Zandar's Thought Of The Day

It's notable that when Glenn Greenwald is absolutely capable of penning a perfectly rational, well-argued, and fact-supported piece involving Barack Obama's policies, in this case dealing with something as complex and subtle as the President's foreign policy involving Israel...when it suits Double G, that is.  But as you can see, even when Greenwald agrees with the President's actions, they are never quite good enough to satisfy his critics on the left.

What made this last week significant is that it underscores how politically difficult such an undertaking is for any American President: precisely because of the obsessive, relentless Israel Lobby that Walt and Mearsheimer invented in their conspiratorial, bigoted heads.  If even the tiniest step provokes the backlash that we saw this week, imagine the domestic political upheaval which a true effort would engender.  The New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg put it this way:

The President wants to make peace and presumably knows that it won't happen without a huge and politically brutal American effort. Such an effort would probably provoke the Israel lobby (a better name for which would be the Likud lobby) into an all-out fight against his reëlection. 

Andrew Sullivan added:  "To achieve this, he has to face down the apocalyptic Christianist right, the entire FNC-RNC media machine, a sizable chunk of his party's financial base, and the US Congress."

And once again, Greenwald is correct here.  I've said as much myself since the President's Middle East speech last week.  Any US President is going to have a hell of a time making any changes at all to our Israel policy, period...and he bemoans the difficulty and near epic futility of such a Sisyphean task.  Which makes the very next line in the article filled with irony of such density that it threatens to become a black hole:

It's far from clear that Obama's commitment to this outcome is genuine.

And people wonder why Obama has such a hard time with Israel, when this is largely the level of "support" he gets on actually speaking truth to power on the subject from his own side.  And Greenwald is ironically light-years ahead of some members of the President's own party, which is the far larger issue.