Late Senator figures in 2008 presidential furor

In a speech Thursday to the Israeli Knesset, Bush mentioned the president of Iran, and said: "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along."

Bush then recalled a comment attributed to Borah in 1939 following Germany's invasion of Poland.

"As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939," Bush told Israeli lawmakers, "an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Obama has said he would pursue talks with Iran without insisting on "preconditions" that could prompt Iranian leaders to spurn the request.

The comments have touched off back-and-forth salvos from the various camps, with Obama lashing out at President Bush and at Republican presidential rival John McCain for "dishonest, divisive" attacks in intimating the Democratic presidential hopeful would be soft on terrorists.

Idaho historians and academics say this business of dusting off Borah's words illustrates the continuing resonance of Idaho's longest-serving U.S. senator, the effectiveness of simple imagery in this blitzkrieg age of 24-hour news and the phenomenon of combining history and hindsight to make a potent political point.

"Trying to draw analogies from the past is something used a lot by political candidates," said Adam Sowards, a history professor at the University of Idaho, where the William Edgar Borah Outlawry of War Foundation was founded in 1929. Sowards adds such efforts often make him cringe.

"There's a common saying, 'History always repeats itself,' " Sowards said. "Historians don't like that saying, because the context is always changing. It's never the exact same situation."

Bush isn't the first to use the comments by Borah, who was himself a contender for president in 1936.