David Corn

Something about this does not pass the smell test. Keep fishing, David.

I wonder about the timing.

Just more of the Bush mess but . . .

All the more reason for an investigation.

Come on! Make BHO shovel that s**t!

Err, poo...

This has probably been said 20 before on this blog alone, but I'll say it anyway. This idea that we have to move on and not investigate the Bush administration is ridiculous (this applies to a who range of scandals, not just the Harman thing).

First, that approach send the signal that you can abuse your power in government and get away with it. Investigations, almost certainly followed by prosecutions and imprisonment, would send the opposite message.

Second, if the Democrats want to keep winning elections, the American people need to know what the alternative is.

Third, no one had this attitude after WWII. People will say, this isn't anywhere near as bad as what the Nazis did, and overall that's true, but it's still pretty bad, and the difference between the Bushies and the Nazis will be reflected in the charges and the sentences- no one's going to be hung.

Tom

In any other country this would be treason. But not in the kosher Never-Never Land that is Washington D.C. We passed that a long time ago when our corrupt politicians engineered a war for Israel's security in Iraq and turned our Armed Forces into the Israeli Foreign Legion. No, it is past treason.

This current generation of Americans has surrendered this country to Israel in the same way India fell piecemeal to British Raj 300 years ago. The Jews wormed their way into both our political parties and thoroughly corrupted this country.

I was wondering when I was going to encounter someone like this. Billyspudd- Your analysis of D.C. and Israel is fascinating. Do you have your own copy of Mein Kamph or do you just borrow it from the library?

1. America invading iraq was a very bad idea. I did a LOT trying to stop it at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

2. I support the Palestinians. My thoughts on that are about 1/2 the way down at http://devlin-mcaliskey.blogspot.com/2009/01/spirit-of-robert-briscoe.html. I've done some work on that, not much, but it's an okay % of the huge amount of activism I've done, and has also come up a few times on my blog.

3. Bush's reasons for invading Iraq were many, Israel was a small part of it. There was the opportunity to give lots of money to corporations in multiple ways, the strong desire for using the US military that most GOPers have, the desire to teach the world a lesson in terms of what the US will do to them if they piss off D.C., the desire for oil, the idea of democratizing the Middle-East. I also heard something about it being connected to countering the growing strength of the Euro. It's possible they half believed that stuff about WMDs and Al-Qaeda. Israel was a small part of it.

4. Billyspudd has an exaggerated sense of how much of a role Jewish-Amerericans play in developing U.S. foreign policy about Israel and the middle-east. They're a small part of the population and are probably only a little bit more powerful, adjusting for population, than other white people. How do they get America to be so pro-Israel? Do they have special powers? Does AIPAC use Jedi mind tricks and say to the President: "you will support israel" and the prez says "i will support iSRAEL."?

No. There's a ton of christians who for obscure biblical reasons involving the second coming of Jesus, support Israel, and there's TONS of Christians and Atheists who for foreign policy reasons support Israel. In the Cold War Israel became an ally, basically because they were relatively democratic and white compared to most/all the rest of the middle-east, the fresh memory of the Holocaust. (well, there were some other countries that were relatively democratic but possibly less so than Israel, and they weren't considered as white as Israelis overall since some large minority or small majority of Israelis were European and the Holocaust wasn't against Arabs or Turks). Since the Cold War, well, the relationship wasn't going to just go away after so many decades, and very shortly after the Cold War ended, what is called (and sometimes is) terrorism became more of an issue (the 1993 WTC bombing), although much less so in the 1990s than since 9/11 They see Israel as an ally in the war on terror (true, that alliance actually HARMS the war on terror, but I never said they were smart, they do lots of other things that hinder the war on terror that aren't connected to Jews). With the Dems, obviously those Christians and atheists I referred to don't have as much influence as they do with with the Republicans, but they have some, and yes, with the Dems, the Jews do have a lot of influence, but the point is that, as far as why Washington consistently has an okay-bad record on Israel, Jewish-Americans are a small part of it, they're only a large part of it with the Dems. So, no they don't have special powers, and they're probably only a tiny bit more powerful than other white ethnic groups, adjusting for population.

The point is that there were reasons besides the "power" of the Jews to explain why D.C. developed an alliance with Israel and continues to be pro-Israel. I mean, in the beginning Jewish-Americans were probably part of it, but would only have been a very small factor. And once it got going, it would have been dificult to change.

(I actually had to do some extra research on this as I was typing, but I have read a book by Naseer Aruri on US foreign policy on Israel, and I got the impression that Cold War politics, not the Jewish-American community, was a big part of it.

I'm also waiting for people like billyspudd to go off on those evil cuban-Americans for controlling our foriegn policy on cuba, but something tells me he won't, he probably hasn't gotten around to reading the "The Protocols Of The Elders of Havana."

