I like Glenn Reynolds, but I think that he’s wrong here about why the President is mucking about with Israel right now:
I think Obama expects Israel to strike Iran, and wants to put distance between the United States and Israel in advance of that happening. (Perhaps he even thinks that treating Israel rudely will provoke such a response, saving him the trouble of doing anything about Iran himself, and avoiding the risk that things might go wrong if he does). On the most optimistic level, maybe this whole thing is a sham, and the U.S. is really helping Israel strike Iran, with this as distraction.
For three reasons:
- He’s a Democrat, and Democrats are not very good at foreign policy.
- He’s a Democrat, and Democrats are not very good at foreign policy*.
- Even if he wanted to do this, his staff are all Democrats, and Democrats are not very good at foreign policy**.
Come right down to it, if the President was planning to implicitly or explicitly let Israel take care of our Iran problem we’d already know, because somebody in his administration would have leaked a warning to the Iranians via the New York Times. Which is probably more ‘sedition’ than ‘treason’ – not much of a distinction, admittedly – but still something that any Democratic President has to take into account when trying to formulate a foreign policy at odds with the neocom wing of the Democratic party.
Moe Lane
*To paraphrase a classic
**Or three times.
Crossposted to RedState.
I think it’s a lot simpler than Reynolds makes it out to be. The President, like most of the left, aspires to European-style aristocracy here in the US. And the European aristocracy has been anti-semitic for something well in excess of a thousand years. Not the raving anti-semitism of a David Duke or Jesse Jackson, but a passive style, that nevertheless is embedded deeply within them. And our President has absorbed some of this so deeply he doesn’t even realize it.
It’s something we don’t really think about here. A few years ago I read a history of the city of Prague. Old-city Prague has a Jewish Quarter that’s been there forever. In reading the history, it seemed like every hundred years or so the current monarch would round all of them up, execute a few, confiscate all of the assets they could find, and expel them from the city, then a few years later a different monarch would invite them back. Given my public school education here in the US this was a surprise to me. I mean, sure, the Holocaust in WW2 was mentioned in history class, but there was no mention that Hitler’s treatment of the Jews was only part of a long shameful history on the continent there.
I like the term “NeoCom” to describe the dimokkkrats. Let’s all use it a lot!
I would also suggest that we say democrat party not democratic party ’cause it makes them angry and an angry dimokkkrat is a dumber than usual dimokkkrat prone to making errors we can use against them.
Just sayin’…..
The same thought occured to me as it did to Glenn, as I wondered where all this came from so out of the blue made it so highly suspicious especially since Obama is truly a coward. If there is anything to it, we could look at the “neo com” managerie around Obama. However, the flak coming down on and around Benjamin Netanyahu would have to be expected by Bibi, and exclude his direct cooperation in such a hair brained scheme, so I discarded the idea. After all, it could cost him his life. There is something going on and it probably does have something to do with Israel taking out a nuclear Iran. Some have postulated that Israel does not actually have nuclear bombs, which is curious.
Skip – I think you’re right: Reynolds is a nice guy and I think he can’t believe the depth of corruption of the man serving as President. And, at the base of it Obama is anti-Semitic and anti-democratic. He is a street thug with street thug instincts. He is very aware of his anti Jewish bias and like the rest of his biases, he thinks they are right. He is a man without a moral grounding. I don’t think he does anything with any depth of strategy or principle. His sole objective right now is control of the economy and population within the US. He simply doesn’t care about the rest of it – perhaps others on his staff do, and they’re just running amuck. But I imagine he could hardly bear to be in the same room with the head of the State of Israel.