Now We Love Him, Now We Don't

Andrew McCarthy at NRO Online documents the policy flexibility of the U.S. Senate's Three Amigos - John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham. They were for arming Qaddafi before they were for killing him. Read his article here.

Here's the gist of it:

It was only a short time ago, in mid-August 2009, that Senators McCain, Lieberman, and Graham, along with another transnational progressive moderate, Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine), paid a visit to Qaddafi’s Tripoli compound. If they seem to have amnesia about it now, perhaps that’s because the main item on the agenda was their support for the Obama administration’s offer of military aid to the same thug the senators now want gone yesterday.

A government cable (leaked by Wikileaks) memorializes the excruciating details of meetings between the Senate delegation and Qaddafi, along with his son Mutassim, Libya’s “national security adviser.” We find McCain and Graham promising to use their influence to push along Libya’s requests for C-130 military aircraft, among other armaments, and civilian nuclear assistance. And there’s Lieberman gushing, “We never would have guessed ten years ago that we would be sitting in Tripoli, being welcomed by a son of Muammar al-Qadhafi.” That’s before he opined that Libya had become “an important ally in the war on terrorism,” and that “common enemies sometimes make better friends.”

WikiLeaks strikes again. Those leaked cables are going to do for foreign policy what YouTube did for elective politics. They make it awkward to take radically different positions on the same issue.

Warning!! Warning !! Warning!!

NOT SAFE FOR WORK

That Wikileaks cable is here if you dare to view it. But do so only on a non-government computer.