For more than a month now, John McCain has been blasting Barack Obama for his alleged “endorsement” by Hamas and for his willingness to, as future ex-President GWB phrased it the other day in his speech to the Israeli Knesset, “negotiate with terrorists.”

Today James P. Rubin, a journalist who interviewed McCain in 2006 shortly after Hamas’s triumph in Palestinian parliamentary elections, writes in the Washington Post that McCain then advocated a position very like the one he’s now skewering Obama for touting.

Rubin reprints the text of the 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.”

 

And here’s the video.

James P. Rubin interviews John McCain on Hamas, 2006 (Sky News/UK) (:40)