Former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson reminds us of an “arresting” document that London Times reporter Tim Sebastian dug up in the Soviet archives in 1991. It was a memorandum from the head of the KGB to the then leader of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov, detailing a message that had been sent from Ted Kennedy via a friend and former senator who was visiting Moscow in 1983. The content of that message was, as Robinson aptly characterizes it, a “quid pro quo.” Kennedy offered, in the KGB man’s description, “to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the U.S.A.” In return, Kennedy would broker a series of television interviews with Andropov on the major American networks.

Even if the motive for Kennedy’s freelance diplomacy had been solely his sincere displeasure with the policies of the Reagan administration, his action would have been ethically improper. But the memo indicates that what primarily drove Kennedy was not disagreement with the administration — which, according to the Constitution, is charged with directing foreign policy — but political ambition:

“Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988,” the memorandum continued. “Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president.”

I’ve written previously in this space about the Logan Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens “directly or indirectly commenc[ing] or carr[ying] on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States.” The cause of my earlier invocation of the law — which has never been enforced — was Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Damascus last year (though Carter could have been brought up on charges of violating the act for any of the freelance diplomatic trips he has performed in the nearly three decades since he left the White House).

The episode of which Robinson reminds us had been revealed many years earlier and was largely ignored by the media at the time, perhaps because the fall of the Soviet Union obviated the salience of a senator’s by then eight-year-old attempt to undercut the foreign policy of a democratically elected president. But the brazenness of this act galls nonetheless, not least because it is so discordant with the behavior of Ted’s brothers, staunch anti-Communists both. As we contemplate the legacy of Ted Kennedy this week, this event should certainly rank highly in our collective assessment.

Two important pieces track the incredible tergiversations of Roger Cohen. Jordan Hirsch points to the contradictions implicit in the New York Times columnist’s heartfelt expressions of support for Iran’s democratic dissidents and his ever shifting calls for “engagement” with the regime that is murdering them.

Is diplomacy with the Ayatollah only ethically repugnant for, say, the next six months? Will we, by then, have conveniently forgotten about the Green Wave? Will it no longer be too distasteful to resume “business as usual”?

There are further discrepancies. Cohen derides George W. Bush’s “radical White House” and praises Barack Obama for “plac[ing] the Iranian regime on the defensive.” Yet it is Obama—and not Bush—who was so slow to issue any positive expression of support for the people on the streets of Tehran and who nonetheless held out the olive branch of “engagement” irrespective of how many dissidents the Iranian regime imprisons, tortures, or kills (entreaties, by the way, that have been abjectly dismissed by Iran’s leaders). Meanwhile, two days after the election devolved into mass protests and violent repression, Cohen said that outreach should “await a decent interval.” Two weeks later he declared, “Meddling be damned.”

Hirsch writes that Cohen possesses two “inherently conflicting aspirations for the direction of U.S. foreign policy.” One is “enthralled by Obama’s ‘heady, history-making’ wish for rapprochement,” an echo of Cohen’s apologias for the regime issued for months on end prior to the brutal crackdowns, while the other “marvels at the ‘limitless potential’ of the three million Iranians who gathered to protest the election results, and glorifies the dissident movement.” Cohen writes as if these contradictory analyses of the regime’s nature were in perfect harmony.

What accounts for the persistence of such hypocrisy? In a devastating piece for the Forward, J.J. Goldberg chalks it up to the worst of journalistic impulses: cynical attention-seeking. A columnist for the past five years, Cohen was regularly spouting “conventional wisdom.” Slate’s Jack Shafer observed that Cohen’s writing “establishes new standards for the aggressive pursuit of the trite” and “dares the reader to wade through a mush of platitudes.” So why not push the envelope and write ridiculous things about the hospitality of the ayatollahs toward Iran’s 25,000 Jews and how the image of a radical, Islamist regime is but a dangerous fiction concocted by a cabal of actual fanatics, that is, American neoconservatives?

Cohen’s spate of columns spinning these yarns have earned him a great deal of attention, but he has also made a fool of himself. Repeatedly. For instance, he simultaneously called predictions of Iranian nuclear capability fear-mongering—more likely to produce a “Persian Chernobyl”—while advising that it is “almost certainly too late to stop Iran from achieving virtual nuclear power status” and that the West should reconcile itself to that anodyne fact. Moreover, the real problem in the region was Israel, whose belligerence needed to be “rein[ed] in.”

The height (or, more accurately, the depth) of Cohen’s quest for provocation was witnessed last week in a 5,000-word piece for the Times Magazine, where he expressed concern over National Security Council staffer Dennis Ross’s “well-known ties with the American Jewish community.” Never mind that these “well-known ties” do not seem to bother President Obama, who, after all, wanted to bring Ross closer to the action of Iran policy. Goldberg asks:

That, in effect, is the dilemma facing American policy toward Iran at this pivotal moment: Is there too much Jewish influence? We’ve heard the question before in Hamas sermons, in Al Qaeda videos and on some left-wing blogs. Now it’s been incorporated into the nation’s newspaper of record.

Cohen was indeed “mugged by reality”—Hirsch’s description of the Times writer’s Iranian odyssey. Finding oneself among the participants of a real-life counterrevolution in the streets of Tehran will change the attitude of everyone but the most coldhearted of “realists.” Yet at the same time, Cohen remains obsessed with exposing nefarious influence in the American government, which is the true impediment to a detente with the Iranians—a detente which, depending on the day, Cohen finds impossible to achieve.

