This happens to every politician that reaches the national level. They run with every intention of doing-the-right-thing, they get elected and enter Washington with passion, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and then the piranhas (the corrupt Washington Establishment) goes to work on them, tells them to "compromise" and be a "team player" for the "good of the party" and the "good of the country." So they compromise here, cut a corner there, then everywhere, and they don't even really know it’s happened, but sooner rather than later, they themselves have become corrupt, and part of the problem.

Obama has only been in Washington for a few years, so he still has the veneer of authenticity, but mark my words, Obama's speech in front of the AIPAC piranhas yesterday was just the beginning…

“Undivided Jerusalem”…it didn’t take the "new messiah” very long to throw the Palestinians under the bus on behalf of the moneyed Jews, did it?

It's time for those on the left to acknowledge that Ron Paul & Ralph Nader, having been eschewed by the so called mainstream press, are the only true peace candidates, and that all the options put forward by the Democrats and Republicans are in fact designed to impose WWIII upon an unwilling American public which has been kept ignorant courtesy of the Zionist occupied press. Obama and McCain will go back in forth with feigned debate, but the reality is they both serve Israel and not America with their outlandish assertions as to the threat from Iran and the uncompromising mandate that Jerusalem remain 100% Israeli controlled.

All we can do is hope that an Obama presidency would do better than Clinton or Bush when dealing with the IP issue. But of course there is nothing he can say today to give us encouragement in that hope.

Yes there have been some positive events over the past: Walt and Mearsheimer, Jimmy Carter, Aaron David Miller's book, an increasingly aware American population, the J-Street lobby, the awareness of AIPAC espionage. But your problem is you are too much of an optimist.

The fact is that AIPAC has never been more powerful than it is right now. One good thing about this is that it may never again be as powerful as it is now either– AIPAC may be at the peak of its power, and so we can expect at least some downward slide from here.

But I counsel you with the words of Edward Said, whom I met in Berkeley at a talk he was giving there. He said the trick is to be a pesoptimist about the Palestinian situation. He said that one must first comprehend and internalize the reality of the dire situation that the Palestinians face. This was the pessimistic part. Then one had a duty to shed that pessimism, and convince oneself that through action, individual action, collective action, things can change.

I actually think in the long run things will change– it may take another 10 years for Americans to widely understand how bad their leaders have f–ed up, but they will, and journos like you will help. But putting your hopes on Obama is simply misplaced. He is not contemplating Palestinian suffering right now– he is not contemplating, period. He is getting with a bunch of advisers in order to figure out strategically what he should say so he wins.

Again, I admire to some extent your optimism, because my feelings tend in the opposite direction. In this case, I am sure I am right– pinning your hopes on Obama for real change is bound to be a disappointment.

Despite all the evidence that he is just a PR spokesperson for the same American foreign and domestic policies that Clinton, bush1 and bush2 supported…

Sorry for being so cynical here, Mr. Weiss :/

Note to Obama: prove me wrong!

If the Milbank article and "Bill Kristol At AIPAC: Obama And McCain "Don't Actually Differ" On Iran" from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/02/bill-kristol-at-aipac-oba_n_104799.html

does not show you what kind of a smarmy, Bill Clinton like politician Obama is, nothing will.

Well, the "liberal alternative" Israel lobby, J Street, also employs the "undivided Jerusalem" code on its website. So Obama may be under the impression that such a plank is what passes for a liberal, open-minded stance toward Israel these days.

But actually, zionism and liberalism are mutually incompatible. One can no more be a liberal zionist than one could have been a philanthropic Nazi, though doubtless some members of that party considered themselves highly refined examplars of humanitarianism, at least as it concerned their own tribe.

As long as AIPAC's unwritten "antizionism = antisemitism" dogma prevails, we will all have to go on parsing silly, elaborate, ambiguous code phrases — the sort of verbal thicket which emerges when the emperor has no clothes, but we all agree to go on discussing his fine fashion sense.

Zionism not only has no clothes; it's a rotting corpse that should have been consigned to the same untouchable ideological category as eugenics.

But if Obama's end goal is a one-state solution, then this would follow. If Obama's end goal is a true democratic Israel where all citizens can live in relative peace, then this would follow.

The two-state solution is not going to work.