Obama’s insistence on speaking to Israeli leaders about the ostensible diplomatic position of the US on settlements for a decade or more has been called “interfering with Israeli politics” by Americans and Israeli reactionaries, and it remains to be seen if it will have any serious backlash in Israel. (Obama is very popular there; Netanyahu less so.)

While to some extent this is because the American discourse on Israel is shaped pretty comprehensively by unswerving ideological and political fealty to Likud (with AIPAC routinely punishing American political actors for adopting positions or rhetoric similar to that of Kadima, Labor, or any other ideological grouping there), there is an ancillary influence that has recently become a critical part of Israeli politics: the new axis of debate.

Much of the debate between right and left in Israel has disintegrated in the wake of heavily US-backed integration of neoconservatism into the national politics. Instead, within Israel the debate is now between the political adherents to Israel as a nation and Israel as an ideology, and right now the latter have more money and control of the government. The latter tend strongly to be ignorant, well-off, ideologically inflexible, and foreign. The last of those seems to be the key: as long as you haven’t been raised from birth in Israel, it’s a lot easier to treat the hatred of the Arab world as either a grand, unending narrative or something arising ex nihilo. Anyone else would see the move from conflicts with states to conflicts with radicals – from surgical strikes to occupation and guerilla combat – and from bombings to rockets as indicative of some manner of change which can be somehow assuaged or at least contemplated.

It’s not for no reason that Avigdor Lieberman, the mover and shaker of the genocidal right, barely speaks Hebrew and makes an electoral strategy of courting Russophones and Americans – and that the overwhelming majority of active settlers are Americans or ideologues, and typically both. For them, and for their lunatic collaborators among the established Israeli population, the Israeli state exists to ensure that as long as you have a mother the Orthodox establishment feels is sufficiently Jewish and white, then you’re entitled to buy land in a subdevelopment and have a dozen children. Queers, secularists, and Arabs are enemies of the state whether or not they know it, and as such gay parades, cremation, and Arab Israeli presence in government and the Army are to be opposed no matter what. The Palestinians don’t exist, aren’t really Palestinian, and don’t belong there anyway, so one of the many things the state has to do to keep property values cheap is exterminate them like insects.

If you’ve noticed I haven’t discussed foreign policy here, it’s because it’s an ideological totem – something external to and not necessary for the fantasists’ creed. While their leaders are perfectly enthusiastic about the old Israeli reactionary project of nuclear blackmail, exaggeration of external threats, and utter disregard for foreign national sovereignty, those exist for the fantasists mainly as a way of adopting a persecution complex – something extremely important to Americans in particular, because the American Jewish experience’s primary activity is imagining your own destruction, an activity which produces a fairly dangerous mindset when combined with a lack of any actual danger to life or limb. (It would be ubiquitous, but Americans are only one of the several immigrant groups the ideologues aim for – and especially for those coming from the more dismal corners of the former Soviet Union, persecution isn’t some exotic thing to transform into ritual – it was big even in the Soviet days, and now it’s how right-wing politicians get elected.)

Israel plays a role in the ideologues’ grand fantasy that it not only should not but cannot in reality. It is a country of millions with citizens of every major creed, race, and walk of life, and the terra nullia created by the violent expulsion of the last rural Palestinians has more or less run out. The choice is between moving into the cities (which seems to  be deeply offensive to the Americans, for whom renting is a form of suicide) desert exurbs (which are an entirely different and less sexy kind of fantasy, banal and Southwestern) and territory whose occupation by Israel has made it a concrete force of evil in the eyes of hundreds of millions of people, which offers it no strategic and little economic value, which its citizens have no concievable claim to and which essentially makes foreign relations with Israel as difficult as with Taiwan. Realists of every political tendency have agreed almost unanimously that the settlements are destructive and need to end yesterday.