Cohen has received many plaudits over the past two months, not just from those who found his earlier work about Iran naive, but also, ironically, from the very same people who were nodding their heads at his earlier assessments of neoconservative perfidy and Iranian reasonableness. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” There exists a distinction between acknowledging the nuances of an issue—the meaning of Fitzgerald’s aphorism—and espousing utterly contradictory opinions. It is a testament to the intellectual muddiness of our times that so many people cannot recognize the difference.

One of the more disturbing, and perplexing, parts of Barack Obama’s much-lauded Cairo speech was his endorsement of the “right” of women to the hijab—as if the great problem faced by Muslim females is the inability to cover their faces (and whole bodies) rather than the subjugation and compulsion to do so. In a not-so-subtle attempt to distinguish the United States from the government of France, which has gone so far as to ban such vestments from its schools, the president stated that “the U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it.”

As Peter Daou, the former Internet director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, wrote:

Is that a joke? With women being stoned, raped, abused, battered, mutilated, and slaughtered on a daily basis across the globe, violence that is so often perpetrated in the name of religion, the most our president can speak about is protecting their right to wear the hijab?

A story in yesterday’s Washington Post reveals just how foolish and counterproductive the president’s words were. It details the ongoing debate in France over the veil, a policy that is overwhelmingly popular with French citizens. It is also popular with older Muslim immigrants to France, people who made their way to the country long before Islamic extremists began to earn a footing in Europe. “If they don’t like it here, they can always leave,” the Post quotes one 65-year-old Muslim Frenchman.

Most interesting, however, is just how widespread the veil is in French Muslim society. Despite all the controversy, the French Interior Ministry estimates that “fewer than 400 women wear the full veil in France.” So here we have the president of the United States wading into an internal debate among one of our allies, rebuking a policy very sensibly adopted by that nation’s government and that affects a scant 400 people. (France, keep in mind, hosts the largest Muslim population on the Continent, some 6 million out of a total population of 64 million.) President Obama entered office promising better relations with Europe and the Muslim world. His backward position on Islamic dress will not help him accomplish that goal.

It has become fashionable once again to proclaim America’s decline. Books herald a “post-American world” and the “end of the American era.” The question is no longer whether America is Rome but how best to manage our inevitable fall. Few of the international-relations pundits who prophesy the decline of America and the concomitant advancement of China, India, Russia, and regional bodies like the European Union, appear worried about the prospect. Indeed, many seem downright pleased by “the rise of the rest.”

Recent events in the Central American nation of Honduras, however, put a dent in the grand theory of American decline.

The ouster of President Manuel Zelaya, which occurred after his brazen gambit to subvert the Honduran constitution by holding an illegal referendum in an attempt to end presidential term limits, has created one of the most nail-biting political crises in recent Latin American history. Whatever the circumstances of Zelaya’s expulsion (claims that what transpired in Honduras constituted a “coup” are weakened by the validation bestowed on the military’s actions by the Supreme Court and attorney general, as well as the consideration that the country is currently run by a civilian government), the situation remains tense. It reached its most dramatic point when, a little over a week after his ouster, Zelaya attempted to land a plane in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, only to be prevented from doing so by a military blockade of the runway. Most nations have recalled their ambassadors and cut off much-needed aid.

Click here to read the rest of this COMMENTARY Web Exclusive.

The most bizarre moment of the Michael Jackson memorial a few weeks ago at the Staples Center in Los Angeles had to be the rambling speech delivered by Sheila Jackson Lee, the joke of a woman who happens to represent part of Houston in the United States Congress. (At the time, Roll Call reported that Jackson Lee “has a history of making cameo appearances at funerals” and that her staff used to “cull the obituaries” to “find funerals” for her to attend.) There, she announced her intention to introduce a resolution on the House floor listing every single one of Jackson’s charitable contributions and lauding him as a “world humanitarian” (his generosity to various teenage boys was presumably excluded). Fortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi recognized that even this would be too much for the American people to take and put the kibosh on Jackson Lee’s scheme.

Well, it appears that at least some of Jackson Lee’s constituents are up in arms about her trip, as well as the likelihood that she used taxpayer money to fund it. A local television station put Jackson Lee on the spot about the matter. See if you can make hash out of this:

“Who paid for that trip for you to go to that memorial service?” reporter Joel Eisenbaum asked Jackson Lee when she appeared live on the Sunday morning newscast.

“Well, uh … that umm … those resources are resources that I have and, therefore, they are in a way that does not interfere with anything that has to do with serving the United States Congress,” answered Jackson Lee.

“Understood,” Eisenbaum replied. “So, public funds?”

“Those resources are resources that I have,” said Jackson Lee.

Hard as it is to believe, this episode does not rank at the top of Jackson Lee’s most absurd moments. Several years ago, she complained about the paucity of African-American names given by the National Weather Service to Hurricanes. And in 2002 the Weekly Standard revealed that Jackson Lee was using a government car to drive her the one block from her Capitol Hill apartment to her congressional office.

If she indeed did use government money to pay for her junket to the Jackson send-off, Jackson Lee will have to eventually report it. But given the tolerance of the people of Texas’s 18th Congressional District for this sort of ridiculous behavior, Jackson Lee doesn’t have a thing to worry about.

