Beijing Olympics – Are They A Trap?
July 31, 2008
The Onion News on the Beijing Olympics. An excellent satire of the US media where fear is the only god.
When Extremists Attack
July 31, 2008
The times they are a-changing. Here is Joe Klein laying bare a truth well-known in Washington yet never spoken. And he does so with spunk. But more telling is the general tone of approval in the readers’ comments below. They are overwhelmingly positive. I had noticed the same on Middle East related posts on the hollywood liberal Huffington Post. People are now able to discuss this critical issue openly, and the hawks are on the defensive. The likelihood of a new war is diminishing. And none of this would have come to pass without the intervention of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. We owe them — and other courageous men like Philip Weiss, Jim Lobe, Chris Hedges, Alex and Andrew Cockburn, Uri Avnery, Jimmy Carter, Justin Raimondo and Seymour Hersh — a debt of gratitude.
I have now been called antisemitic and intellectually unstable and a whole bunch of other silly things by the folks over at the Commentary blog. They want Time Magazine to fire or silence me. This is happening because I said something that is palpably true, but unspoken in polite society: There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then successfully helped provide the intellectual rationale for George Bush to do it in 2003. Their motivations involve a confused conflation of what they think are Israel’s best interests with those of the United States. They are now leading the charge for war with Iran.
Happily, these people represent a very small sliver of the Jewish population in this country. Unhappily, their views have had an impact in the highest reaches of the Bush Administration–and seem to have an influence on John McCain’s campaign as well. Happily, the Bush Administration seems more interested in talking to the Iranians than in launching on them–and, according to my Israeli friends, the Israelis are not going to do anything foolish, either. I remain proud of my Jewish heritage, a strong supporter of Israel and a realist about the slim chance of finding some common ground with the Iranians. But I am not willing to grant these ideologues the anonymity they seek.
Neocon Flap Highlights Jewish Divide
July 31, 2008
The neocon-Joe Klein flap continues. Philip Weiss has a follow up:
Joe Klein is on fire, as they say. Here he is letting it rip again on the neocons and apologizing for supporting the Iraq war. Here are Josh Marshall and Jed Lewison standing up for him. And here is former Bush aide Peter Wehner being lawyerly and sanctimonious about him at the National Review, saying Klein shouldn’t blog, he’s too wild. Oh my– Klein should keep blogging this subject, he’s starting the conversation we’ve all been waiting for. Time Magazine should sense the moment and put the issue on the cover–Zionist claims on American Jews. And Klein should level with us, Did his own “strong” support for Israel affect his bad judgment on Iraq?’.
Today the story is also covered by Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe in the excellent IPS. Also check out Jim Lobe’s post laying out the context for this feud.
WASHINGTON, Jul 30 (IPS) – A mushrooming media controversy pitting neoconservatives against a prominent Jewish-American political commentator could mark a new stage in the growing battle over who speaks for the U.S. Jewish community on foreign policy issues, particularly regarding the Middle East.
TIME columnist Joe Klein’s accusations that Jewish neoconservatives, who played a particularly visible role in the drive to war in Iraq and have since pushed for military confrontation in Iran, sacrificed “U.S. lives and money…to make the world safe for Israel” have spurred angry charges of anti-Semitism and personal attacks from critics at such neoconservative strongholds as the Weekly Standard, National Review, and Commentary.
But the fierceness of the controversy surrounding Klein, generally considered a political centrist, highlights the growing antagonism between neo-conservative hardliners and prominent U.S. Jews whose more moderate views are aligned more closely with those of the foreign policy establishment.
Israel Shoots Dead Nine-year-old Boy
July 31, 2008
Greenwash
July 31, 2008
George Monbiot: Both government and corporations claim to be getting greener to help halt the advance of Climate Change through Global Warming but does the factual record support their claims?
The Mearsheimer and Walt Effect
July 30, 2008
In just two years John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have had more of an impact on the debate over US Middle East policy than the so-called Left has in the past twenty (Mostly because with few exceptions, the left studiously avoids specifics in favour of dogma-sanctioned generalities; slogans and rhetoric in place of analysis). The space that they have created has not only empowered others to speak out, but has also put enough heat on the lobby that some of its erstwhile fellow-travelers feel compelled to decry its excesses, if only to make its influence sustainable over a longer term. So it was that we had Joe Klein — an avowed Zionist, and author of the Clinton election roman a clef, Primary Colors – come out indicting the Jewish neoconservatives with ‘divided loyalties’ for leading US into the war in Iraq. Denunciations were issued from the usual quarters led predictably by the ubiquitous Abe Foxman of the ADL. Klein refused to back down. And now we have one of the war’s boosters, Jeffrey Goldberg, interviewing Klein where despite his generally hawkish Zionist views, he speaks out against the possibility of a new neoconservative misadventure.
Philip Weiss, by far the finest blogger, has already done a fine job of parsing the interview and offering his insights.
Klein and Goldberg Establish Code for Critiquing Neocons’ Religious Agenda: 1, Be Jewish…
Jeffrey Goldberg has a great interview with Joe Klein on his blog, remarkable for a few things. First you see Klein unbound. He’s really smart. He stands by his criticism of Jewish neocons as having dual loyalties and then sounds the realist when he says that Iran is seeking nukes as a deterrent against western threats
I think that my reading on the nuclear issue is, given the level of threats that they’ve been getting from the United States, and from Israel, it’s a logical thing for Iran to want nuclear weapons as a deterrent. I don’t think they’d ever actually use it. First of all, they don’t actually have it, but if they did have it, they’d contaminate at the very least the third most holy site in Islam, and they’d kill a hell of a lot of Muslims.
Brilliant. Klein also opens up the essential conversation that I have been calling for for years, for non-neocon Jews to dime out the neocons’ religious agenda in the Middle East.
Dubya is…The Dark Knight!
July 30, 2008
![[What Bush and Batman Have in Common]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-BX473_oj_kla_20080724191516.jpg)
So I am not the only one drawing this analogy. It appears the Murdoch press has also seen the parallels. Andrew Klavan tells readers of the Wall Street Journal ‘What Bush and Batman Have in Common‘. (via TruthDig)
A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .
Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a “W.”
There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
Sucking Up to the Bankers
July 30, 2008
Robert Scheer on ‘A Bipartisan Lovefest‘ with the bankers.
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| AP photo / Jae C. Hong |
| Sen. Barack Obama meets with his economic advisers Monday in Washington. From left: former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Obama, Service Employees International Union Chair Anna Burger, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine. |
This is a time to condemn the bankers, not to embrace them. They are the scoundrels who got us into the biggest economic mess since the Great Depression, lining their own pockets while destroying the life savings of those who trusted them. Yet both of our leading presidential candidates are scrambling to enlist not only the big-dollar contributions but, more frighteningly, the “expertise” of the very folks who advocated the financial industry deregulations at the heart of this meltdown.
Republican candidate John McCain even appointed as his campaign co-chairman Phil Gramm, who went from being chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, where he sponsored disastrous legislation that empowered the banking bandits, to becoming one of them at UBS Warburg. Gramm was forced to resign from McCain’s campaign only after he went public with his contempt for the financial concerns of ordinary Americans, calling them “whiners” and perpetrators of a “mental recession.”
Study Finds Youths Don’t Follow Office Politics
July 30, 2008
Onion News Network: Organizations hope to make youth see importance of getting prime parking spaces or a new desk lamp.