The problem is Lieberman and what he represents – not just a radical ideology whose core involves the flat denial of basic, observable reality, but massive foreign support for that ideology based on a common developed or affected ignorance. There will always be Americans coming to Israel and acting as if the place exists to give them a half acre in a stupidly-named suburb; as of right now, it is the policy of both the Americans in charge of dealing with Israel and what is or at least was the major Israeli political party of the realist right to treat that ridiculous fantasy as the national purpose. This, not Israel and more than just Likud, is what AIPAC stands for: Give me Kosher Pines or give the entire country death!

1. I’m really hoping to see some Republican flack characterize her as an illegal (besides reliable fascist G. Gordon Liddy) in the next couple of months, because
(a) it’s the single dog-whistle they seem to get the most mileage out of; and
(b) it’s legitimately and infuriatingly easy to get Latinos to accept tirades about filthy illegals at face value instead of recognizing the entire genre as one blatant ethnic slur after another.

2. Obama’s choice to go through the nomination process in the traditional timeframe is a good one, especially in light of the serious cross-purposes the Republican Party and its constituents are working at in re. despicable wop-a-doos. While it might be somewhat challenging for a White House which has yet to fully acclimatize to the relatively glacial pace of news and opinion outside of the Internet to spend seventy whole goddamn days on this one issue, that cuts both ways – there’s a long, long time for the miasma of The Base to seep out, and two months is a long time for the Republicans – whose strategy so far has been one of constant escalation, stoking an entitlement to fascist outrage as politics – to keep shit under wraps.

3. In light of the recent tragic murder of one of the country’s three late-term abortion providers by a survivalist lunatic, I have to wonder if as moderate a justice as Sotomayor seems bound to be on abortion is wholly appropriate, even in light of the benefits that exist in her presence. I like to think that sharing the court with misogynist jackasses like Scalia & Son will radicalize her a little, but I’m not holding my breath.

4. It’s a pity that with God as his witness Jeffrey Rosen will never blog again. Now who is going to get paid by a liberal institution to imagine that sensible centrist Obama will finally have his Sister Souljah moment rebuking this terrible identity politician and her extreme brownness?

5. If the phrase “we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Obama for helping us out the extremist bigots who helped shatter our solid national majority and lose us elections from Alaska to Virginia” or some variant of it fails to come up among Republican political veterans or commentators during or after this fracas, the Republican Party is a walking corpse.

Prophesy is an interesting word, partially because it doesn’t actually mean anything*; it is the verbal form of prophecy, and a fairly predominantly American Evangelical phenomenon. It rests on a wackily fundamental misunderstanding, and it’s everywhere.
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An unnerving number of North America’s political cartoonists are bizarrely obsessed with President Obama’s lips.

Today is the last Martin Luther King Junior day to be observed under George W. Bush; he is, in spite of himself, an icon for the religious right – in the temple of a sort of Aryan superhero a grand emissary from Mammon incongruously welcomed.

The next one will be observed under Barack Obama; such is the nature of our polity that he represents (for now) the relative left, a man of centrist convictions generally aligned with the neo-liberal movement, a sighted lunatic in a nation of blind lunatics, a Lodge or Rockefeller surrounded by Goldwaters.

I can’t expect, as long as the religious right continues to dominate the media’s picture of ‘religious issues’ and the right-wing power-structure remains in place, that we will see a national candidate, or really even a national figure, similar to King. The Christian left has these days been relegated to the sidelines, pushed into common cause with soft-rightists and eccentrics.

Martin Luther King Junior Day 2009 will be celebrated under an evangelical reactionary, and Martin Luther King Junior Day 2010 under America’s closest equivalent to a Christian Democrat. We can at least take some comfort in the country’s rejection of the alternative.

Any one of the millions of men with sufficiently non-nasal alto voices and severe delusions about the American class system burst into a kindergarten, set a succession of children down on their knees, and told them one of two stories.

