Booker’s whole career has been a testament to a poisonous financial-corporatist consensus, which dresses up the interests of big money in post-ideological garb.
And Rosenberg links to videos of “Booker himself groveling for dollars at AIPAC.” At that link, Booker fawns over Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Max Blumenthal reported on his 2008 performance earlier this year:
Booker waxed nostalgic about his first trip to Israel, arranged by Boteach when he was 22-years old. “Only when I saw Israel did it really become a part of my being and did I understand that the nation’s security really is about land,” Booker told the AIPAC crowd. After visiting the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and hearing from his guide about the danger of Syrian missiles raining down on Israeli cities, he concluded, “We cannot allow the valley to be saturated with the blood of Jews.”
Note that Boteach, a failed Republican candidate for the House, also is Samantha Power’s powerful advocate. He has likened Palestinians to Nazis and denied that there’s an occupation.
I am a regular visitor to, and champion of, the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria, where I visited just last week, even as President Obama’s administration has voiced opposition to Israeli settlement.
You’d think that going against the Obama administration on such a key policy provision would make you political roadkill. Especially if you are a failed Republican congressional candidate in New Jersey who is friends of Sheldon Adelson, who spent millions to take Obama down. But the lobby is above party; and Power needed Boteach to get the U.N. ambassadorship. When Obama was suffering in the Jewish community in 2011, Power sought Boteach out and later cried in front of Jewish leaders at his behest as they went on about Israel. After she had her cakewalk Senate hearing, she did a pubcrawl with Boteach. Well… Cory Booker got there first. And that’s how the lobby works: it summons rising politicians and gets them in the fold.
@Phil
If I had to be in a foxhole, it would be with Cory Booker, and not you.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/nyregion/mayor-cory-booker-says-he-felt-terror-in-fire-rescue.html?_r=0
Booker and Boteach have been friends for a long time, since Booker became President of the L’Chaim society at Oxford. The idea that their relationship is about “the Lobby” summoning rising politicians into the fold is quite simply an ignorant lie.
You’re really just like the Arab League. You’ll keep the whole world from getting anything done just to shriek on about the I-P conflict.
The rest of world pretty much credits Booker with turning Newark around after years of corruption and mismanagement. You apparently believe that the only thing that New Jerseyians should care about is Shmuley Boteach.
Once again, you’re irrelevant, and this time, you’re simply lying.
The dominant political ideology in America is now neither traditional conservatism nor traditional liberalism but Zionism (both Likud Zionism and liberal Zionism). The neoconservative wing of the Israel lobby (RJC) controls the Republican Party and the neoliberal wing of the Israel lobby (NJDC) controls the Democratic Party.
The key policies being promoted by this new trans-party regime: endless trillion-dollar wars on behalf of the Israeli interest (and Israeli messianic objectives), the total surveillance state, torture, radical wealth inequality, Wall Street corruption, the Clash of Civilizations, ethnic and religious nationalism (at least for one group), etc.
Democrats like Cory Booker, Samantha Power, Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi are key elements of this political machine, along with Republicans like Sheldon Adelson, Bernard Marcus, Eric Cantor and John McCain.
This is a historical development of extraordinary importance in American politics and culture — and no one has yet fully connected all the dots and understood the implications.
Cory Booker———-Self Serving Opportunist
Sheldon Adelson—-Ellis Island Opportunist
op·por·tun·ist
/ˌäpərˈt(y)o͞onist/
Noun
A person who exploits people and circumstances to gain advantage rather than being guided by principles.
No further explaination needed.