Category Archives: Media Criticism

The Obama/Netanyahu Phone Call

The crisis has exploded:

The crisis in the relationship we discuss in our new editorial statement has entered a new and potentially unprecedented phase.

It may well be that the president is going to present American Jews with a choice over the coming months no American president should ask us to make—to become parties to and participants in his effort to create what, in 2009, he called “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel.

…If you want to hate what Netanyahu said, hate it. But here’s the thing: How the prime minister of Israel talks about Israeli citizens who possess equal rights under the law and have their own means of redress under the law if they are mistreated should have no basis whatever in the “assessment” of the bilateral relationship between the United States and Israel. The president has spent years making very nice patter with Turkey’s Erdogan and other foreign leaders whose treatment of minorities do not deserve mention alongside Israel’s and whose suffering small sub-populations have no means of achieving redress.

Even those who are furious with Netanyahu should really take a breath and a close look and consider this point carefully: The Arab-vote business is a pretext. American presidents, this one especially, typically do not revisit special strategic relationships based on election-day maneuvers in a democracy, however unpleasant they might find them. In my view, Obama is hoping once again to use liberal Jewish disaffection in the United States with Netanyahu as a wedge to give him space to make a major policy pivot from the special relationship—one for which he has hungered since he came into office.

Yes.

[Update early evening]

No peace in the Middle East soon, but it’s not because of Bibi.

The idiocy of the left knows no bounds.

Bibi King

What his victory implies for 2016:

Israel, like America, has a “silent majority” and they have stood up tall in opposition to so-called liberalism/progressivism and defeatism against Islamic terror. That same “silent majority” is very likely to stand up again in this country in 2016 for similar reasons. They already did in 2014 – and they could go further, unraveling all of Obama’s policies and destroying his legacy.

Well, we can hope. I do suspect there was a backlash against what was clearly perceived to be the administration’s interference in the election. Which makes the victory that much more sweet.

[Afternoon update]

Bibi’s win makes leftists cry (there’s nothing “liberal” about them).

[Update a couple minutes later]

Israel chose Bibi over Barack.

Yup.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

How Rand Paul’s digital team helped re-elect Bibi.

[Update a while later]

Bibifreude, baby.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Powerline has more.

Scott Walker

This is disappointing:

If Walker is the guy I hope he is (I’ve been a booster), he won’t just have to take on his enemies, he’ll have to take on his friends, too (something Cruz, Paul and even Jeb can claim to have done). Isn’t that the point of the anti-establishment movement on the right? That reform starts with reforming how we run our own affairs? Well if there’s a more obvious hive of cronyism in the GOP than the Iowa ethanol racket, I’d like to hear about it.

I get that Walker needs to win Iowa and that staffers aren’t more important than the candidate. But principles are. If Walker didn’t want a critic of the Iowa caucuses on his payroll he shouldn’t have hired one. But he did. And throwing her under the bus for this, suggests not only that he’s got some problems getting ready for prime time, it also suggests he can get rolled by the Iowa GOP establishment. What happens when he gets to Washington?

Good question. I think it really is true that the only reason the disgusting ethanol subsidy persists is because of the irrational notion that the Iowa caucuses should have an outsized influence on the nomination.

[Update later morning]

More thoughts from Stephen Kruiser.