Make room under the bus for Eric Holder
Clarice Feldman
One of my favorite national security mavens, Gabriel Schoenfeld, says in the Weekly Standard that Attorney General Eric Holder's likely to be thrown under the Obama bus. I can't find a thing wrong with that prediction:

Eric Holder has been a disastrous attorney general. "Classic 101 Boobery" was how one Democratic operative memorably called his decision, now on hold, to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court in lower Manhattan. Other blunders have piled up and the White House has been repeatedly embarrassed by his string of ill-considered decisions and gaffes. With the midterm elections approaching, it would not be surprising if Holder soon finds himself under the Obama bus, lying next to former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair.

That would answer the question as to why the administration waited so long and why they held back on needed efforts to stop the disaster before it got worse.

June 14, 2010
Obama will use Oval Office speech to politicize the Gulf oil disaster
Bill Weckesser
Has the Obama administration willfully been scuttling clean up efforts in the Gulf so that the oil could make its way to shore and onto the beaches and birds for maximum political leverage? Now Politico is reporting that the President will use his oval office address for a full court, no hold-bars, assault on the oil and energy industries. Mike Allen writes in http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38488.html

Jim Dandy: I would think in some regards Israel has turned into a pawn of sorts.. They couldn't keep up the military without help.

Tuesday: the syncronicity was intentional

(V): Peace has been made with Jordan, Egypt.........Jordan had control of the Gaza from 1948- 1967,why did they not give statehood to the Palestinians? Many middle east countries fall over each other in support of the Palestinian issue,they are used as pawns.

June 13, 2010
Obama's alternate history musings on the oil spill
Rick Moran
What do you do if you're president and the American people think you're handling of an environmental disaster is incompetent?

If you're Obama, you make up an alternate history scenario where you place the blame on what your opponents would have done if you had tried to prevent it:

In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: "I think it's fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending."

The president also implied that anti-big government types such as tea party activists were being hypocritical on the issue.

"Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something' are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much," Obama said. "Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms."

The excuse here has the benefit that it is absolutely unsupported by the facts, while creating an alternate universe where the president was prevented from doing something when he had 60 sitting Democratic senators and a huge majority in the House.

And the canard that the tea party folks are "anti-government" is a nice touch, don't you think? There is a huge difference between being "anti-statist" and "anti-government" and Obama knows it. He just finds it convenient to raise a straw man argument as he desperately tries to spread the blame for his administration's towering incompetence on the oil spill.

Jim Dandy: Sometimes I think it would be good if Someone went to the Israeli gov and talked about 'ghettos' ... Not to be nasty, but to try and knock some sense over the whole middle east situation. I'm wondering if she was trying to get that point across.

Jim Dandy: That sums it up well.

Artful Dodger: No argument here,it seems many woulld like to throw Israel under the bus, to appease known terrorist groups who populate boats with well intentioned bleeding hearts as human shields to break down their passage for weapon reinforcements............say that 10 times fast

Jim Dandy: Doesn't matter. Clearly a huge majority of people on your forums consider Thomas to be a hero. That doesn't speak well of them.

Artful Dodger: it wasn't a scientific poll

Jim Dandy: I'm sure you do. But it doesn't sound fairly represented. After all, 90% think Helen Thomas is a hero. I don't know of any conservatives that would think that way. And that 90% of the posters in your forums think a Jew hater is a "hero" is hardly something to celebrate. That's a statistic you ought to try to camouflage, not parade for all to see. It's not the first time Helen Thomas showed her hatred for the Jews. But hey, it's the Jews. It's not like she hates blacks! That would be different. In your world it must be ok to hate Jews. I wonder if Helen Thomas was aware that many Jews still have their tattoos from the concentration camps? And many have family members that were murdered (by the millions) in both Poland and Germany. News Flash for you and others who admire racist Helen Thomas: The Jews ARE home.

I wonder if Helen Thomas favors sending all the Blacks back to Africa? For that matter, what's her position on Mexicans living illegally in the US?

Artful Dodger: I read, and engage in forums from all sides.You don't learn anything from only hearing one side of the story

(V): If she had simply said Israel should blah blah blah,in regards to the Palestinian issue, it would be one thing. The request Israelis be banished to two places that still hold very taumatic memories for Jews worldwide took it over the edge in my opinion.If she was ignorant to that, she clearly is not qualified to hold a seat in the WH press corps anyway.

