I agree that a true freeze would be progress. However, let's say that somehow Israel manages to truly freeze all new settlement for the period of a year. Hard to imagine, but let's say so just for argument.

In such a scenario, Israel will continue to have armed troops inside Palestine, armed settlers in countless enclaves, checkpoints that arbitrarily restrict and frustrate the movement of Palestinians within their own land, etc. etc. --a continuing unjust system of apartheid that will remain what it is today--unjust, unfair, and a constant source of anger and frustration among the occupied. As a result, there easily could be continuing acts of violence, both in the west bank and in Israel proper, by Palestinians of all sorts.

It is hard to see a freeze holding for very long under such conditions. The Israeli occupation of Palestine is one problem that may not be solved by incremental change. Those who believe incrementalism is a law of nature, and must be followed no matter what, may end up being disappointed.

Can anybody reasonably argue that Obama is NOT doing the right thing here?

Still waiting...

Waiting...

Waiting...

One could make a reasonable argument that Obama is NOT doing the right thing here because--even if he is wildly sucessful beyond all expectation and "freezes" all the illegal Israeli occupations in the west bank--the result would still be "frozen" apartheid. A myriad number of permanent Israeli settlements, roads, checkpoints cannot and will not be the basis for any form of lasting peace. A Palestinian state cannot exist with armed and belligerent settlers from another country within its borders.

Freezing settlement, by itself, will not satisfy any Palestinian, nor would it satisfy any American, if we were in Palestinian shoes.

So Obama's goals, if frozen settlement is as far as they go, are doomed to failure because they are insufficient for peace.

We are still reeling from 8 years of a president who largely ignored pragmatism and was ruled by ideology.

We replaced him with a president who largely ignores ideology and is ruled by pragmatism.

And yet, the second's behavior in office is disturbingly similar to his predecessor--at least in this area of ever-expanding executive power.

Why and how can that be?

...will resonate with nobody outside of the small rump that is now the Republican Party.

There's a word for what resonates within a rump. Regardless, I enjoyed the line.

MoDo's tenure is a perfect microcosm of everything that is wrong with today's "journalism": it's unoriginal, obsessive, mean-spirited, impotent, lazy, trite.

absolutely right, and more, it's her trademark style. but what bothers me more is her obvious lie in defending her plagiarism. If I understand her defense correctly, the likelihood that someone told her something, and then she simply added that concept to her column, and that addition was identical to a TPM blog entry except for three words--well, that bends the laws of probability way beyond their credible limits. You'd think a NYT columnist would have better chops than that when lying about their "work".

Roundtable: George Will, James Carville, The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel, former senior adviser to Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign Steve Schmidt, and Liz Cheney, a former State Department official for middle east affairs.

Three "conservatives", Carville and vanden Heuvel discussed enhanced interrogation techniques, release of photographs, and related. It produced as distorted a discussion as one might imagine, in which the GOP attacked democrats, Carville served as CYA for Obama. It was left to vanden Heuvel to bring up the issue of rule of law and other issues of substance.

Given how the media covers these issues, it's a major miracle that the public has been able to establish any reality-based opinions such as you describe here.

Orwell said something to the effect that much political writing exists to defend the indefensible. The Obama parrots are definately proving him right, currently.

I don't understand this article today Glenn. It appears to have absolutely no mention of Nancy Pelosi. Isn't this entire torture debate about what Pelosi knew, and when she knew it?

I think the Presidential Medal of Freedom would be the appropriate award for Harman--she has done more than most members of Congress to free POTUS of any remaining restrictions or limitations.

http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/two_column_table/Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom_Recipients.htm

GG:

We simply cannot, in good conscience, maintain productive relations with a country that fails to take "torture" seriously. We are, after all, the United States.

Now wait a minute. Who says UAE and US weren't(/aren't) taking torture seriously?

U.S. Complicit in American’s Detention and Torture in the U.A.E.

More than three months ago, a U.S. citizen named Naji Hamdan was arrested by the State Security forces of the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.). He was detained without charges or access to a lawyer until the ACLU filed a lawsuit on his behalf. He has since been released into criminal custody in the U.A.E., and reports that he was severely tortured while in detention, apparently in the presence of American officials.

http://blog.aclu.org/2008/12/12/us-complicit-in-american%e2%80%99s-detention-and-torture-in-the-uae/

Seems serious enough to me--UAE kindly invited US officials to come over and watch the torture. What can be more serious, and obliging, than that?

Despite being caught in a falsehood when replying to Sherer's excellent question, it seems to me that Obama has done much to enable a prosecutorial investigation.

He will not go there himself, but he has done two key things that he did not have to do:

1. He released the memos

2. He called torture what it is--torture (following the King of Jordan).

One has to ask why Obama did these two things, if all he truly cares about is looking forward.

Orwell also said:

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

If I didn't know any better, I'd think he was referring to your column today, Mr. Keillor.