Joe emails: For the first time since I can remember, the Prime Minister of Israel is more popular, and wildly so, in Israel, than the President of the US. Netanyahu, who is now presiding over a country unified in its determination to shove the iranian bomb down the throats of the rug merchants who created it, is more popular than Obama, who wants to appoint a special envoy to Iran to show them how to create green jobs in Natanz. Netanyahu has done what no Prime Minister of Israel has done since the handshake on the white house lawn in 1993, namely, kill the concept of a 2 co-equal state solution which the world has obsessed over since before the advent of the wheel. Obama, even with his famed perseverance, has just about given up any hope of any real peace talks.
Netanyahu realizes that the agenda must be shifted for the reality based world to realize that no new nation in the fertile crescent can be created that will have the wipe my butt with a rock cultural attitudes of the middle ages that the Palestinians have combined with the 20th century know how of a short range missile that the Palestinians are so fond of. The problem is that it is politically incorrect to state that the arabs need a state like Michelle Obama needs a more surly face.
What the world needs to be shown is that the Jewish state intends to stay. When Netanyahu said that what the arabs will get is a demilitarized country, with final status issues such as jerusalem and refugees to wait, he told the world that Israel had the intestinal fortitude to tell the world that it would not rush to a peace agreement and that its prime minister had the political backing to wait the world out. A demilitarized palestinian state is kind of like MSNBC doing a hit piece on the Obama administration. It is not congruent. For Netanyahu to even state that that is a solution is so ridiculous that the world said, holy sh&t, this guy is actually able to stand up and tell the arabs to piss up a rope.
On the other hand, Obama is completely delusional. Unlike any american president since Carter, he is simply reviled in Israel. He is not hated by one part of the population, he has simply completely turned off the entire state. Israel sees in Obama a complete fool, aka a "frier" or sucker. Israelis hate suckers – they have no respect for a president who wastes his time making speeches in cairo about mutual respect from an arab/persian world that takes the position that they will inflict on the jews a second holocaust to make up for the job left undone by the first one, which by the way, never happened. Even george bush sr., when he tried to domesticate Yitzhak Shamir and his right wing, managed to keep the israeli left happy by supporting Rabin in his bid for election.
For obama, he would not spend a plug nickel of his eroding political capital on anything Israeli. His abject tone deafness to any plea for succor against Iran is simply too much for Israel. When Zbigniew Brezinski, an obama advisor nee of Carter foreign policy fame, advises US planes to shoot down israeli planes en route to and from Iran, a visceral survival instinct in israel awakens. Israel now realizes there is only one acceptable way to deal with Obama, and that is pray that the republican party wins control of part of the congress in 2010 and nominates someone else.
As for Obama’s attempt to pressure Israel, he had better watch his rear flank – his commander in Afghanistan has threatened to quit unless Obama spends some time promoting the welfare of his troops getting shot at instead of promoting health care for everyone. His domestic agenda which for the moment consists solely of a lame health care plan devoted to the memory of his dead mother who died, in his mind, because she had to spend time on paperwork qualifying for insurance, when in fact she died because anthropology professors who decided to live in Indonesia because they hate America take the burden of having their uterine cancer misdiagnosed as an upset stomach.
