If it were $4 billion, that’s a horse of a different color!

I do love the Village’s version of “accountability.” On a similar note, if we give the banksters trillions of dollars in bailout cash, we have no right to limit their bonuses! That would be so mean!

You know, the IMF never seems to have any problem attaching conditions to the funds it provides to countries, and it doles out much smaller sums. Maybe we should route all aid to Israel through the IMF and see if that helps.

On a similar note, if we give the banksters trillions of dollars in bailout cash, we have no right to limit their bonuses! That would be so mean!

On the same token, it would be awfully short-sided and nitpicky of us to demand some kind of assurance that the same sort of practices that got us into this predicament weren’t being used anymore.

As a Jew, I despair of my fellow Jews insistence on “Israel Right or Wrong.” I support the country and I want America to support the country – there really are compelling shared interests. But the hypocrisy is repulsive – the human rights violations and the weird denial of Israel’s nuclear program. Oh no, I said it – I must be an anti-semite! Actually, I lived in Israel in 1984, and I was very struck by the diversity of opinion there. You are much more free to criticize the government when you live there than when you live here – my fellow Jews tolerate no dissent. It’s sad and wrong and not sensible.

Seditious asshole.

If it were $4 billion, that’s a horse of a different color!

Or if they needed healthcare reform.

my fellow Jews tolerate no dissent.

Not true! J Street exists now! It’s not all AIPAC anymore! 🙂

J Street exists now!

Is that like the ubiquitous Arab Street?

And when the Arabic lobby becomes bigger, does it take over A Street in DC?

if it were $4 billion, that’s a horse of a different color!

Or if they needed healthcare reform.

It literally drives me to slam my head against the walls (which have taken out a restraining order against me) that there is actually a debate about health care reform. How did we get so apathetic?!!?

David Frum came out in favor of Ethnic Cleansing yesterday in the Washington Post. Can’t find the link now. It was magical.

How did we get so apathetic?!!?

Nothing comes easy in this country. Indeed, in the world. National health in England only came about as a result of the terrible tragedies of World War II, and the recognition that healthcare would be a vital issue for those who survived.

One of America’s great strengths is also one of its great weaknesses: we forget how easily a nation can be held hostage to tragedy.

Mystic,

This one?

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/15/frum.mideast.peace/

…we forget how easily a nation can be held hostage to tragedy.

Not me. I set a Google Reminder.

One of America’s great strengths is also one of its great weaknesses: we forget how easily a nation can be held hostage to tragedy

This isn’t a tragedy — it’s a travesty. It is mind bottling that, in 2010, people in the alleged Greatest Country On Earth™ can still be without health care.

Then you have the Village babbling on about how we should just give money away to other countries because of some misplaced morals while our own country slowly dies between channel surfings.

It is mind bottling

License required for that in most jurisdictions.

License required for that in most jurisdictions

I’ve got a Class W.

Every war must end — and end badly for at least one of the belligerents. It’s time for this war to end too, and at last.

Holy shit. I think that’s all I can say.

No, wait. Did the American Revolution really end “badly” for one of the belligerents? We won, but we didn’t exactly poison the wells and salt the fields of England.

Did the American Revolution really end “badly” for one of the belligerents?

Louis XVI might have some reason to complain.

Sometimes, more often than not when you hear about what Israel is doing there to sabotage the entire middle east, I think we could do more good putting the MFO on the inside of Palestine with their weapons pointed outwards instead of in Egypt and Israel with their weapons pointed inwards.

If it were not for their war crimes and other abuses of power, neocons like Dick Cheney et al would seem almost sane in comparison to their Israeli warmongering kissing cousins.

I really, really fucking hate Israel apologists. I just want to say that first – of all the sub-species of trash that’ve dwelled in American politics, the people who have steadily and consistently provided the “moral” backing for sixty years of Israeli politics racist enough to make a South African blush are hands down the people I fucking hate the most.

Onto this particular asshole;

“PRESIDENT OBAMA’S Middle East diplomacy failed in his first year in part because he chose to engage in an unnecessary and unwinnable public confrontation with Israel over Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem.”

No, President Obama’s Middle East diplomacy failed in his first month, in large part because he came in on the heels of one of Israel’s routine live-fire live-victim training exercises, this time in the Gaza strip (over 1,000 dead Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians) after which it became clear that Obama, like every previous president, didn’t have the political capital to restrain Israel from its regular mass murdering sprees. After that, his appeal in the so-called “Arab street” was on its way down.

“Last week the administration finally managed to strike a deal for the launching of indirect Israeli-Palestinian talks. So it has been startling — and a little puzzling — to see Mr. Obama deliberately plunge into another public brawl with the Jewish state.”

Some might say it’s been startling that the Israelis would start off the new talks with a declaration of yet another land theft from a country that isn’t theirs. But why should they have to answer for their conduct.

“True, this U.S.-Israel crisis began with a provocation from Jerusalem […] The dispute’s dramatic escalation since then seems to have come at the direct impetus of Mr. Obama.”

