Jack Ross says I'm being paranoid about Rahm Emanuel's influence.
I think he found himself in a
glorious trap of his own making – first, by being constrained by
Illinois from really going to bat for Hillary, and second, to now be
succeeded in the DCCC by Chris Van Hollen,
my former congressman when I lived in Maryland who said the right
things during the Lebanon War, however ignominious the consequences for
him were, who will [likely] be at the helm of twice as many House pickups for
the Democrats.
Which brings us to the real reason the Democrats
have let the war go on as they have.
No doubt Rahm and his cronies
have made a bad situation worse, but the Democrats aren’t doing it
because of Israel or internationalism or anything so silly as that –
they’re doing it merely to keep the issue alive for the 2008 election.
Morally reprehensible, but its politics, what else is new? They
probably tell the more progressive members a variation on the line from
Spaceballs “We’re not just doing it for money, we’re doing it for a
shitload of money!” – “We’re not just doing this to win an election,
we’re doing it for the most massive landslide in the presidency and
both houses since 1932”.
Again, a human tragedy, which Rahm Emanuel will be condemned by God and history for his role in, but that’s the world we live in.
So Jack is supplanting my understanding of secret Zionists with an even darker theory, cynical murderous Democrats. At least in my understanding, they have a positive motivation. I’m not convinced. I don’t think we’ll ever know the true motivations of the war supporters, till there are hearings or actual journalism or Whittaker-Chambers-like defections from the neocons. Or till they write their memoirs and tell us why they drank the Koolaid.
Rahm Emanuel is opaque, and political to his bones. My problem here is that if there’s a scintilla of Zionism, I’d like to know about it–the same way I’m told constantly that fundamentalist Christians don’t like stem cell research. It doesn’t disqualify Zionists from participation; it’s just information, the lifeblood of a democracy. As it is, I always feel that the wool is being pulled over my eyes.
The Law of Return (which allows me to move to Israel) created, as Jacob Blaustein and Elmer Berger feared it would, a tug on Jewish American citizens. And it created a weird boomerang effect. A lot of people who went over there soon came back to play a role here. So, Rahm Emanuel, Jeffrey Goldberg and Michael Oren all served in Israel to one degree or another and now have prominent roles in our politics. Gershom Gorenberg’s more on my team, but he made aliyah a long time ago for religious reasons and now writes about Israel for an American audience, including attacking Walt and Mearsheimer (got to get to that). Hillel Halkin also made aliyah a long time ago and regularly holds forth even on such subjects as American pluralism for Commentary. Thank you, do I really need a religious nationalist’s advice on this score? Dore Gold left Scarsdale to become a power broker in Israel and now writes about eternally undivided Jerusalem and is a scholar at American Enterprise Institute (or was as of 2005; the latest report). The only boomeranger I’m really grateful for politically is Leon Hadar, former JPost reporter now at Cato, truly independent and imaginative.
I find it confusing. Maybe I ought to accept that people are more international these days, everyone gets to weigh in. I wouldn’t mind hearing from some Arabs..
