Tonight on Hardball, Chris Matthews lamented Obama’s passivity and, speaking of his foreign policy, said that his speech on Iraq the other night was the speech of a neoconservative, not a "dove." Over the course of the hour, the hobbyhorsical host several times slammed the Republican Party as a party of "neocons" that will give us "war on demand," which started a war against a country that hadn’t attacked us, which wants to attack Iran now.
The problem with these partisan rants is that Matthews knows just what MJ Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel report in the posts below this one: that the Israel lobby reigns in the Congress, terrifies the Democratic candidates, and forbids us to talk to Hamas even though we talked to parties of violent resistance in Iraq and Northern Ireland. As for Obama’s neoconservativism, anti-Vietnam-war Democrats like Schumer, Berman, and Lieberman voted for the Iraq war, surely in part because of Israel’s security. Just as many Democrats are now pushing for an attack on Iran. The Iran saber-rattling is not a partisan issue; both parties are corrupted (as both existing parties were by the slave power); and the cause of the rot is the Israel lobby. Until the media start talking about it, politicians can’t run against it, and voters won’t be able to vote against it.