So, the problem isn’t that Germany invaded Austria, Czechoslovakia and then Poland, the problem is that France and Britain eventually did something about it. Got it. Pray continue, you worthless fuckwad.

“Mr. Obama and his advisers appear determined to prove that they will not be pushed around by Israel. The public scoldings also send a message to Palestinian and Arab leaders who have been demanding assurances that the United States will use its leverage in the new peace negotiations.”

No, an immediate suspension of all aid to Israel would send that message – what Obama just did was to signal that the U.S. intends to talk out of one side of its mouth and concede everything with the other, like it always has.

“And the administration hopes to extract immediate concessions from Mr. Netanyahu: It has demanded that he reverse the Jerusalem settlement decision, release Palestinian prisoners, agree to cover sensitive “final status” issues in the indirect talks and investigate the errant settlement announcement.”

The Israelis have started every negotiation over the last twenty years with a demand that the Palestinians concede X amount of land before they’d even sit down and negotiate with them – and every time, the amount of land they demand is higher than last time (and doesn’t take into account the illegal expansions that have occurred in the meantime).

Why shouldn’t Israel be expected to concede a paltry 1,600 homes that have no right to be there, just once?

“A larger question concerns Mr. Obama’s quickness to bludgeon the Israeli government. He is not the first president to do so; in fact, he is not even the first to be hard on Mr. Netanyahu.”

No, indeed he is not. The “first president” to bludgeon the Israeli government hasn’t been born yet.

“But tough tactics don’t always work: Last year Israelis rallied behind Mr. Netanyahu, while Mr. Obama’s poll ratings in Israel plunged to the single digits. The president is perceived by many Israelis as making unprecedented demands on their government while overlooking the intransigence of Palestinian and Arab leaders.”

Of course, it’s too much to expect that any of the fans of this column will understand that this exact same thing applies to Palestinian and other Arab countries as well, or how Israeli intransigence and America’s non-reaction to it look when you’re one of the people they’ve just kicked out of your home for the third time in a year.

If it were $4 billion, that’s a horse of a different color!

Oh yes – because not much higher than that and you can no longer represent the amount in 32 bits.

/geek

Oh, who am I kidding – I never /geek.

It’s all cool – we have Leiberman and President McCain preaching to Obama from the well of the Senate and decrying his hostile posture towards our 51st state. They’ll show him the error of his ways.

Frankly unctuous bastards!

Fred Hiatt’s name has been added to the manifest for a slow boat to Haifa.

Emigrate.

Glenn Greenwald had a pretty good post covering the Neocon reaction to our little feud with Bibi. Sadly, the influence of these fuckers is way out of proportion to the numbers they represent, or their intellectual heft, or their actual willingness to back up their yapping with any action other than sending someone else’s children to die in the sandbox.

I suggest we don’t give Israel any money at all. Then they can do whatever they want.

Danielle Masursky: “my fellow Jews tolerate no dissent.”

It’s a good thing no Jews read this comment section — you’d be in big trouble!

Glenn Greenwald had a pretty good post covering the Neocon reaction to our little feud with Bibi. Sadly, the influence of these fuckers is way out of proportion to the numbers they represent, or their intellectual heft, or their actual willingness to back up their yapping with any action other than sending someone else’s children to die in the sandbox.

I’m always so torn about this. On the one hand, these people seem to be unsatisfied with anything less than complete subservience to Israel. On the other hand, every time I say that I hear disturbing echoes of those ZOG conspiracy wackos and those guys who tried to turn half my family into soap and ashes. There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground.

Yeah, thats the one actor!

The money shot for people who just want to get down to business:

“Imagine this alternative history:

Suppose that the Western world had not intervened in 1949. Suppose the Israeli war of independence had been fought to the bitter end: Arab armies breaking apart and fleeing, commanders laying down their arms, columns of refugees crossing the Jordan River.

The 1949 war would have ended not with an armistice, but with a surrender. Palestinian refugees would have had to settle in new homes, just as the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from their former homes in the Arab lands resettled in Israel.

The outcome would have squelched any hope that more fighting would have yielded a different result — and the more decisive result might have dissuaded Arab governments from any further attempts to resort to force.”

Yep. That is how the real world works! It takes hard steely men (like David Frum) to make the tough calls, not those namby pamby world “leaders” of 1949 who never had the courage to make the hard decisions. Unless you count that little war thing that ended 4 years previously … and really, who the fuck even remembers that?

Look how well total punishment for the losers worked for the Allied Powers in WWI. They fucked Germany up, yo! That brought stability to the region for almost all of the past 90 years!

The human spirit is fragile and easily crushed. Especially in certain bloodlines, if you catch my drift. Only when people believe they have no choice but to submit to your will can there be meaningful peace. Its like marriage that way. Like the old saying goes, there is nothing safer than a man with nothing to lose. Or something like that. Pretty sure that is close.

God, I love me some David Frum!

I really, really fucking hate Israel apologists. I just want to say that first – of all the sub-species of trash that’ve dwelled in American politics, the people who have steadily and consistently provided the “moral” backing for sixty years of Israeli politics racist enough to make a South African blush are hands down the people I fucking hate the most.

