Justin Raimondo:

The news that Dennis Ross will be appointed the special envoy to Iran – and, more, that he will function as a Middle East "czar" – is "staggeringly bad news," as Philip Weiss so trenchantly put it. The appointment, Weiss avers, is "illustrative of the fact that neoconservatism by one of its more amenable names is still in our lives, and the Israel lobby is a big component of the Establishment. Dennis Ross, who pushed the settlements in '92. Dennis Ross, who moved from party to party with indifference, because he had a bigger power than party behind him. ...A friend says that Dennis Ross in Arabic means, Expletive you!"

The appointment, and it is a prominent one, is no surprise to my regular readers, who were warned last summer of what a Ross in this position would have to mean:

"The appointment of Dennis Ross as[Obama's pre-election] principal Middle East adviser is good news for the War Party, specifically for that crucial branch of it that specializes in promoting Israel's ambitions over America's national interests.

"No matter which president Ross worked for, Democrat or Republican – and he's worked for both – his interventionist agenda and his sympathy for the interests of a certain Middle Eastern nation were no secret. His sympathy, too, for poor, persecuted Scooter Libby prompted him to endorse that convicted felon's defense fund. And he was right in there with Bill Kristol and the Project for a New American Century in agitating for war with Iraq.

In a future Obama administration, the so-called liberal hawks will have their chief factotum in Ross."

In short, Ross represents what Leon Hadar described as "neoconservatism with a smiling Democratic face." He will serve under Hillary Clinton, at State, which is looking to be the locus of the Lobby's power base. The question is: will a rival locus of power coalesce elsewhere, perhaps at the National Security Council, or within the military? The CIA under Leon Panetta looks like its going to be awfully partisan, whatever that may come to mean in foreign policy terms in the coming years.

...

I fail to see how Obama is going to be much better than Bush in any aspect other than perception. Looks like he may be happy to help Israel commit genocide and torture innocent men, women, and children --- but he will make sure that we do not do so at GitMo. Great.

Is there an up side? Well, it does look like he will destroy the evil empire via hyperinflation. Tough medicine.

Note: All empires are evil, it is in their nature. It is typically American that the USA is number one in evil. Were number one!!!

Israel is the tail that wags the US dog. Or maybe it's AIPAC. In any event, the bullshit artists that justify this absurdity trot out their talking points. One of which is that the US absolutely needs a quote stable democracy in the MidEast unquote.

Really? You know, if Israel by some form of divine grace just disappeared today (thus stopping the bloodbath in Gaza), all the US has to do is send three aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean. Each one, as we all know, is a small city with its own nuclear and conventional firepower. While the military is not precisely a democracy, it's close enough because they are under OUR control.

So much for the necessity of a stable democracy in the MidEast.

"At least 30 people were killed in the Zeitoun district of Gaza after Israeli troops repeatedly shelled a house to which more than 100 Palestinians had been evacuated by the Israeli military, the UN said today.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said it was "one of the gravest incidents since the beginning of operations" against Hamas militants in Gaza by the Israeli military on 27 December.

OCHA said the incident took place on 4 January, a day after Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza.

According to testimonies gathered by the UN, Israeli soldiers evacuated around 110 Palestinians to a single-storey house in Zeitoun, south-east Gaza. The evacuees were instructed to stay indoors for their own safety but 24 hours later the Israeli army shelled the house with rockets. Around half the Palestinians sheltering in the house were children, OCHA said."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/09/gaza-palestinians-israel-evacuees-zeitoun

"If a book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But for God's sake, let us freely hear both sides if we choose." ...Thomas Jefferson

In the modern era, we have things that are not to be discussed if you intend to question the "received truth." In fact, some things will get you put in prison or your country threatened with destruction.

Holly, it's not a call for genocide -- it's a call to win the war and to have one's right to exist be just as valid as your neighbor's. You can twist anything you read into something abhorrent if that's all your looking for. -- markandkari

You guys will accomplish what the rest of the world and diplomacy won't. A final solution in favor of Israel.
Keep up the good work! -- shooter242

The meaning of these is not twistable. Reference to Die Endlösung is allusion to genocide.

Likewise,

...it'll take the sewage dwellers 50-years to rebuild. Then, do it again. -- NeoConCabal

Is not a call for self-defense. It is a (knowing and self-aware) recipe for ghettoization, with an implicit wish for the Gazans to be "solved" away in the same manner that the people of Warsaw's ghetto were "solved" away 70 years ago.

Lying in order to mis-spend my tax dollar at the expense of my nation's prestige has gotten old.

Nicholas Kristof has a column on this topic. Link at sig.

A sad day for mankind when a tiny, racist, violent, hard core, and influential minority manages to lead hundreds of millions of supposedly free citizens of a democratic country by the nose.

For the record...i admittedly am a full-on Chomsky worshipper for what he's done to help expose American state crimes and confront and deflate conventional wisdom bloviators and apologists, etc., and it sounds like a reasonable excuse that they'd have been insane to try something so brazen because it would get leaked, but that's just it and Glenn has been writing about this same type of insanity and leaks of illegal, criminal behavior on the part of the administration for years for fuck sake and the only reason they are not insane is because they know they can and do get away with it, who cares if it gets leaked, it doesn't matter, as ninety-billion of Glenn's columns will attest. Anyway I only watched that youtube snippet Glenn posted to see what Chomsky says that Glenn says his views are close to and frankly that was the most embarrassing Chomsky video I've ever seen and if anything it made me want to run out and get a "truther" video and paypal Alex Jones $20.00.

Jesus, the real Chomsky would have blown that Mecha-Chomsky out of the water with some of the absolutely ridiculous "there's nothing to see here" statements Bizarro-Chomsky says in that video. I assume Glenn just threw up some video randomly as a sample because the Glenn that I read in these pages would never in a million years think this ludicrous assertion backed up by nothing at all fact wise...

"Anybody that knows anything about the sciences would instantly discount the evidence"

was a slam dunk refutation to get all sycophantic about and confident the missing evidence is just normal for science as Chomsky later goes on to try and posit, (as if the basic tenets of physics we are still struggling to understand or why the hell they snatched all the video of the "plane" hitting the Pentagon...)

Are you kidding me Chomsky? I mean fine if you want to rationally explain away the acknowledged by the committee themselves deficiencies and weaknesses in the 9-11 report and the official explanations of events but for Chomsky to say this and then go on to just fucking ramble on...

Chomsky 0, new 9-11 report 1.