Gee, I’m not the only one who thinks that the White House is nuts on the Middle East and Israel.

The letter’s lead signatories were Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD). The letter had only circulated for three days last week before garnering 327 signatures, probably the most bipartisan effort seen on Capitol Hill in this session of Congress. It provides a measure of just how far out of the mainstream the Obama administration has gotten on relations with Israel.

Moreover, they’re entirely correct. Thanks to what amounts to a reversal of 20 years of American policy on settlements in Jerusalem, Obama has given the Palestinians a reason to refuse to come to the table that Israel simply can’t address. Obama has made peace a lot less likely than it was fifteen months ago by throwing his tantrum in such a public manner. Weakening Israel won’t bring peace — it will bring more attacks on Israel as Palestinians begin to believe that the US won’t back its ally any longer.

Jennifer Rubin believes Obama’s fumble was by design, or at least by instinctual hostility towards Israel. With advisers like Samantha Power at the White House, that hostility was known long before Obama got elected. Accidental, latent, or overt, Obama’s hostility towards a key democracy in the most strategic part of the world has raised eyebrows of both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill — perhaps belatedly, but not too late to put some serious pressure for this administration to grow the hell up.

They seem to be particularly impervious to that. As do their defenders, including some commenters here.

Why has Obama treated Netanyahu so rudely?

It seems pretty clear to me that, of all of the countries in the Middle East, there’s only one where he wants to see a regime change.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Instapundit has a theory:

Possibly Obama just hates Israel and hates Jews. That’s plausible — certainly nothing in his actions suggests otherwise, really.

But it’s also possible — I’d say likely — that there’s something else going on. I think Obama expects Israel to strike Iran, and wants to put distance between the United States and Israel in advance of that happening. (Perhaps he even thinks that treating Israel rudely will provoke such a response, saving him the trouble of doing anything about Iran himself, and avoiding the risk that things might go wrong if he does). On the most optimistic level, maybe this whole thing is a sham, and the U.S. is really helping Israel strike Iran, with this as distraction. The question for readers is which of these — not necessarily mutually exclusive — explanations is most plausible.

I’m going to go with Occam’s Razor myself. I’ve seen no evidence that Obama gives a damn whether or not Iran gets nukes (and perhaps he would even be happy to see it — who knows)?

[Update mid morning]

We are all Bibi Netanyahu now:

I think the reaction to Obama’s treatment of Bibi Netanyahu hits home because it was so personal in nature, and because it epitomized how the American people have been treated by Obama and the Democrats, with arrogance and disdain.

We have seen this attitude since the Inauguration, when Obama and the crowd treated George W. Bush with disrespect, in the smears by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other leading Democrats against health care protesters, in the daily attacks by the left-wing blogs and mainstream media against the Tea Party members, in the treatment of Sarah Palin and Trig Palin, in the bribes and budgetary chicanery used to pass a health care bill opposed by a significant majority of the population, and in the disgusting use of the race card to stifle legitimate political dissent.

In Bibi Netanyahu we see something we have lost in our leader, an unflinching sense of national destiny, an unapologetic pride in who we are and why we are, and a willingness to stand up to tyrants and neighborhood bullies regardless of the price.

Instead, we have a bully for a leader, who prefers the company of other bullies to true democrats.