Losing Helen Thomas

by Rachel Sklar | 4:46 pm, June 7th, 2010

I put off watching the Helen Thomas video all weekend. Couldn’t watch.

Of course, I’d seen the headlines. I knew that the gist of it was her telling Israelis to ‘go back to Germany and Poland.’ When I first saw the headlines I thought, “There must be some mistake” – knowing, of course, what had happened to the Jews of Germany and Poland. It’s hard to hear the words “The Jews of Germany and Poland” and not think of anything but the millions and millions of Jews who were incarcerated, enslaved, tortured, starved and exterminated in the Holocaust.

There really couldn’t be any mistaking such a comment. Even with the best possible spin, it was…revealing. And it revealed something about Helen Thomas that I didn’t want to see.

Look, Helen Thomas is a hero to many, and up until a few days ago, that included me. She was a tough, tenacious woman pushing forward in journalism eras ahead of a time when it was commonplace for women to do so. During the Bush Administration, she sat there at the front of the briefing room, asking uncomfortable questions about two difficult wars. She sparred memorably with more than one press secretary. She cameo’d in Stephen Colbert’s now-legendary White House Correspondents Dinner gig. Did she have an agenda? Hell yeah. But she was a columnist, for one thing, and a legend, for another. For those who watched the goings-on in the White House briefing room, she was a welcome fixture — for coming on fifty years — understood to belong in that front row by dint of seniority, achievement and being one hell of a character.

Today, just months shy of her 90th birthday, that all ended. She resigned abruptly from the her longtime position with Hearst — and thus from her longtime seat in the White House briefing room, and said in a statement: “I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians.”

I do, too. Because with those comments, we lost an icon. Because all of the foregoing — being the first female officer of the National Press Club, the first female member of the White House Correspondents Association — and its first female president — none of that is enough to give her a pass.

It’s not enough to have spent a lifetime being an awesome, trailblazing journalistic and feminist icon. Because longer still than the shadow cast by such a great career is the one cast by the Holocaust. There are still people living in this country — and many others, not the least of which is Israel — who have numbers tattooed on their arms from concentration camps. People who remember seeing their mothers or fathers or brothers or sisters torn away from them and packed on trains taking them to their deaths. People who couldn’t go back to where their families came from in Germany or Poland even if they wanted to, because entire villages were wiped out.

So, yes, Helen Thomas took it way too far in suggesting Jews in Israel go home to Germany and Poland. Because there is only one reason they left that home in the first place. That doesn’t mean it’s not a damn shame. That she said it, yes — I’ve heard more than a few people lament that if she’d just retired sooner, or held out a little longer. But even sadder is that she could think that to say it, knowing what she knows about history and the history of this country (it was just the anniversary of D-Day, after all), working in an industry that trades in facts and information. And saying that Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine” not only ignores the legitimate history of a legitimate nation, but makes it pretty clear where her bias lies. That such comments were made before the flotilla incident — at a White House event celebrating the contributions of Jewish Americans for Jewish Heritage Month, no less — make them that much more troubling.

Ah yes. About that flotilla incident. Would Helen Thomas have been castigated so thoroughly without that backdrop? Well, yes, probably — see the above. What the flotilla incident did, though, was trigger a major surge of outrage — and, if we are honest, of other stuff. There has been criticism of Israel; there has been holding Israel to an arguably higher standard than other nations (see: North Korea) and there has been anti-Israel sentiment, blurred in with…a little more. What Helen Thomas said was at the upper end of that category — and I think, frankly, it startled a lot of people. Because that’s one hell of a slippery slope.

I wish Helen Thomas hadn’t said those things, and I truly wish she hadn’t thought them. But she did. Which means that, sad as I am, Helen Thomas can no longer be a hero to me.

Artful Dodger: Anti-Semite, or anti what the Israeli's have done??

Jim Dandy: Helen Thomas is an anti-Semite. I don't see how anyone can consider a racist a hero. You need to find new forums. She has a history of Antisemitism. You ok with that?

Jim Dandy: Never heard of her till someone brought her up.

Artful Dodger: Helen Thomas had a renaissance during the GW era amongst liberals.Longevity seems to be her sole badge of honor, other than being a pioneer for women in the press corps.Let's put it this way, if her comments were regarding a similar scenario regarding African Americans,she would be slammed from all sides.I am frankly disgusted by the comments I have read on typically democrat websites, she is a hero to 90% of the posters I have read.

Helen Thomas! Who cares?
Ralph Kinney Bennett
Helen Thomas! Who cares?