Update: I’d be remiss not to mention a brief item published not long ago by the The Wall Street Journal’s David Feith, who managed to get Jackson Lee’s accomplice, Congresswoman Diane Watson, on the phone to discuss their since scuttled resolution honoring Jackson. “I just marveled at the fact that he bought the remains of the Elephant Man,” she told him (one suspects that she “marvels” at this information for reasons different than those that you or I do). And then there’s this: “Michael saw the world through his own lenses. He saw no harm, no danger, nothing wrong with romping on the bed with children.” Watson should seek work as a criminal defense lawyer. There’s far more money in that than serving in Congress…

In an Economist-sponsored debate on the motion “This house believes that Barack Obama’s America is now an honest broker between Israel and the Arabs,” J Street impresario Daniel Levy writes:

Too often Israel’s most self-destructive tendencies (entrenching occupation, settlements) have been indulged, perhaps even encouraged in recent years. That is irresponsible friendship, akin to handing a drunken mate the keys to a car.

Feel like you’ve heard that one before? You wouldn’t be mistaken if you had. When he founded the organization last year, former Howard Dean staffer Jeremy Ben-Ami told Newsweek the following:

Well, the United States clearly has a lot of influence on Israel because of the nature of the relationship and if you’re really serious about stopping the settlements and about what American policy is — American policy says no more settlements, no more expansion and take down those outposts — if we’re serious about it, then we need to start to act serious. And it’s time to act like the big brother or the parent and to say ‘enough is enough and we’re going to take the car keys if you don’t stop driving drunk.’ We’re not talking about simply business as usual.

This wasn’t the first time Ben-Ami compared the democratically elected government of Israel to a drunk driver. He used the same analogy in a Washington Post piece as well. You’d think Daniel Levy, scholar that he is, would at least credit his pal for this noxious gag.

In response to this tiresome analogy, David Frum has his own allegory of inebriation:

Advocates of getting tough on Israel remind me of the old joke about the drunk who searched for his key under the lamp-post because it was brighter there. In the same way, American leaders (and Jewish liberals) are often tempted to press Israel for the convenient reason that Israel is much more susceptible to pressure.

If there’s anyone who’s drunk off of anything in this debate, it’s the J-Streeters and their fumes of naiveté.

James Taranto points to a strange story in yesterday’s New York Times by Simon Romero praising President Obama for getting the better of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in his deft handling of the situation in Honduras:

From the moment the coup in Honduras unfolded over the weekend, President Hugo Chávez had his playbook ready. He said Washington’s hands may have been all over the ouster, claiming that it financed President Manuel Zelaya’s opponents and insinuating that the C.I.A. may have led a campaign to bolster the putschists.

But President Obama firmly condemned the coup, defusing Mr. Chávez’s charges. Instead of engaging in tit-for-tat accusations, Mr. Obama calmly described the coup as “illegal” and called for Mr. Zelaya’s return to office. While Mr. Chávez continued to portray Washington as the coup’s possible orchestrator, others in Latin America failed to see it that way.

If your goal in crafting American foreign policy is to become more popular among the world’s bad actors, (believing that by doing so they will behave less badly), then, yes, Obama has been thus far successful in his policy on the Honduran crisis. Such pusillanimity has been characteristic of this administration, from the President’s Cairo speech that flattered the Arab narrative of 1948, to its very public attacks on Israeli “natural growth,” to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s pushing the “reset” button with Putin’s Russia. As for Honduras? Congratulations America, you are now on the same side as Chavez, the Castro brothers and other anti-American regional thugs. Meanwhile, we’re undermining the forces of democracy in that tiny country, particularly its courts and Congress, which both moved against President Manuel Zelaya’s attempts to subvert the constitution.

But while administration policy made Chavez’s predictable claims of U.S. subversion more difficult — if not impossible — to mount, the Venezuelan autocrat has quickly changed his tune to adapt to the new situation. He is, after all, a wily man, quick and able to respond to ever-changing situations; it’s one of the reasons he has stayed in power for so long. Though his public opposition to the “coup” might have thrown Chavez off for a day or so, it didn’t take long for the caudillo of Caracas to reorient himself, and now Obama is playing directly into Chavez’s hands. Ranting about American imperialism just a few days ago, Chavez — evidently delighted by his newfound friend in the White House — now says that Zelaya should score a meeting with Obama when he’s in Washington as such a photo-op would “deliver a major blow” to the interim government in Tegucigalpa, Honduras’ capital. Indeed, it would.

So let’s concede Romero’s point that Obama has “outmaneuvered” Chavez by escaping the traditional role of the president serving as a pinata for an anti-American leader. That’s very good for Obama’s self-esteem (recall the president’s relief, expressed in a speech at the April Summit of the Americas following an hours-long tirade from Daniel Ortega, that the Nicaraguan strongman “did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old”) but what have we gotten in return? U.S. interests in the region are not being served by continued international isolation of Honduras’s interim government, nor would they be served by restoring to power an anti-American authoritarian like Zelaya, who has approval ratings of less than 30%. Yet that’s what American policy supports. Instead of leading on this issue, we’re following, and following the likes of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez at that. But, hey, it’s nice to have these guys saying nice things about us for once, no?