5. On a related subject, it is frustrating for me as a leftist that, to one degree or another, somewhere around 1/3 of Jewish-Americans have one attitude for their people and another attitude for the rest of the world. They're roughly as bad as that 1/2 of those Irish-Americans who get all fired up about the North of Ireland (as they should) but are hostile or indifferent to injustice in the rest of the world.

6. These barely count as reasons to reject anti-Semitism- bigotry is simply wrong. But it can't hurt to mention this anyway. And they're also aimed at people who are progressive/left, not people who are anti-semitic from the right.

A: Some majority of Jewish-Americans are our allies. to one degree or another they're good on most/all the issues except Israel and the MId-East. Besides being wrong, anti-semitism makes it more difficult for supporters of the Palestinians on the left-progressive side to work with Jewish liberals-leftists, and that weakens our movements.

B: The far-right expreses support for the Palestinians. Not because they support the Palestinains (when Arabs immigrate to America, they're more likely to get assaulted than be helped by the far-right, and there's some evidence of Nazi hostility towards Arabs in Arab countries) but because they hate Jews and see it as an opportunity to recruit stupid people. Once people become anti-semitic on Israel, it probably doesn't take much more (something that makes them lean towards racist) and they're vulnerable to being recruited by the far-right, especially by the elements of the far-right who are also good (in a twisted way) on stuff like labor or the environment. I'm certain they're picking up some recruits as a result of anti-semitism among supporters of the Palestinians on the liberal-left side. Which is why activists on that issue on the left should show ZERO tolerance for anti-semitism, condemn attacks on Israeli civilians, and make it very clear that Jewish-Americans are a small part of shaping American foreign policy on Israel.

C: the anti-semitism of some supporters of the Palestinians makes it dificult to win people to the cause of supporting the Palestinians.

I think that's about it.

Tom

As a native born Israeli I can assure you that the Palestinians have been screwed over by everybody . The guys who hurt them worst were the Arab nations surrounding Israel. Their so called brethern kept them locked up in camps for 2 decades with promises of someday pushing Israelis into the sea to drown. This happened while the Palestinians nearly starved. They were forced into putting their lives on hold because they were never allowed to begin anything that might appear like a future might exist that was not bound by the myth of Arab and Muslim fierce prowess in battle.

In the past 100 years, the only Arab armies to win a war did so in 1918 against the Ottoman empire, the sick man of Europe.

Oh well, I guess I really like the Protocols of the Elders of Havana. I must do some research and write it on their behalf. I should think that since the Pope gave Cuba to the Spaniards, they should seek to recapture the rest of their 16th century conquests as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if what you say about Arab armies is right, but you're probably reading the wrong thing into it. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if they do exaggerate their chances and pass that on to the Palestinians. But I can think of some sort of exceptions (Arab volunteers in Afghanistan with the Soviets) and in any case, in that 100 years how many wars have they fought with non-Arab armies? This sort of thing happens sometime. You might remember that for a long time there was a huge Arab empire.

Anyway, as far as the Arabs being the worst for the Palestinians, that's nonsense. Sure, they don't have a good record, but they're not the ones who have been occupying the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and killing Palestinian civilians and treating them however they want to and cutting off their energy. As far as the ones in the camps outside Palestine, they're there because they and their parents/grandparents were kicked out by Israel. They didn't have a crystal ball to tell them how things were going to work out and if Israel had just done the right thing and let them return and adjusted their attitudes (yes, the Palestinians also needed an attitude adjustment, but I've got reason to believe it was more a problem with the Jews, and the Jews were basically immigrants/settlers, you don't immigrate/settle somewhere and treat the native population like that) they could have gotten on with their lives. But you treated them horribly.

So, it's actually Israel who has treated the Palestinians worse.

As far as the Havana thing, I'm not sure what you're getting at. I thought it was a funny response to the idea that we should hate Jews because they (allegedly, sort of actually since they're white) have a disproportionate affect on US foreign policy. I mean, we've been doing horrible things to Cuba, we almost went to war with the Soveit union in connection with our cuba policy, and these anti-Castro Cuban-Americans wouldn't have minded if we had gone to war with Cuba. It's not a perfect annology, but it exposes how these anti-semites are simply bigots and idiots, and mostly right-wingers.

Tom

This is treason, if true: High treason. She was offering help to stop an investigation of an Israeli spy network (a few already in jail). She was seeking to gain control of a Congressional committee in charge of Intelligence. She did so by voting for a Bush era proposal for illegal warrantees wiretapping.

Hello?

Do we need to have the dead body of a Palestinian dropped on our door to see where all this is going: manipulation of our intelligence community and foreign policy for the benefit of another nation.

We need to wash our hands of blind, uncritical support for Israel and look at the facts.