Barack Obama’s reelect numbers are down to 42% among Jews.

[Update a while later]

Is the US still an ally of Israel?

The hard Left’s multiculturalist furor at Israel has made enormous inroads into the Democratic party, as we see with the current “reset” policy of the Obama administration, while the old blue-blood, country-club Republicans who tsk-tsked Israel have almost vanished. Over the last 20 years the Left has reconstructed Israel from a bastion of the traditional liberal Jewish tradition into a Western, capitalist hegemonic oppressor, all of which shows the power of campus multculturalism when a tiny democratic country of 7 million can be reconfigured into a colonial power.

And that hard Left is running the country now. At least until January.

[Update a few minutes later]

Why Barack Obama is making Rashid Khalidi happy. Funny thing, the LA Times never has released the video of the birthday party. I wonder if it even exists any more?

He’s clearly got Barack Obama’s number:

Unlike the United States, Iran is run by adults. This is why the world fears Iran more than it fears the United States.

Has there been any rally to the side of the United States in this dispute?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows this and so he mocked Obama: “Mr. Obama, you are a newcomer (to politics). Wait until your sweat dries and get some experience. Be careful not to read just any paper put in front of you or repeat any statement recommended. (American officials) bigger than you, more bullying than you, couldn’t do a damn thing, let alone you.”

I remember thirty years ago, when there was so much “liberal” concern that Ronald Reagan would lead the US into war. But just as in 1938, it’s feckless thinking and policies like these that are much more likely to, and one for which we’re not prepared.

[Update a few minutes later]

Thoughts of allies and enemies past:

Why does this matter, other than that it is stupid for a country to treat old friends like belligerents and old belligerents like friends?

In the case of Britain, history resonates. Over the last century it was Britain that, sometimes alone, defended liberal constitutional government, whether from Prussian militarism or the hydra of fascism, Nazism, and Japanese militarism. It was always a reliable partner in the Cold War, and aside from normal periodic spats was a loyal ally in most of America’s postwar fights. We forget sometimes the courageous record of the British in Korea, or their lonely alliance with us in Iraq. Note that this is all apart from the British role in general in the shaping of Western liberal political history, and in particular the protocols and values that underlie so much of the American experiment, from a common language to a rich heritage of literature and thought. For an American president to be woefully ignorant of all that, and why it should count, is nothing short of unbelievable.

Obama is equally clueless about why, for a half-century at least, both Republican and Democratic presidents have forged a second special relationship, this one with Israel. There certainly were not always strategic advantages in doing so, given the Arab world’s vast petroleum reserves, its huge size and population in comparison to tiny Israel, and the global fear, first, of rampant Soviet-inspired Palestinian terrorism, and, subsequently, its radical Islamic epigone.

But he’s throwing that all away. Let’s just hope that 2013 isn’t too late to resurrect the relationships.

…so clueless?

About four years ago, around the time when Democrats were heatedly charging that Bush had “lied” about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in order to build a case for war (after all, they argued, if the weapons had existed, why weren’t we able to find them after liberating Iraq?), I was having lunch with Dr. Laurie Mylroie, one of America’s leading students of terrorism in general, and Iraqi terrorism in particular. Laurie was beside herself with anger. Why wasn’t the Bush administration citing Gen. James Clapper, the Director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, who said that satellite imagery proved conclusively that shortly before the war’s outbreak, Iraq had transferred its weapons of mass destruction to Syria? Why wasn’t it quoting Gen. Georges Sada, deputy chief of Saddam’s air force, or Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s chief-of-staff, both of whom also claimed that Saddam’s weapons had been transferred to Syria? Why was it so tongue-tied, so unsure of itself, so unwilling to answer its critics? Didn’t anybody in the White House realize that if the Democrats’ charges went unanswered, they would fatally undermine the entire case for the war?

By this time, however, I had left the White House, so I had to tell Laurie the truth: Her revelations about Generals Clapper and Sada (though not Ya’alon) were news to me, and I had no idea why the White House wasn’t citing them.

I couldn’t figure it out either. I guess now we know the reason.

Thanks for Obama, Karl. Hope it turns out better than it is right now.

Putin should be asking himself, “Why do they hate us?”

In the Caucasus itself, the brutal policies of Putin and his local henchmen have managed to totally alienate most of those that had not already been killed or driven into exile, and have given a huge boost to the jihadists at the expense of the centuries-old moderate Sufi Islam of the region. His failure has come at a staggering cost. The region’s economy has essentially collapsed, with unemployment rates of up to 80 percent, complete dependency on Moscow subsidies for bare economic survival, and “total corruption” as the rule, according to the Kremlin itself.

More significant still for the long-term, a decade of Putin has achieved something that seventy years of Soviet Communist rule were unable to do: generate a nearly universal animus for Russia and the Russians among the locals. The result has been an ongoing mass exodus of ethnic Russians from the region bringing their share of the population from more than a quarter in the 1980s to less than 10 percent today. Indeed, places like Chechnia, Ingushetia, and Dagestan seem to be on their way to becoming Russian-free, except for the few in mixed marriages. Given this reality on the ground, it is difficult to imagine Moscow holding onto these territories except through an unsustainable military occupation.

And more subway bombings. He’s uncorked the Jihadi bottle.