Last week, the Justice Department unveiled charges against a husband and wife team of State Department employees who allegedly spied for Cuba for nearly 30 years. Wendell and Gwendolyn Myers are accused of conspiracy to act as illegal agents of a foreign government, handing over classified information to that government, and wire fraud. According to the Justice Department, the couple wasn’t in it for the money. Like so many spies for communist regimes, they’re “true believers.”

Many questions need to be asked about this breach, ranging from concerns about the integrity of State Department employees to how the government handles sensitive information. First on my mind, however, is when does the Nation take up a contribution fund for the Myers’s legal defense?

Here’s a telling quote from a story in today’s Financial Times, quoting J Street co-founder and intellectual leading light Daniel Levy:

And Mr Obama dropped a hint that he understood the Arab world’s concerns at Israel’s nuclear weapons status. “I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not,” Mr Obama said. Daniel Levy, a former Israeli government official, who is now at the New America Foundation, said: “Might this be a kind of: ‘Yes – we acknowledge there is a double standard here regarding the Israeli nuclear issue, and eventually we will get to that too’?”

So Levy agrees with the Mullahs in that there is a “double standard” between Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons and Iran’s pursuit of them. Remind me again how J Street is either “pro-Israel” or “pro-peace?”

In her disastrous press conference yesterday, Nancy Pelosi finally confirmed that she was aware waterboarding was taking place as early as 2003, after her top intelligence aide Michael Sheehy attended a briefing with CIA officials where he was told as much. This contradicts her earlier, and highly dubious, claims that she didn’t know about waterboarding until the rest of us found out.

But Pelosi really made news with her accusation that the CIA lied to her in September of 2002, specifically disputing the claims of the Agency (and others) who said that Congressional leaders were briefed about the actual, and not just potential, use of enhanced interrogation techniques. We’ve known about these briefings for at least two years, but it was only yesterday, with the real possibility of a congressional “Truth Commission” taking shape, that Pelosi decided to accuse the CIA of “misleading” her. In 2007, for instance, the Washington Post described the content of that meeting this way: “For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.” The Post further reported that “Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.”

But let’s take Pelosi at her word. Let’s assume that in 2002, all the CIA told her was that “they had some legislative counsel — the Office of Legislative Counsel opinions that they could be used, but not that they would,” as she put it last month. According to the people now calling for “war crimes” investigations against Bush administration lawyers, the mere writing of a legal memo that justified enhanced interrogation techniques itself constitutes a “war crime.” Put aside the question of whether the agents performing said techniques are themselves culpable, it’s the lawyers who argued for their legality who are the real “war criminals” and who should be disbarred, impeached, imprisoned, etc. By this logic, then, Pelosi being aware that such legal rationales had been provided by government officials (her claim), even if she wasn’t told waterboarding itself was taking place, would obviously make her complicit in the commissioning of war crimes since she did absolutely nothing about it.

I should state plainly here that I don’t believe Nancy Pelosi is a war criminal. But that’s because I also don’t believe John Yoo or Jay Bybee are war criminals for drafting legal opinions the Left disagrees with. Regardless, that Nancy Pelosi is complicit in the commissioning and cover-up of war crimes is the inescapable logic of the arguments being put forth by the mob calling for partisan witch-hunts. To maintain at least the guise of intellectual consistency, those calling for the heads of Yoo and Bybee should start calling for the Speaker’s as well.

Last week, several lawyers affiliated with the Federalist Society participated in a conference call in which they challenged the notion that waterboarding amounts to torture. The lawyers stated that since the military has waterboarded over 26,000 of our personnel as part of its Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training, waterboarding cannot constitute torture.

Disagreement with this mode of reasoning is encapsulated in a recent NPR story quoting a scientist who studied the effects of waterboarding on soldiers. He says that one cannot compare the psychological effect of SERE training with the tactic that was used aganist Al-Qaeda terrorists because our soldiers had the ability to “stop the process at any point” whereas the three high-level Al-Qaeda detainees whom the CIA waterboarded didn’t have that luxury.

Isn’t that the point?

The purpose of interrogation is to get information, and the purpose of the interrogations now under such virulent attack was to obtain information that, if acquired, would save (and, at least according to Michael Hayden, Michael Mukasey, and Dennis Blair, did save) American lives. For such interrogations to prove effective, it is necessary that they entail a level of coercion so that the person undergoing interrogation cannot simply demand a stop to it and call in his lawyer (as criminal defendants in the United States have the right to do during even the most fearsome good cop/bad cop routines). Focusing on fear is what distinguishes “enhanced interrogation” techniques from outright torture — things like drilling holes in kneecaps or pulling out fingernails — the effects of which are far worse than mere apprehension.

Let’s assume that waterboarding, as practiced on the three high-level al-Qaeda detainees by the CIA, does, however, produce “negative psychological repercussions,” in the words of NPR. A lifetime jail sentence, which any terrorist wanted by the United States should feel lucky to have, would also carry “negative psychological repercussions,” but that doesn’t mean we release terrorists onto the streets out of concern for their emotional well-being. There are more important things than the mental health of Abu Zubaydah and Khaled Sheikh-Mohammed. Risking these thugs’s psychological state is a price we should be willing to pay, albeit sparingly, if it’s required to save innocent American lives.

Waterboarding does not instill fear of imminent death (as KSM probably figured out around the 4th or 5th time he endured it), which makes the difference between these two scenarios — the difference, ultimately, that distinguishes the training that soldiers voluntarily undergo from the “torture” that the CIA used to extract information – the imposition of fear. It says something absurd about the “torture” debate that scaring terrorists, in the cause of saving American lives, is now considered not only out of legal bounds, but on par with the behavior of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.

