Is There A Bizarro White House?

(Many thanks to Soccer Dad for linking to this post)

In a previous post ("Bush and Abbas"), I wrote about Thursday's meeting--Abbas' demands and Bush's expressed confidence in Abbas. What was said at the press conference after their meeting was bewildering at the very least.

But that was at the Bizarro White House.

The reality is what happened in the actual meeting. According to DEBKAfile, Bush laid down the law when speaking privately with Abbas.

The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas did not get much chance to lay down his usual list of demands and gripes in his talks at the White House with US president George W. Bush Thursday, Oct. 20. Instead, in contrast to the jovial mood of their joint news conference, Bush crushed his visitor’s hopes of a Palestinian state in the foreseeable future. “Not during my term,” the president declared firmly, according to DEBKAfile’s Exclusive sources Washington.

Abu Mazen is described as coming out of the meeting pale and shaken, with nothing to show for his Washington trip. Most of their 45-minute conversation was one-sided. Bush scarcely let Abu Mazen get a word in edgeways, cutting him short several times.

According to our sources, the US president laid down a new set of rules, unfamiliar to the Palestinians. In a word, no one will help the Palestinians if they don’t help themselves – and that goes for me, the US President, too. If you think you can disarm Hamas by letting them take part in elections, go ahead, but you are on your own. We think you are making a big mistake, but we don’t interfere. But there is a price to pay. A regime dominated by terrorists cannot expected to be treated as a democracy.

The New York Sun does confirm what Bush said about Hamas:

President Bush yesterday privately told his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, that while it was up to him as to whether terrorist groups could participate in upcoming municipal and parliamentary elections, America would have no contact with terrorists in his future government.

[Update 10/26: Arutz Sheva reports:An Israeli government official acknowledges failure in the attempts to persuade the United States to prevent Hamas from participating in the upcoming PA election... "From Israel's standpoint," the official told Arutz-7's Haggai Huberman, "this is a negative result of the Bush-Abbas meeting." Israel is apparently either not taking seriously the report that Bush told Abbas that the US would not deal with terrorists in the government, or perhaps feels the dangers of the inclusion of Hamas outweighs Bush's claim that the US won't deal with Abbas' government]

That would be more than a warning--it's the law:

Under U.S. law, Washington would be unable to deal with any foreign
government controlled by groups deemed by the State Department to be
terrorists.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been designated terrorist organizations, and
the former intends to run in elections for the Palestinian Legislative
Council in January 2006.

"Hamas has already been in government in the Palestinian Authority," Welch
said. "Under American law, we can't deal with them. I don't see that law
changing after January."

There is more that Debka claims happened between Bush and Abbas before the press conference. But is it possible there is a Bizarro White House?

Clearly the US president has taken several steps back from his first concept of Palestinian statehood as a top American policy goal. He is leaving it to the Palestinians to make the running. For the first time, they have been put clearly and firmly on notice that as long as they harbor terrorists, they can forget about attaining their own state.

Could be.

Of course, maybe that was at the Bizarro White House and the press conference was the reality...

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