1) “Well, we spent years training and outfitting the Georgian army, to the point that they yelled and cheered like Americans as their troops poured into a breakaway area with a long history of ethnic conflict with Georgians and bound by treaty to remain demilitarized. They got as far as the capital, and held it for two days, before foul interloper Putin – completely without warning and cause – invaded, slaughtering armed Georgian innocents en masse and driving thousands of military refugees behind the Ossetian border. But they had done work we could be proud of – in those two days in the capital they left no stone unturned in the Jewish quarter, and it seems that the Caucasian state would have exercised its precious sovereignty to purge Georgia of the last Russophile Semites befouling their territory with Marxism.”
“What’s the moral of this story, strange man?”
“Putin, the swarthy traitor, opposes America in its quest to free Earth of Jewish tyranny.”

2) “Well, after the twin humiliations of the long-demonized Hamas winning Palestinian elections insisted on by Bush and a failed neocon-backed invasion of Lebanon, Israel decided it had had enough of failing and invaded the Gaza Strip in an effort to make the politics of Israel’s Palestinian wards more Israel-friendly. The completely spontaneous combined-arms assault surgically neutralized hundreds of deviously unarmed Hamas militants and eliminated what little infrastructure Hamas, in its perfidy, had built up to circumvent Israel’s democratic, self-determining decision as a free nation-state to completely blockade Gaza to any and all traffic, including “food”, “water”, “humanitarian aid”, and other vital Islamofascist instruments. To this day, Gaza remains under heavy occupation by Israeli forces, a historical first that will surely disarm the nationalist radicals dominating their local politics.”
“What’s the moral of this story, strange man?”
“Don’t fuck with the Jews.”

(BONUS FUN STORIES to come when a cartoon defaming symbols of Israel warrantlessly attacks the Jews for the Israeli state’s behavior; when long-term US ally Uzbekistan makes rootless Bolshevist radicals wear yellow badges to ensure the continued freedom of world markets; and when Israeli dissidents treasonously abandon the quest to destroy Islamofascist children wherever they be born.)

Climate change, on the other hand . . .

It is December 15, 2008. The Las Vegas valley is a city at the same latitude as San Francisco (naturally mild weather) in the middle of the northern Mojave Desert (little rainfall, extreme temperatures). So we do occasionally get snow – except it only sticks at night and in the dead of winter. Las Vegas should only ever get about half an inch deep in snow in late January.

In North Las Vegas, they’re reporting an inch or more. The photos are foggy, with non-evergreens – trees which normally only start to brown and die around Christmas, because we have no autumn – covered in snow.

We’ve been through fog this winter so thick visibility was limited to feet. I know most of you are probably from temperate climates, so I want you to imagine a climate where it is spring and fall for about two weeks, winter for about a month, and summer for the rest of the year. We get so hot that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk in February. We get torrential rain in the early winter that has been taking place in the first weeks of November.

Before the year is out people will have slipped and killed themselves on black ice around the Strip.

I wish there was something funny I could say about this, but the capital of the Mojave is covered in more snow than New York got at any point in 1999. I love snow and all, but I’m actually pretty fucking terrified right now.

Nuuuuh! Looks like the paranoid lefties’n Realist swine think a coupla troops add up t’martial law! Hyuk-hyuk-hyuk.

Jesus Christ. While I’m used to how consistently wrong the establishment’s favorite line (back the badge, then backpedal) winds up being, it’s rare to see it revealed wrong so goddamn quickly. The militarization of the convention police departments (especially the RNC’s) was regarded as a necessary precaution against radicals; and even reliable liberals ignored what amounted to the decision of the securitarian establishment to throw the Third Amendment out (evidently out of spite, because Jesus, the third amendment? Was ignoring fishing licensing too much work or something?) – and now we have clear signs that the country plans to have a full division stationed domestically – and live.

Falling empires tend to take one of two trajectories: a grand moment of clarity and the sloughing of the imperial clothes after a bitter external struggle (the Netherlands; France; the UK) or violent, overcompensatory oppression of their home subjects in ways pioneered in the Empire (Russia). I was hoping that we would have the former; turns out that our professional death-squad cheerleaders can’t stand the thought of our dwindling veto power over our subjects’ destiny will be the end of civilians being destroyed with M16s. Sorry, blacks!