Yesterday I read Michael Tomasky's review in New York Review of Books (no link yet) of Robert Kaiser's book on the corruption of lobbyists. Tomasky is justly disturbed about the health-care lobby's ability to destroy Obama's work on health care and business destroying Obama's motions of tax fairness. He hopes that the era of lobbyists is ending. He blames Republicans chiefly for the explosion of lobbyists. So far so good.
I have to say I'm staggered that the New York Review can run this piece, and a good liberal can write it, on the basis of a book by a conventionally-intelligent high-status Washington journalist, and none of them feels any need at all to talk about the Israel lobby. Tomasky can't even apostrophize the idea of the Israel lobby–even as it's the talk of the 92d Street Y and Chas Freeman, too. It's no surprise that the New York Review has never run a review of Walt and Mearsheimer's important book on the lobby (and is said to have killed the review it commissioned).
This is about the smallmindedness of my own crowd, the liberal-left. Since when does the New York Review accept a newspaperman's parameters of what an issue is? Never. The Israel lobby is a lobby not because its adherents are making tons of money off it and are using the profits to buy politicians, which is the workmanlike Kaiser paradigm of lobbying, but because its adherents are devoted to it, many for religious/nationalist reasons, and are using money to buy politicians to nullify any impulse toward fairness in Israel/Palestine with the result, as Eric Alterman said at the 92d Street Y two nights ago, that Arabs fly planes into the World Trade Center– a central issue for our national security, as Freeman said in his goodbye letter. There are few PACs involved here. The Israel lobby doesn't need PACs because it doesn't have to tithe. All it has to do is whistle, and the ardent supporters will write checks. But the critical component of a lobby is still here: money is being used by a narrow interest to corrupt policymaking.
As usual, I sense some ideology lurking in the NYRB's/Tomasky's failure: possibly the usual fear of blaming any Jew for any thing, possibly secret adherence to Zionism, possibly in Tomasky's case, adherence to the Democratic Party, which is more corrupted than the Republicans by this stuff; but the result is a failure to inform the elite about how policy is influenced in Washington.
"As usual, I sense some ideology lurking in the NYRB's/Tomasky's failure: possibly fear of blaming any Jews for anything, possibly secret adherence to Zionism, possibly in Tomasky's case, adherence to the Democratic Party, which is more corrupted than the Republicans by this stuff; but the result is a failure to inform the elite about how policy is influenced in Washington."
The last part of this statement is what I find interesting. Any group that has no clue that there could be corruption or bad policy regarding Israel, or who needs a newspaper to clue them in, is not elite in any sense. Instead, they are momentarily priveleged.
There are many people who are nowhere near a center of power who have some sort of understanding of what is going on, so there is no excuse for the priveleged to be in the dark. Sure, average citizens usually make a wrong move or two when connecting the dots, but there is no excuse for ignorance, no matter which side you support.
If our elites are so ignorant, dishonest or easily swayed on other issues of obviouse importants, then how can anyone expect them to manage a nation honestly or effettively? I can't think of an issue where the decision makers seem wise or in-touch. Obama is just an extension of Bush when it cimes to the Middle East, economics and immigration, and seemingly just as out of touch and blindly ego-driven.
Harper's is similarly disappointing. Guardedly critical comments about the lobby or Israel seem to be permitted in the blog but not in the magazine. Under the editorship of Lewis Lapham we might have hoped for a piece in Harper's about the Gaza Massacre but there will be nothing now, of course.
Ken Silverstein wrote a mendacious piece in the Nov. 08 issue ("Useful amateurs: How the smearing of Barack Obama got crowd-sourced") link to harpers.org
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that wholly neglected to mention the role of the Jewish community's email campaign that PW and MJ Rosenberg wrote so well about.
What hope is there for us when the NRoB and Harper's are silenced?
(And while we are at it, shed a tear for what the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly once were.)