Who does al Queda support for president? Who knows?

Some people are trying to attach significance to the fact that various Islamist nutjobs purport to support one or the other candidates for U.S. president this year. McCain was stupid to try to capitalize on Hamas’s endorsement of Obama, which really put him on the spot when it was reported this week that an extremist website favored McCain.

The most sensible commentary on this comes from the always clear-eyed Melanie Philips, in a Guardian column entitled, “Is America Really Going to Do This?” Writes Phillips:

Personally, I don’t give any credence to the ‘support’ for one candidate over the other that has been expressed by the enemies of civilisation (Iran and Hamas ‘support’ Obama, while an al Qaeda blogger ‘supports’ McCain). Their agenda is simply to sow confusion and promote American recriminations and disarray.

That said, the endorsements, if taken at face value, make sense. Hamas endorsed Obama because they think he will “change” America and the see his pledge of security to Israel as mere election year posturing. The al Qaeda dude says he likes McCain because McCain will keep America in a drawn-out war that will wear the country down.

I think they’re both right, but only partially. Obama won’t abandon Israel outright, but he certainly sees it as little better than its neighbors (enough to disqualify him as president, in my opinion — someone with a moral sense that warped has no business in the white house). And McCain will not retreat, but that doesn’t mean the war will bankrupt the country.