Props to Rachel Maddow. A day after we knocked her for failing to mention AIPAC’s role in pushing war with Iran, she took on the lobby last night in blasting the Democratic senators who are trying to derail the Iran deal.
“A vote for this thing is a vote to go to war with Iran,” she said, in comments that Ali Gharib picked up. And Steve Clemons said that Obama will veto the legislation if it passes.
Here is Maddow on AIPAC:
Because of the domestic political pressures — and it’s groups like AIPAC, I think, leading the way on this. They’ve sort of been seen as the lead push on this in terms of an outside group, but it’s other groups as well. In terms of that domestic political pressure and the way that Democratic Senators as well as Republicans are susceptible to it, if Bob Menendez could get Harry Reid to allow a vote on this, and if the Senate could vote on it, do you think that there’s a chance that it could pass with a veto-proof majority? Could the White House get their bluff called on vetoing it?
Good for Maddow. Her ears must be burning.
Well done, Rachel. Keep reading MW– it’ll give you guts and facts.
She noticed the elephant in the room by pretending that it’s a menagerie. The “other groups” pushing for this bill are also Zionist orgs.
Now I got the feeling that MW is one of those powerful groups that can intimidate the media.
Alternative theory is that this (sabotaging the negotiations) is so insane that there is some backlash at the top of our establishment. So Maddow got some green light to bolder.
Does Mondoweiss take writers and editors aside and steer them toward one message, away from another, with an escalating series of threats and rewards, and thus achieve message control through intimidation? At its best, Mondoweiss has pointed out the hollowness and corruption of some of those messages, and embarrassed those writers and editors, and eventually demarcated limits to how far the intimidators can push them. Mondoweiss has also beaten a trail through the snowdrift of disinformation, so that others find it easier to follow. A prophet crying in the wilderness, a pioneer with arrows in his back. Not an intimidator.
The “alternative theory” is that Likud-Neoconism has been very consistent now for twenty years, Netanyahu has demanded of the intimidators the same message in the same words for so long – “Iran is two years from a nuclear weapon, the immediate equivalent of Nazi Germany in terms of existential threat to the Jewish people; therefore extreme emergency measures are required now” – all the while using warmongering, a strategic plan for regime change and societal disintegration in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, among the Palestinians, phonied and stove-piped “intelligence,” phony peace processes and AIPAC’s power in DC, and the ADL, CAMERA, Podhoretz, Kristol, and the Dersh to smear dissenters, to hold up a consistent story that has become so threadbare and so hollow that more and more people can no longer suffer to speak it or hear it spoken, without having a physical reaction of exhaustion or revulsion.
The Israelis need to dump Likud, because Netanyahu’s end-game is very clear and progressively ugly. American Jews are apparently in a better position to see this than the Israelis. The unified message attempting to smear the ASA – “all those academics are just a bunch of ignorant Anti-Semites” – will be revealed for what it is when the rest of academia joins them in condemning the Occupation. “Bigoted liberal academic establishment!” The absurdity speaks for itself.
The momentum is clear. Only the timing remains uncertain. But “breaking friction is greater than sliding friction” and Likud is already sliding toward the dustbin.