Time To Check Your Lottery Tickets

...for the Dean of the Village Idiots himself, David Broder, is defending Chas Freeman, and taking Obama to task for refusing to stand up for him.

Had the lobbyists not prevailed, Freeman would have assigned the intelligence analysts this week to figure out why the Chinese provoked a naval incident off their coast and what lessons we could draw from the mixed reactions of other nations.

Over time, he said, he would have challenged analysts to remember that "it is not how highly classified information is, but how reliable, even if it's on the front page of the newspaper." He would have undermined the insularity of the intelligence world by asking members to meet with outside experts whose insights "may be worth more than security clearances." And he would have turned them loose even on "domestic" questions such as: "If we are 38th in the world in health, what could we learn from the other 37?"

All of this now gone, because, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Blair, Freeman's views are "beyond the pale."

Blair said that the White House told him that if he wanted Freeman, he'd have to fight for him himself. When I asked the White House on Tuesday if Obama supported Freeman, a National Security Council spokesman said he would check, but he never got back to me. Freeman vanished without a squawk from Obama.

And as much as it is generating a huge grinding noise inside my own chest to even consider this next sentence I still must say it: David Broder is absolutely correct.

It'll most likely neven happen again, but I can't argue with him for once. Obama left Freeman out to dry, didn't back up his own DNI in Dennis Blair, and totally folded without a whimper when both Republicans and Democrats swore fealty not to America, but to Israel.

AIPAC runs our foreign policy on the Middle East, plain and simple. Even David Broder can see it.