Eli Lake of the Washington Times had an important yet overlooked scoop yesterday: Democratic Congresswoman Jane Harman, scourge of the left-wing of her party and subject of intense and petty hatred from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “was one of the only lawmakers in 2003 to challenge the CIA’s program of harsh interrogations, according to a little-noticed letter to the CIA that was declassified last year.” Lake reports on a letter that she wrote to the CIA, in which she expressed her concern that the interrogation program “raises profound policy questions and I am concerned about whether these have been as rigorously examined as the legal questions. I would like to know what kind of policy review took place and what questions were examined.”

Harman not only questioned the legality and effectiveness of the CIA interrogation programs, she also called upon the CIA not to destroy tapes of its interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. Whatever one thinks about the propriety of this program, Harman at least demonstrated the concern that Nancy Pelosi only now claims — completely unconvincingly, as Bret Stephens cogently reminded us last week — to have expressed.

Furthermore, Lake cites a government official who says that Harman’s inquiry “was one of very few the CIA received about the program from members of Congress at the time.” So much for the theory — a point of consensus among the leading lights of the credulosphere — that Harman is part of the vast neoconservative conspiracy and was merely an appendage of the Bush administration in Congress. In the eyes of her left-wing detractors, Harman ought to be a hero.

But why let facts get in the way of a good narrative? Harman was a vocal supporter of the Iraq War and opposed most of her colleagues by not supporting a withdrawal of troops from that country in 2006 and 2007. Due to her hawkishness, she has long been a target of virulent left-wing attacks, and lost out on her bid to chair the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, a job that former Minority Leader Dick Gephardt promised her when the Democrats were in the minority. Pelosi ended up giving that job to Silvestre Reyes, a legislator who infamously didn’t know that Al Qaeda is primarily Sunni and Hezbollah is Shi’ite.

If the Democratic Party leadership wants voters to think they’re serious about national security, they would be promoting Jane Harman. One can draw the appropriate conclusions from their not having done so.

In yesterday’s Jerusalem Post, Lenny Ben-David showed how the anti-Israel conspiracies of the present — seen in the form of Walt-Mearsheimer, the AIPAC “espionage” case, and the politically charged leaking of classified information to imply Jane Harman has dual loyalties — have a long and ugly history in Washington. The entire column is worth reading, but there’s a nugget of particular interest buried halfway through the piece:

In 1962 [William] Fulbright launched an investigation of foreign lobbyists in Washington, attempting to force AIPAC to register as an agent of Israel rather than a domestic American lobby. His chief investigator was a journalist named Walter Pincus. (Today, Pincus, the Washington Post’s veteran national security reporter, helps cover the Jane Harman story and the Rosen-Weissman trial.)

“Israel controls the United States Senate,” Fulbright told Face the Nation in 1973. “Around 80 percent are completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants it gets. Jewish influence in the House of Representatives is even greater.” (Years later, after retiring from the Senate, Fulbright registered as a foreign agent for Saudi Arabia.)

Ben-David neglects to mention that Pincus also covered the aftermath of the Freeman debacle for the Post, and did so in a thoroughly dishonest fashion. Most embarrassing was a story he filed on the Arab media’s reaction to Freeman’s resignation, as if the typically paranoid, inaccurate, and anti-Semitic ramblings of the Arab press were somehow newsworthy (the piece was deftly skewered by Noah Pollak). Nevertheless, by reminding us of Pincus’s past work as a “chief investigator” for the segregationist and virulently anti-Israel William Fulbright, Ben-David provides context for understanding his contemporary reporting on Israel.

Paul Krugman isn’t one for subtlety, but his latest column about CIA interrogations during the Bush years really takes hyperbole to new heights:

In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those [founding American] ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for.

As a liberal, Krugman ought to be eminently familiar with the entire catalogue of American sins. Were the memos released last week really demonstrative of a greater “betrayal” of American ideals than slavery, massacres of Native Americans, Jim Crow, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II? One doesn’t have to be a devotee of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to be familiar with these events. Perhaps Krugman conveniently overlooked these instances of American dishonor because Democrats presided over them.

This hyperbole is demonstrative of the the outrage racket indulged in by the Left since Abu Ghraib. Proclaiming one’s shame of the United States isn’t anything new for liberals, but in the aftermath of 9/11 they had to wait a few years before finding a reasonable pretext. In the freshest round of self-flagellation, the more scandalized one can become over revelations that American interrogators put wet towels on the faces of terrorist masterminds or subjected them to loud music for hours on end, the greater moral standing one can claim for oneself. To be unmoved by these tactics is to be cold and heartless. Outrage, much of it insincere, has become a badge of pride for swathes of the liberal commentariat and earns them membership in the club of the self-righteous. If you aren’t outraged at what’s taken place in your name — and if you’re not willing to share it with the country on a regular basis — then you’re simply a Cheney-esque barbarian, no different from Nazis and Communists.

The moral vanity of these people is a thing to behold.

