President Bush's slander of Barack Obama as a terrorism appeaser would have been bad enough in any circumstance or venue. His carefully selected context — a visit to Israel on its 60th anniversary and an address to the Knesset — gave a particularly acrid odor to the affair.

For the president's target audience was neither Israelis nor their legislators. It was American voters and very particularly Jewish-Americans. To that end, the president hijacked Israel's national day and kidnapped the Knesset's members as props for his own partisan politicking.

And to boot, the White House lied about the event.

At the time, aides were telling any reporter who asked that the unspoken subject of Bush's comment was Obama. Later, they denied that and then decided the target had been former president Jimmy Carter, who had met with leaders of the terrorist Hamas — four weeks earlier.

The peg for the president's comments was Obama's oft-stated willingness to meet with the leaders of antagonist nations without preconditions to explore whether there might be mutual interests that could fruitfully be pursued.

Bush's stance has been to meet or negotiate with no leader who hasn't agreed with him in advance. Stubbornly following his own advice, Bush has thus left himself with only war or futile griping as responses to Iran's dangerous and growing influence in the Mideast.

To serve his habitual fear-mongering, Bush equated Obama's position with a supposed willingness on his part to truckle to terrorists, although the Democrat has specifically rejected the idea of any dealings with Hamas and Hezbollah.

Particularly noxious was the president's invocation of the appeasement of Adolf Hitler before World War II as somehow relevant.

That appeasement had nothing to do with mere talking. Britain and France ceded a large chunk of Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1938, hoping to slake Hitler's lust for territory but, in fact, only whetting it.

Nothing remotely like that is on the table now, any table or anywhere near one.

By raising the Hitler apparition and doing so in Israel and within days of Yom HaShoah, the annual lamentation for the Holocaust, Bush made himself party to the thoroughly disreputable campaign that is under way to cast Obama, contrary to his voting record and years of his commentary, as a secret enemy of Israel.

That campaign is viral on the internet, and at its extremes — and there is very little to the campaign but extremes — has Obama as a secret Muslim, a sleeper jihadist, even a cat's paw abroad for the political leanings of distant cousins in Kenya.

The issue of when to talk and to which leaders and under what circumstances is legitimate, though it is being argued only shallowly by Obama and John McCain alike. In any event, whichever becomes president, it is likely to be settled by events later rather than by campaign poses now.

George W. Bush first ran for the presidency promising dignity in the White House. Going overseas to play underhanded partisan politics at home doesn't seem to fit.

— Tom Teepen writes for Cox Newspapers. His e-mail address is teepencolumn@earthlink.net.