I hope you’re not assuming they actually give a shit about Jews *or* Palestinians, as opposed to attempting to immanentize the eschaton by propping up some flavor of Israel for the Third Temple to be built in.

LOL, sweet reference, Brandi!

David Frum came out in favor of Ethnic Cleansing yesterday in the Washington Post. Can’t find the link now. It was magical.

Fuck me, that a absolute piece of shit, and thats saying something. I got half way through hte mangoes when this little snippet struck me:

Suppose instead the world had agreed that one of the combatant ethnic groups — the Serbs, say, but it really does not matter — retained a permanent inextinguishable right to reclaim its former homes. Suppose the world agreed to pay displaced persons from that group billions in foreign aid on condition that they never permanently resettled in the territory to which the ethnic group had moved. Suppose the world tolerated Serbian terrorist attacks on Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo as understandable reactions to injustice.

Change the war to the US War of Independence, and the Serbs to Colonialists…. what a fucken wanker…

“I’m always so torn about this. On the one hand, these people seem to be unsatisfied with anything less than complete subservience to Israel. On the other hand, every time I hear that I hear disturbing echoes of those ZOG conspiracy wackos and those guys who tried to turn half my family into soap and ashes. There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground.”

And that’s exactly the way they want it. Destroy any semblance of a middle ground; anytime someone tries to hold Israel accountable for its actions, scream “NAZI! NAZI! NAZI!” at the top of your lungs (like they’ve been doing to Obama for over a year) and bully the moderates into silence until, de facto, the only people who still dare to speak up are the goose-steppers who don’t shun the label because it’s a badge of pride for them.

Granted that the pro-Holocaust sentiment has a pretty solid following in the Middle-East, and a fringe but loud-mouthed following in Europe (the same people who spout “Eurabia” conspiracy theories, by the way, and who are applauded by the right wing when they do). In America, I’d say the antisemetic movement is so politically insignificant that it’s not even worth mentioning – the majority of Israel critics, in my experience, are honest people who are just sick and tired of war crimes.

/geek

Self-negating command, Xecky.

Isreal really needs new blood in its leadership. Its been the same group of assholes for 60 years. WTF is Netanyahu doing on my TV screen again?

“Isreal really needs new blood in its leadership. Its been the same group of assholes for 60 years. WTF is Netanyahu doing on my TV screen again?”

Not completely. The original creators of Israel were left-wing, secular modernists, not postmodern religious fanatics like so many of the current ones. From what I understand, Jewish religious fundamentalism came out in full force in the late 1970s (same as its Christian and Muslim siblings), which contributed enormously to creating the current political scene.

Actually, it’s not too different from America. The left wing is basically dead (though it left a much stronger legacy in Israel than in America), and the two top dogs now are a far right, fundamentalist party (Likud) and a vaguely centrist party whose defining feature is “we’re not the right wing” (Kadima). Like in the U.S, I don’t see that changing for a while.

Suppose instead the world had agreed that one of the combatant ethnic groups — the Serbs, say, but it really does not matter — retained a permanent inextinguishable right to reclaim its former homes.

So Serbia = Israel in this analogy?

Suppose the world tolerated Serbian terrorist attacks on Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo as understandable reactions to injustice.

Apparently so

Isreal really needs new blood in its leadership. Its been the same group of assholes for 60 years. WTF is Netanyahu doing on my TV screen again?

Strangely, this is the way the world works. Recall that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell were all retreads from previous administrations; they even tried to dig up Iran-Contra’s Poindexter for a while. Next time around, it’ll be Perle, Wolfowitz, and Dougie Feith. Then you had Chirac in France, Berlusconi in Italy…the world doesn’t seem to be able to produce a new and better class of flacks, for whatever reason.

The one-state solution is not good enough- the beneficiaries aren’t far away enough or brown enough (like South Africa was), and the ongoing cash dump cleanses a multitude of sins. I converted from the Tribe to atheism long ago- no evidence of god anywhere I looked. Same old politics, both sides of the aisle, both sides of the ocean, politics as usual. Dammit.

I do love the Village’s version of “accountability.”

But if a well known conservative liar has tapes, which he refuses to release unedited, that portray someone “helping” pimps (when the transcripts show they pretended to want to save the prostitutes) – then they need to be defunded immediately.

Also, if an anonymous video submission to a liberal group compares Bush to Hitler which the group immediately deletes, they should have a congressional resolution against them.

But a defense contractor who murders civilians is a-ok.

During seventies, Solomon Grundy (or Shlomo Grundig — hey, it was seventies) spend two years living on kibbutz. Solomon Grundy find that most outspoken critics of Israel Jews themselves, some secular, some religious (but not religious in sense of guys who think Menachem Schneerson Moshiach). Maybe personal connection to issue engender strong feelings; Solomon Grundy not know. Solomon Grundy also know many American Jews raised by parents who live during civil rights era and whose grandparents survive (or not) Holocaust. This probably instill sense of importance of social justice.