Last week, I wrote an op-ed for the Jerusalem Post in which I criticized J Street’s endorsing the production of Seven Jewish Children, by the British playwright Caryl Churchill, in Washington, DC. For those of you not familiar with the 10-minute play (the full text of which is available here), it is enough to say that it draws a direct parallel between Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews and Israel’s contemporary treatment of the Palestinians. In the words of the prominent British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson, it is “wantonly inflammatory” and unquestionably anti-Semitic. In my op-ed, I questioned the propriety of a purportedly “pro-Israel” organization going out of its way to endorse the production of such material.

In a letter to the Post defending his organization’s stance, J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami writes:

J Street didn’t, as Kirchick noted, endorse all the words or sentiments in the play’s script. So it must be that Kirchick objects to providing a stage to a work that might provoke a conversation about the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the Jewish soul and Jewish morality.

I do not “object to providing a stage” to any theatrical work, and never did I give the impression that I do. Indeed, I wrote that “complaints over the propriety of [Seven Jewish Children's] production…should not be confused with a call to ban it.” And if Jeremy Ben-Ami thinks that a lurid, anti-Semitic screed “might provoke a conversation about the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the Jewish soul and Jewish morality,” then perhaps he should find work in a field unrelated to Jewish causes.

Not content to merely imply that I oppose freedom of speech, Ben-Ami comes right out and falsely accuses me of it directly:

Would Kirchick really ask theaters not to run plays which disagree with his political viewpoints? What country does he think he lives in?

Nowhere do I say that productions of Seven Jewish Children should be shut down because of what I believe to be the play’s utterly contemptible content. Let a thousand flowers bloom, and a million leftist, self-hating Jewish theater companies put on performances of anti-Semitic propaganda. It’ll only hurt their fund-raising appeals when they try to hit up Jews for money. Ben-Ami invents his charge out of whole cloth, painting me to be a censorious, close-minded, proto-fascist who would go around shutting down drum circles and readings of Palestinian love poetry.

What I questioned was the motivation of those who lead an ostensibly “pro-Israel” organization endorsing the dissemination of anti-Semitic material, and, moreover, justifying it as something beneficial to the “Jewish soul and Jewish morality.” There is a vast difference between an argument over the right of theaters to stage whatever plays they wish (where I consider myself a free speech absolutist) and the cultural value of the play’s content (an entirely subjective matter). So the debate here about J Street is not analogous to the one about the legality of neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois. The controversy over J Street and Seven Jewish Children, rather, is analogous to Jewish organizations at the time celebrating such an ugly spectacle because it “might provoke a conversation about the impact of the [Nazi-Jewish] conflict on the Jewish soul and Jewish morality.”

“Are we so vulnerable and weak as a community that we can’t endure a debate sparked by a 10-minute play at the JCC with some controversial dialogue?” Ben-Ami asks. The Jews are a resilient people, and they’ll certainly “endure” whatever phony “debate” is “sparked” by a bigoted play (notice how even the most lurid anti-Semitism never rises above the level of “controversial dialogue” to Ben-Ami and Jews of his ilk). What most Jews won’t endure, I predict, is the self-loathing masked as communal angst exemplified by J Street.

Scott Horton, April 14: “The Bush Six to Be Indicted”

Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast.

Reality, April 16: “Prosecutor: Drop Case Against Those Bush Officials”

MADRID, Spain (CNN) — Prosecutors will recommend that a Spanish court drop its investigation of six former officials in the administration of U.S. George W. Bush for alleged torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Spain’s attorney general said Thursday.

David Frum has more on Horton’s “enthusiastic credulity and indifference to fact.”

Over at his Nation magazine blog, Robert Dreyfuss, the former Middle East Editor of Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review, huffs and puffs over the U.S. government’s reaction to the problem of piracy off the coast of Somalia, as well as the media’s coverage of last week’s daring rescue, comparing it to such salacious celebrity scandals as the O.J. Simpson case and the Jon-Benet Ramsey murder mystery. Piracy on the high seas, Dreyfuss writes, is a “tempest-in-an-Indian Ocean-teapot.”

It’s hardly surprising that the national security correspondent for the Nation would react this way, seeing that the crisis resulted in a stunning victory for the American military and the death of three brigands.

But onto the more important question: is piracy off the Horn of Africa the problem that the media is cracking it up to be, or wildly overblown? In the past year alone, the Wall Street Journal reports, pirates have attacked 78 ships and hijacked 19. As I write this, nearly 300 people remain hostage to pirates. The Gulf of Aden, one of the main areas where pirates operate, is a major world shipping route where 20,000 ships and 7% of world oil shipments pass through it annually. To anyone concerned with the world energy markets, not to mention the rule of law on the high seas, piracy is a vitally important issue.

Nevertheless, one can understand how these facts would mean little to the reality-based folks over at the Nation, in particular, their LaRouchite national security reporter. On to more pressing matters, like urging a boycott of Seth Rogen movies and construction of the “Eurasian Landbridge.”

In light of President Obama’s returning home empty-handed after pleading with our European allies to boost their troop commitments to Afghanistan, it’s heartening to see that Poland has announced plans to increase its troop presence in the country by 20%. This is no small thing, considering that the primary threat to Poland is a revanchist Russia and that the diversion of troops and military material anywhere out of the country reduces its defenses against the expansionist power to its east. Poland has been one of America’s most steadfast allies since 9/11, a strong coalition partner in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a bedrock of NATO. It’s long past time that this nascent democracy got the respect it deserves.

