I'm not necessarily interested in wading into the brouhaha over whether Bush's remarks in Jerusalem yesterday were an implicit attack on Barack Obama. The consensus in the media seems to be that they were, though clearly Bush didn't say anything yesterday that he hasn't been saying for years (See this speech on Dec 7, 2001, for starters: "The terrorists are the heirs to fascism. They have the same will to power, the same disdain for the individual, the same mad global ambitions. And they will be dealt with in just the same way. Like all fascists, the terrorists cannot be appeased: they must be defeated. This struggle will not end in a truce or treaty. It will end in victory for the United States, our friends and the cause of freedom.")

What I am interested in doing, however, is taking issue with something Jonathan Alter said today on Morning Joe. Alter claimed Bush's remarks were an "unprecedented" attack and called them (I'm paraphrasing from notes here) a "violation of 60 years of uninterrupted policy," referring to Senator Arthur Vandenberg's famous dictum that "politics stops at the water's edge."

Uninterrupted policy? Please. Alter is a smart guy and a student of history, so one can only marvel at how his partisanship and his intense dislike of President Bush allowed him to make such a silly and historically inaccurate statement.

For the record, Republicans were accused of violating the aforementioned policy in December 1998 when they questioned President Clinton's motives for military strikes on the eve of impeachment hearings. Here's the lede from The Washington Post, December 17, 1998:

The unwritten rule that politics stops at the water's edge was rudely shattered yesterday, as many congressional Republicans who have long distrusted and reviled President Clinton sharply criticized his motivations in bombing Iraq on the eve of a House vote on impeachment. [snip]

Secretary of State Madeline K. Albright said she was particularly upset that "somehow the rules that have existed for many years about criticizing the president when he's abroad seem to have been broken."

"I found that very unseemly and unbecoming to members of Congress," Albright said.

President Clinton was guilty of violating the policy himself in November 2005 when he went to American University in Dubai and called the Iraq war a "big mistake." The AP reported Clinton's remarks this way:

"It was a big mistake. The American government made several errors ... one of which is how easy it would be to get rid of Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country."

Mr. Clinton's remarks came when he was taking questions about the U.S. invasion, which began in 2003. His response drew cheers and a standing ovation at the end of the hour-long session.

Of course, there was also Al Gore's speech at the Jeddah Economic Forum in Riyadh in February 2006 where he accused the Bush administration of "indiscriminate" abuse of Arab-Americans in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

And let's not forget the mother of them all: the September 2002 trip to Iraq by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California. During that junket - paid for by a bagman of Saddam Hussein, as we just learned recently - McDermott and Bonior went on national television, via satellite from Baghdad, and accused the President of the United States of being a liar.

These are just a few recent examples gathered up in 20 minutes, surely there many more. Alter and others are free to voice whatever opinion they want about Bush's remarks. What they aren't free to do, however, is to let partisan hyperventilating over the politics of the moment obscure the historical record and to try and blow this up into an "unprecedented" attack - if it was even an attack at all.