “a meaningful array of political parties, independent media outlets, civil society organizations that give citizens—including minorities—a broad range of opportunities to band together with others to make their voices heard, and a legal system that ensures that no one—and especially no government official—is above the law.” Bush should take note.