Though he was much derided for it at the time, Donald Rumsfeld was onto something when, in response to complaints that “Europe” opposed the American-led war against Saddam Hussein’s regime, he spoke of people’s tendency to conflate the entire European continent with what was really just “Old Europe,” and even more specifically, was just France and Germany. The rest of the continent, he said, in particular the once-”captive nations” of the Cold War, are far more pro-American in their attitudes. What might have sounded provincial and simplistic six years ago to some, was in fact quite prescient.

At a news conference in Strasbourg, France, earlier this week, President Obama said the following in response to a questioner from Austria:

It was also interesting to see that political interaction in Europe is not that different from the United States Senate. There’s a lot of — I don’t know what the term is in Austrian — wheeling and dealing.

You can watch the video here.

This is a perfect Daily Show segment; all Jon Stewart has to do is play the clip and look smugly at the camera with his head in his hands as his audience laughs at the president’s ignorance over Austrians not having their own language but rather speaking German. Of course, had President Bush said this, he would have been laughed off the stage, as he was when he referred to Greeks as “Grecians.” Bush’s occasional verbal foibles were a cottage industry for Jacob Weisberg and supplied the left with a comforting narrative of presidential stupidity. Don’t expect this embarrassing gaffe to lead the ironic, snarky left to criticize its own.

A committee of Arab doctors has been established to “investigate” what caused the death of Yasser Arafat. The passing of the Palestinian terrorist leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner has been shrouded in mystery ever since he died in 2004, as his widow forbade an autopsy and the French doctors who treated him at his deathbed in Paris could not officially determine a reason for his sudden, “massive brain hemorrhage.” Other symptoms that Arafat faced in the later stages of his life were an immune system–suppressing blood disease, the loss of 1/3 of his weight, and mental dysfunction.

These conditions, of course, are all associated with Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), which may very well have killed Arafat. His alleged homosexuality was something of an open secret among intimates, if rarely ever reported on by a fawning media that didn’t want to complicate the macho image of the courageous resistance fighter (although Arafat’s homosexuality was probably not something that would bother most of the left-wing reporters who cover the Middle East, the same cannot be said for his Palestinian followers and sympathizers in the Arab world). Ignoring the probable cause of Arafat’s death has served the Palestinian political narrative, as it it allows them to place his death on the ledger of grievances against Israel: it was Israeli poison, not AIDS, that killed him. That the French medical officials who cared for Arafat could find no trace of lethal toxins in his system has done nothing to disabuse Palestinians of this meme.

So much of the discourse in the Arab and Muslim world thrives on deceit, the way in which homosexuality is discussed being one of the most egregious examples (for instance, see Saudi Arabia, where sex between men — including members of the Royal Family — is prevalent to a comical extent, yet for which the penalty is death by decapitation). Impaneling a group of venal doctors to issue a politically useful diagnosis on the long-deceased leader of the Palestinian national liberation movement may provide a gloss of legitimization for yet another Arab conspiracy theory. Its more corrosive effect will be the exacerbation of a destructive cultural artifice.

Courtesy of Mickey Kaus, we now have a view into the infamous “Journolist,” on which over 300 liberal journalists and activists debate — er — gossip all day like a group of high schoolers. Kaus got his hand on one thread, dated March 24, in which Center for American Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias starts off a discussion by exposing the supposed racism of Marty Peretz.

Today, Yglesias writes about the Foreign Policy Initiative, a new think tank/advocacy group founded by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan. He opines:

When I was a kid, I remember hearing that cockroaches would not only survive the sure-to-happen US-Soviet nuclear holocaust, but actually emerge stronger than ever as they devour our irradiated corpses. Similarly, there’s a new think tank in town, headed by Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and former Coalition Provisional Authority spokesguy Dan Senor.

The use of the word “cockroach” to describe undesirable persons has a long history, but there’s a specific and ugly context that is most pertinent. In the run-up to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 — in which nearly 1 million people were massacred over the course of just 100 days — “Hutu power” radio stations used the word repeatedly to describe members of the minority Tutsi tribe. Historians and political scientists who study Rwanda cite the intensity and pervasiveness of this hate speech as playing a crucial role in mobilizing Hutus to kill so many their fellow countrymen. Such language is used to dehumanize.

As an expert on nearly everything, surely Yglesias is aware of the word’s loaded history. That he would simultaneously act as traffic cop for internet civility is risible.

Earlier this week, news emerged of unidentified aircraft killing 39 arms smugglers in Sudan in January. Israel is suspected of having carried out the attack, as the smugglers were reportedly transferring Iranian-supplied weaponry to Hamas fighters in Gaza, via Egypt. On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Miniser Ehud Olmert issued the sort of non-denial denial characteristic of Israeli leaders when some terrorist’s car blows up in the Middle East. “We operate everywhere where we can hit terror infrastructure — in close places, in places further away, everywhere where we can hit terror infrastructure, we hit them and we hit them in a way that increases deterrence,” he said.

Not everyone is pleased by Israel taking out a bunch of Islamist terrorists in the deserts of Sudan. Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation’s national security correspondent (and former Middle East editor of Lyndon LaRouche’s newspaper), has an interesting take:

But the raid, which reportedly killed between 30 and 40 people and destroyed 17 trucks, is a big deal, even though it occurred months ago, and it could severely destabilize Sudan, inflame relations between Arab countries, Iran, and the United States, and set the stage for a response by Iran. (emphasis added)

Yes, because an air-strike in Sudan might precipitate a genocide, or spark a civil war, or lead to the international criminal indictment of the country’s president, or… I don’t expect much from The Nation these days, but this is akin to arguing that intercourse with a pregnant woman puts her at risk of becoming pregnant.

