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:

But in March 2004, McCain seemed to ‘entertain’ the possibility of running on the Democratic ticket. Speaking with ABC’s Charles Gibson McCain said, “John Kerry is a very close friend of mine, and we’ve been friends for years. Obviously I would entertain it…”Watch it:

Moreover, on at least two occasions, in May and July of 2004, McCain denied discussing a possible VP run with Kerry.

- “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.

During tonight’s State of the Union address, President Bush falsely suggested that the Iraq war has made America safer.

My fellow Americans: We will not rest either. We will not rest until this enemy has been defeated. We must do the difficult work today, so that years from now people will look back and say that this generation rose to the moment, prevailed in a tough fight, and left behind a more hopeful region and a safer America.

In reality, “the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.” According to the National Intelligence Estimate:

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

In tonight’s State of the Union address, President Bush misrepresented the housing crisis in New Orleans.

Tonight the armies of compassion continue the march to a new day in the Gulf Coast. America honors the strength and resilience of the people of this region. We reaffirm our pledge to help them build stronger and better than before.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed “nearly 41,000 inexpensive rentals.” Since then, the city of New Orleans began demolishing “4,500 units of public housing, making way for mixed-income neighborhoods with only 800 units of public housing, an 82% reduction in size.”

The city is facing an acute housing shortage. Rents have almost doubled since before the storm. But HUD, the federal housing authority, is pressing ahead with the demolition. 50% of families who want to but are unable to return to New Orleans make less than $20,000 a year.

Today’s New York Times offers anecdotal evidence of how former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani went to extraordinary lengths “to punish anyone, vindictively and aggressively” for criticizing him or his administration.

As mayor, he made the vengeful roundhouse an instrument of government, clipping anyone who crossed him…“There were constant loyalty tests: ‘Will you shoot your brother?’ ” said Marilyn Gelber, who served as environmental commissioner under Mr. Giuliani. “People were marked for destruction for disloyal jokes.”… He cowed many into silence.

Giuliani’s strong dismissal of critical opinion, and emphasis on loyalty is reminiscent of the ways in which President Bush politicized every aspect of the federal government, with devastating consequences. Giuliani should take note: the Bush administration revealed that “potential disaster lurks behind what we had previously assumed to be a grand virtue: loyalty.” Below is a partial list (compiled by fellow ThinkProgress interns and BodyPolitik contributors Ona Keller and Jordan Grossman) “of the White House’s efforts to politicize the federal agencies“:

- Department of Justice: “After the 2004 election, administration officials quietly began drawing up a list of US attorneys to replace. Considerations included their perceived loyalty to Bush and a desire by White House political adviser Karl Rove to increase voter fraud prosecutions, documents and testimony have shown.” [Boston Globe, 5/6/07]

- Interior Department: “A midlevel Interior Department official” received a “phone call from [Vice President Dick] Cheney in 2001, setting in motion a secret move to undermine the science of federal biologists who had said diverting water from the Klamath would violate the Endangered Species Act and devastate two imperiled species of fish.” [The Oregonian, 6/30/07]

- Defense Department: “The Defense Department…has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.” [MSNBC, 9/14/05]

- Office of the Surgeon General: “The first U.S. surgeon general appointed by President George W. Bush accused the administration on Tuesday of political interference and muzzling him on key issues like embryonic stem cell research.” [Reuters, 7/10/07]

Like Giuliani, the Bush administration regularly dismissed dissenting opinion (anyone from former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil, to General Eric Shinseki, to the NIE on Iran) and stacked the ranks with ideological loyalists. These moves stifled decision making and landed the United States in an unpopular war and left the American people asking for change. If the New York Times article about Giuliani’s loyalty tests is any indication of how the former mayor will govern as president, Americans can expect more of the same from a Giuliani White House.

Did Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) flip-flop on healthcare? During last night’s fiery debate, Obama claimed that “I never said that we should try to go ahead and get single payer. What I said was that if I were starting from scratch, if we didn’t have a system in which employers had typically provided health care, I would probably go with a single-payer system.”

