Great analysis by Steve Walt of the Freeman affair, its chilling effect and the silver lining (Israel lobby was seen fleeing the scene of the crime in a Lexus). Great time-line and reporting of the foreign-policy establishment's support for Freeman by Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe here. Walt's best line is that the Democratic Party is a party of "wimps." And he's talking about the man who just won a "historic election." He's right. Obama has a progressive base but fails to represent it on Gaza or the occupation.
Why? Because of a money interest in the occupation. Because he fears the desertion of big Jewish givers on key congressional races.
This is why I constantly invoke Lincoln and the 1850s. The existing party structure had cut a deal and failed to represent the moral leadership of the country, the newspapermen of New York and Chicago, the churchmen and abolitionists of Boston, and freethinking lawyers in Springfield, Ill., who were opposed to the spread of slavery. These people were willing to leave their parties to oppose slavery and build the Republican Party. The Democrats called them radicals for doing so. The Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court revealed to the intelligent what the intelligent all know now: the political structure is corrupted by a force that as Chas Freeman says is endangering our national security.
The great imbalance politically now is that Tons of Americans are unrepresented by the Israel lobby. There is righteous rage, as Luban and Lobe point out, among the foreign-policy elite over this question. Old lefties like me are up in arms. Realists at Harvard are upset. Multiculturalists are appalled by Gaza. The antiwar intellectuals are upset. Who will represent us? Not wimps.
P.S. Very dark piece by Joe Klein: "Assassination." The real target of the Freeman mob (not the lobby, he says; and Klein is wrong/incurious) is Obama. Scary. I'm sure assassination/target is unconscious, inadvertent.