Today brings the disappointing news that the government of South Africa has denied a visa to the Dalai Lama, who was planning to visit next year for a peace conference associated with the World Cup. The event is being organized by three South African Nobel Laureates: former Presidents Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu has announced his decision to back out of the conference due to the government’s action, saying that, “We are shamelessly succumbing to Chinese pressure.”

If only the explanation was so simple. Contrary to Tutu’s assertion, the South African government came out with a statement claiming that China had no role to play in its decision. If true, that makes this episode even more disturbing. Normally when these sorts of choices are made to appease Chinese demands, it’s due to China’s economic leverage over the country in question. But in the Chinese-South African trading relationship the South Africans are hardly the weaker party. Exchange with South Africa represents 20.8% of China’s trade on the entire African continent, putting South Africa in a strong position to say “no” to the inevitable Chinese complaint that arises whenever the Dalai Lama travels anywhere.

There doesn’t need to be an economic rationale for this decision, as South Africa’s relationship with China is deeper than the desire for mere lucre. As I’ve written before, the foreign policy of post-apartheid South Africa has taken on a disturbingly anti-Western and Third-Worldist tone. While the African National Congress has adopted many free market economic policies that angered the populist segments of its broad coalition, on foreign policy it has hewed closely to the “anti-imperialist” precepts espoused by its intellectual leaders — almost all of whom were Soviet-sympathizing leftists who formed close relationships with revolutionary movements around the world. It is for this reason that the ANC is so virulently anti-Israel and supportive of Robert Mugabe, to take just two pressing international controversies. This frame of thinking perceives the United States and European powers as colonialist, while seeing China — whose record in Africa over the past decade is far closer to “imperialism” than than that of the United States — as the savior of the continent.

This latest episode once again reveals the startling hypocrisy of the ANC, which for some 40 years was sustained by the solidarity it earned internationally. Banned in South Africa and with its leaders either in jail or exile, the ANC set up offices around the world and appealed to governments, NGOs, and people of good conscience to join the fight against apartheid. It successfully pressured governments to boycott South Africa economically, and ironically, in international sporting venues as well. The ANC could never have ended apartheid on its own; for most of its history it was a battered and weakened organization that lived off the generosity and sympathy of friends abroad. It says something sad about the legacy of the anti-apartheid movement when the very same people who rightly insisted that to ignore their pleas was to be complicit in a crime against humanity have turned their back on another’s struggle for freedom.

There are a lot of unexpected gems in Philip Weiss’s American Conservative story on Chas Freeman, especially from the great defender of the Tiananmen Square massacre himself. The following one really takes the cake for what it says about the various manias of State Department Arabists and the journalists who love them:

I am interested in seeing the survival of a humane and not a thuggish Jewish state in the Middle East.

Let us, for analytic purposes, take at face value Freeman’s characteristic of Israel as a “thuggish” state. What, then, does that make Saudi Arabia, the monarchy to which Freeman was posted as Ambassador and where he developed a severe state of clientitis? The state where gays are beheaded, women are banned from driving, and the practice of Christianity is outlawed? Surely, rational people can agree that the things the Saudi monarchy does to keep itself in power are more “thuggish” than the Israeli occupation. Certainly, “thuggish” and stronger epithets can also be used to describe Ba’athist Syria, or Jordan, where torture is routine. Why is it only the perceived transgressions of Israel that rile men like Chas Freeman and the Israel-obsessives at the American Conservative?

It was only a matter of time before J Street — the self-proclaimed “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization that is neither — came to the defense of Tiananmen Square Massacre enthusiast Charles “Chas” Freeman. In a statement released Friday, J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami says says that “J Street stayed out of this fight. First, we – probably like many of those who did comment – did not know enough about Freeman or his positions to really take a stand.” But even though Ben-Ami admits that his organization didn’t bother to familiarize themselves with Freeman and his worldview, he then goes on record defending the man and attacking his critics. “What is important to me is that the Obama team not draw the lesson from this episode that they simply need to be more careful vetting of appointees to make sure they’ve never criticized Israel,” he writes.

The problem with this assertion is that there are plenty of people in the Obama administration, up to and including President Obama himself, who have criticized Israel, some quite stridently. This has been the case in every presidential administration. So the claim that Freeman lost out because he failed to pass an ideological litmus test imposed by “Israel-firsters,” in the language of his intemperate son, is a straw man argument, and it’s disappointing, though not surprising, that Ben-Ami would parrot it.

Israel was not at the heart of the controversy over Chas Freeman. And Ben-Ami never actually acknowledges just what it is that made so many people — liberals, conservatives, libertarians, Democrats, Republicans etc. — outraged about his appointment to the NIC Chair. Doing so might lend credence to those critics’ arguments, so Ben-Ami does the easier thing. He ignores these concerns and propagates the meme that it was Freeman’s statements on Israel — awful as they were — that ultimately ended his career, despite all evidence to the contrary. (Does Jeremy Ben-Ami believe that Congressmen Wolf and Hastings, as well as Senators Bond, Coburn and Chambliss were all lying when they told the media that the dread Israel Lobby had next to nothing to do with scuttling Freeman’s appointment?)

Read the rest of this entry »