Today, the Clinton campaign released a 2003 video of Obama in which the senator sounds like a proponent of a single-payer system. “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal healthcare coverage… I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world is spending 14%, 14% of its gross national product on healthcare, cannot provide basic healthcare insurance to everybody…. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. And as all of you know, we may not get their immediately.”

Still, it is unclear if Obama ever believed that single-payer was politically feasible. One would have to read a full transcript of his comments; Clinton’s abridged video, which ends in mid-speech, may have cut the nuance. (For the record, the Obama campaign still maintains that he has been consistent. In fact, Obama makes the feasibility argument in a 2007 speech posted on Clinton’s YouTube page.)

But if he did support single-payer, Obama could argue that, like Clinton’s, his views on healthcare have matured. In fact, Clinton openly admits that her current plan is different than her 1994 proposal and even maintains that her ‘evolution’ on healthcare is “invaluable preparation for dealing with the problems in the health care system today.” From the New York Times:

But now, as Mrs. Clinton heads into her re-election campaign and a possible bid for the presidency, she is trying to recast the political disaster of 1994 as something else: as a badge of honor, as a symbol of lessons learned and, perhaps most significant, as invaluable preparation for dealing with the problems in the health care system today…

Mrs. Clinton’s approach to health care is strikingly different this time around, a measure of her evolution from an impatient agent of change to a cautious senator — and potential presidential contender — keenly attuned to the political center.

The consequences of the Bush administration’s stubbornness and political inflexibility should dissuade voters from supporting candidates who are unwilling to adapt their policies to circumstance. In this context, Clinton’s attacks echo the Republican talking points of the 2004 election. The Democrats should stop their bickering and engage in a substantive policy debate about single-payer healthcare.

In today’s New York Times, reporters David Kirkpatrick and Michael Powell erroneously characterize Mike Huckabee–who believes that his candidacy is divinely inspired– as a moderately religious politician who walks a fine line between “pulpit and podium.”

For the most part, Kirkpatrick and Powell ignore Huckabee’s numerous attempts to blend personal religious conviction with public policy and quote evangelical sources who marvel at Huckabee’s ability to downplay the role of religion in his conception of government.

Some evangelical observers say they marvel at Mr. Huckabee’s knack for making even the most conservative tenets of orthodox Southern Baptist faith, about creation, the accuracy of the Bible or gender roles, sound downright moderate when he is speaking in television interviews or at public debates.

Kirkpatrick and Powell also fail to correct the record about Huckabee’s disingenuous explanation for why he signed his name to a 1998 Southern Baptist Convention statement which suggested that a wife is subordinate to her husband. Huckabee has argued that “‘the position required no subordination at all.’ It meant, he said, both husbands and wives ‘mutually showing their affection and submission as unto the Lord.’”

But according to Richard Land, president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, “the statement says that while the husband and wife are equal before God, ‘the wife does not get veto power over the husband’s decision.’

“Somebody has to be in charge,” Land explained. “The Bible says the husband is in charge.” While the husband should “solicit his wife’s views,” ultimately “he is going to make the decision.” The reason, Land said, is that Southern Baptists believe that “God holds the husband accountable for the household.”

In their article, Kirkpatrick and Powell reprint Huckabee’s dodge and quote an evangelical leader who called Huckabee’s explanation “masterful.”

The two reporters also assert, rather ironically, that Huckabee “has indeed made an art of escaping politically delicate questions about theology.” In reality, by downplaying Huckabee’s strong religious convictions and his views about the role of religion in public life, Kirkpatrick and Powell misrepresent Huckabee as a more moderate politician. The former governor has often crossed the line between “pulpit and podium.”

Consider the following:

- In an interview with Beliefnet.com, Huckabee “clarified his view that the Constitution should be amended to be brought in line with God’s will — and he directly equated homosexuality with bestiality.”

- Huckabee has close connections to Christian Reconstructionists.

- In in Des Moines, Huckabee told bloggers who supported his candidacy that they were “doing the Lord’s work.”

- “At a Republican Governors Association Dinner speech in 2004, Huckabee had a mock three-minute telephone conversation with God. During that time, Huckabee said that “we kind of think you’d hang in there with us, Lord, we really do.”

- “In 1997, Huckabee claimed that Jesus would have agreed with him on supporting the death penalty.”