I was an accredited White House correspondent from 1966 to 2001. During that time and long since, I have known many to suffer Helen Thomas, but nobody to take her seriously.

She's a joke. Can anyone really remember anything she has said or written? No. Of course not.

She was a sort of weird press room mascot, trotted out for her embarrassing question to the President ritual while colleagues groaned inwardly and stared at their shoes to hide their rolling eyes. She was like one of those never-was-a-firemen, who hang around the fire house, becoming a fixture by default, indulged or humored over the years unless or until the nuisance factor gets too high.

Her splenetic Jew-bashing was the most attention she has ever received other than the phony adulation and awards garnered from time to time from bored fellow journalists who realized that, "My God, she's still around."

I don't know why everyone got so animated. It was Helen Thomas, for crying out loud. Whatever she did - whatever came off her keyboard or out of her mouth - was like a bear defecating in the woods. Few have seen it and few would care to. Boy, if ever there was a candidate for one of P.J. O'Rourke's "pre-obituaries!"

Jim Dandy: True.. but he's still got time to go on tour.

(V): I think the Pope has enough on his plate already

Jim Dandy: ?? Gotta link.. From all I can read it looks like the Pope is unhappy over the breaking of terms as laid down in a 1993 agreement.

(V): I heard Israel just placed a trade offer to The Holy See, they cited a lot less aggravation as the reason.

Tuesday: I have no problem with Israel existing, I have no problem with Jewish folk wanting a homeland after what they've been through.

... I accept the Arab nations have been very anti social to say at times. But that time is over.

Israel in the NT is a metaphor ie home, space, peace.

Übergeek 바둑이: I still remember when Iran was Persia

I think that the big problem with the Middle East is that western nations and the United Nations have double standards which greatly favour some countries, while acting to the detriment of others.

One good example is our view of democracy in the region. We tell Iran to become more democratic and to reform its electoral process, while we condone Saudi Arabia's autocratic regime. Most people don't know that women were not allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia in the first local election ever held (that's right, the first ever). Most likely they won't be allowed to vote in 2011 for the next election, just as they are not allowed to drive a car, or go out in public without a male relative or husband to accompany them. Yet our governments point the finger at Iran as the bad guy in the Middle East.

Another good example is nuclear proliferation. Our governments point fingers at Iran and North Korea, yet Israel is allowed to have nuclear weapons as a "deterrent". Israel has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and they refuse to allow anyone to inspect their nuclear facilities. That's right, nobody can go into Israel and say "Are you making plutonium?" Yet we want other countries to abandon nuclear programs. We tell them "don't make weapons of mass destruction" even though our countries have the biggest and most deadly arsenals of weapons of mass destruction in history. That's right, nobody has WMDs than the US.

Another interesting one is military aid. Currently Israel gets US $3 billion per year in military aid from the American government. All that money goes to a country that has fighter jets, tanks, battle ships, nuclear weapons, etc. Israel has the 4th largest military in the world. In contrast Palestinians get no military aid. They have sling shots and stones, and when militants make poorly designed rockets everybody calls them terrorists. Imagine having a sling shot and having to fight the 4th largest army in the world, an army that gets billions in military aid every year?

The truth is that the Middle East will be a mess as long as western superpowers see political, economic and military benefits there. We see oil in Saudi Arabia, and a strategic location for military dominance in Israel. So our governments turn a blind eye to all the worngdoings in those places. Our enemies are those governments that act for their own self-interest rather than the political and economic interests of western capitalism. If Iran was a lackey of western superpowers, they would be allowed to have nuclear weapons just like Israel, Pakistan and India are. Then Iran would be called a "democracy" and not a "threat".

Tuesday: Maybe the Israeli secret intelligence got and moaned to their lackeys in the USA. Maybe it's the way she said it. Most intelligent people understand their is a big problem there that needs sorting, just with the USA blocking any serious efforts to sort the problem.. it goes on.

.. bit like the Korean war.. still not officially over. I wonder in that situation if they want to out do some European history regards to what is called the 100 years war.

Tuesday: no

Tuesday: I think the way Israel is behaving recently alot of people and governments are getting tired of the middle east situation. I can understand Israeli's not liking getting attacked.. but at the same time since when is it right that Palestinian people are being treated like the Jewish people were in WWII. Evicted from their homes illegally and forced to live in ghetto's and no-one willing to stop it even when the law is on their side.

No wonder hate is high in militant Palestinians. It's a stupid situation.