By now "moral clarity" just means blanket support for Israel. Nothing moral about it, and the phrase should be retired.

Do you really think that Israel, the only democracy in the ME, is interested in squandering its shared resources on a war?

I'm not an Israeli and I'm asking whether my nation should be squandering its own resources on the thousand-year-old blood feud you mention.

I doubt that anyone has ever even proposed American even-handedness in the Israel-Palestine dispute. Even-handedness would be either no support for either side, or equal support for the Palestinians and the Israelis.

Still less has anyone ever proposed that the US support the Palestinians instead of Israel, and give the billions of dollars to them instead of Israel.

The only debate is between rational supporters of Israel and bloodthirsty fanatic supporters of Israel, such as yourself and the Armageddon Christians.

Israel-Palestine disputes always degenerate quickly. Nazi talk is some of the worst of it.

We want you, personally, nuked. We don't even know whether you're Jewish, you may well be a philo-Semitic Armageddonist.

"Paying us dividends in strategic, military, and intellectual capital."

I doubt that. Whatever capital there is of those kinds is Israel's capital, not ours. I'm not sure we gain anything. We just seem to end up responsible for policies we have no voice in. The bloodthirsty minority in each country ends up winning.

I am not opposed to supporting Israel, and few here are. Read my above statement. I haven't even proposed neutrality.

If by "military capital" you mean "little practice wars, like the Spanish Civil War was for Italy and Germany", that's going to far into "something stinks"' territory for me to touch.

During most of the period 700 AD -- 1800 AD Jews mediated between Christendom and Islam, and at key points (the Crusades, the Spanish Reconquista) the Jews and the Muslims were allies.

So the 1400-year blood feud is a tendentious myth.

You think just maybe, the Israelis had firm intelligence about those targets that moved them onto the hit list?

Or not. Can't be ruled out. Quite possible either way.

SIGH, you can be sure that if the Palestinians were being opressed by anyone other than the Jews, the world could care less. This has never been about the Palestinians.

Unfortunately, Israeli policy is effectively American policy, so we have to have a special concern about it. If we were giving several billion a year to Sudan, Darfur would be our problem too.

As long as Israel is above all criticism, the worst Israelis will rule.

Joe Frank: I suggest that the US shift its outsourcing to some country that causes us less grief.

I won't ask you to share the seekrit military information you have.

Yes, Glenn, the Jews are native to Israel, predating the Palestinians.

Nobody should care. France was originally Celtic. Turkey was originally Greek, Syrian Christian, etc. The Ukraine as originally Ossete. North Africa was originally Christian. Over the last 150 years or so Jews have displaced Arabs.

Native Americans aren't attacking us because they were destroyed as peoples by 1880. They only got their civil rights 50 or more years later. This is what is in store for the Palestinians, the way things are going.

There's no reason for the US to help out this process, except in the contextof partnering in an American imperial mission that most of us don't want.

Israel controls our elections, our news media, our entertainment media, our finance, and our foreign policy. The head of Homeland Security is a dual-citizenship Israeli. Rahm Emanuel fought in the IDF while America was at war.

I hate that crap.

Joe:

Dispossession claims in living memory have priority over all that other crap. Forget that BS.

Someone here, possibly you, mentioned a thousand-year enmity. That's what I was addressing.

You get all these morons talking about how Minnesotans are stupid. That's often the entirety of their message, which doesn't make them seem at all smart themselves.

Or they parrot uninformed allegations for Coulter or the WSJ or Lott or one of the others, often using exactly the same words.

Sometimes I'd just say that if you accuse someone of a crime, you should have some factual evidence. Many seemed totally baffled by the concepts of "facts" and "evidence". They were pretty sure that they disagreed with me, but they weren't quite sure exactly what I had said. One called me a troll.

"If it smells fishy, it probably is fishy". "If you smell a rat, there's probably a rat around". Actual arguments I was given by people who had no detailed knowledge at all of what had actually happened.

There are already a couple of them on this thread, I see.

Imagine Wichita Falls Dallas Cowboys fans tweaking on meth after another blown game. That's the Republican internet intelligentsia at this point.

I suppose it's better to do the wrong thing for the right reasons than it is to do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, as the Bush Administration did. Call me simple-minded, though, but I'd prefer that Obama do the right thing for the right reasons. Just not appointing Geithner would have been a start.

Accusing Obama of being just like Bush will the new stupid media trick, even from media who were OK with Bush at the time. I'm already sick of it, and there's almost four years to go.

Brooks is an insider, but I think of him promarily as a fluent, sly Republican operative. His job is to split off perhaps 1% of the Democratic support by relaying the Republican message to sensible moderates in a not-visibly-insane way. With hardly any exceptions, the real Republican spokesmen (Boehner, McConnell, et al) are unconvincing or repellent to anyone who has understanding of what's happening.