Excerpt:

“Big money has always been a problem in American politics, but now humongous money threatens to capsize the ship of state. Billionaires are very, very good at getting rich, mostly through stealth monopolies, relatively sure things (e.g., casinos) or through riding investment bubbles. But they are seldom scientists, physicians or educators, and can often entertain rather cranky beliefs, such as climate change denial or misogyny. Thus, the GOP super wealthy, having produced the tea party in 2010, have now given us national candidates so extreme that they often seem to be running for Supreme Leader of Iran instead of president of the United States. Although the Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court contributed to this problem, the culprits here are, fundamentally, the length of U.S. campaigns and the cost of television advertising for them.

Ari Berman has shown that about four-fifths of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 for the Republican primary contests was donated by only 196 individuals, who gave $100,000 or more each. Politics has become a game of the super rich, but the money they donate is significant only because of the way it is spent. An increasingly large percentage of it pays for television and radio commercials, and it is used by our new aristocracy to keep pet candidates alive. Newt Gingrich, for instance, might not have made it to South Carolina, where he won, without the backing of a single individual, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, owner of the Venetian in Las Vegas.

In the 2008 campaign year, about $2.8 billion was spent on television campaign spots nationwide, and the figure is expected to be much larger this time. Although television advertising is not always decisive, politicians can’t afford to bet that it won’t be. Mitt Romney spent $15 million in negative advertising against Gingrich in the Florida primary, which arguably blunted Gingrich’s momentum coming off his South Carolina win. Why should private broadcasters, licensed by the U.S. government in preference of other possible licensees, have been allowed to make massive profits off a public political campaign?”…

Read The whole thing.

This belief is completely irrational. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has repeatedly said that the US believes that Iran has not decided yet whether to initiate a nuclear weapons program. If it doesn’t have a weapons program, Iran can hardly actually have a weapon.

Iran is using centrifuges to enrich uranium, mostly to 3.5% for fuel for its electricity-generating civilian reactors (it is enriching to still-low 19.75% for a medical reactor, to produce isotopes for use in chemotherapy).. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has given a fatwa, based on the injunction in Islamic law against killing innocents, against possessing or using atomic weapons.

Two caveats about this poll. That question was asked of a subset of only 500 persons within a larger sample. But that would mean it could be off in either direction by several percentage points. It is a weighted sample, though, and shouldn’t be off that much.

The other puzzlement is that 63% of Americans are committed to using diplomacy to dissuade Iran from getting a bomb and oppose military action at this time. But if they think it has a bomb, what do they think the persuasion will accomplish. Convincing Iran to give up its (non-existent) nukes after already developing them?

Beats me.

The full results are in this pdf file.

Sometimes you just want to give up. The American public is bombarded with so much propaganda by vested interests that it lives in a world where human beings co-existed with the dinosaurs, Iran has nukes, US foreign aid is 1/4 of the federal budget, the Iraqi and Afghanistan governments are among America’s most deadly enemies, and pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is not causing the climate to change.

But who knows, maybe their preference for diplomacy is because they don’t want to go to war with an already-nuclear armed Iran, so that the propaganda has backfired on Big Oil and the Israel lobbies.

The Red Cross is calling for a daily brief ceasefire so that it can deliver humanitarian aid. The Baath regime is highly unlikely to grant the request. The Red Cross cannot send a convoy in without government permission because of the danger that it will be targeted.

The Baath army has had difficulty advancing into Baba Amr because it is being defended by well armed defectors from the Syrian army who are putting up the kind of fight in Homs that the Libyan youth revolutionaries put up in Misrata when that was besieged by the forces of Col. Muammar Qaddafi last spring and summer.

For regime military forces to call a ceasefire would, while in accordance with the laws of war when substantial civilian deaths are imminent, nevertheless allow the Syrian defectors to regroup. That development would make it even harder for government forces to advance after the ceasefire had ended. One suspects, as well, that the Baath military officers would shed no tears over civilians starving in the rebellious city of Homs.

The heartbreaking images that came out of Homs via the intrepid Arwa Damon of CNN and today via Marie Colvin have spurred calls for the Syrian resistance to be armed.

[Oh no! Marie Colvin has been kiilled in the shelling of Homs! She was one of the greats.]

Senator John McCain has urged that some third party, not the US, send arms. The Obama administration was initially cool to this idea, especially since US and Iraqi intelligence says that foreign Sunni radicals (“al-Qaeda”) based in Mosul in Iraq have now departed in some numbers for Syria. These guerrillas are likely responsible for the suicide bombing in Aleppo and the assassination there today of a government official.

But on Tuesday administration officials changed their tune and began allowing for the possibility of arming the Syrian Free Army defectors.

Regular readers know that I think sending a lot of arms into Syria is a very bad idea.

But given the humanitarian crisis in the besieged cities and towns, the international community’s responsibility to protect does require some action. I’d like to see airdrops of water, food and medicine on Homs and other encircled urban areas if the government won’t pause the fighting or allow a humanitarian corridor. The problem is that the Syrian regime has a lot of anti-aircraft batteries, and might well shoot down the planes being used for the drop. That development in turn might lead to hostilities, which would be very undesirable, and which Russia and China are pledged to block.

Well, I hate those US drones when used for purposes of warfare. But here is a Gandhian use for them. Let us defy the Syrian regime’s misuse of its sovereignty to murder its own citizens by using drones for supply airdrops. The US military was thinking already in 2009 of using drones to resupply troops in Afghanistan, and surely they have made progress since then. They could be launched from Incirlik Air Force base in Turkey, and I think Turkey might agree to this limited form of intervention. If the Syrian military shot down any humanitarian drones, no one would interpret that as an act of war requiring retaliation. So the tactic does not carry with it any danger of escalation into hostilities.

Readers in the military would know better how plausible this plan might be.

The USG Open Source Center translated the following interview in al-Sharq al-Awsat with a member of the Homs resistance (many Syrians pronounce it Hims):

“Report on Syrian Regime Forces Continued Bombardment, Siege of Hims
Report by Yusuf Diyab in Beirut: Hims Is Shelled by Rocket Launchers, and Its People Were Fasting Yesterday To Pray for Victory. An Activist to Al-Sharq al-Awsat: The Number of Victims Among the Free Army Is slight Compared With the Civilian Victims
Al-Sharq al-Awsat Online
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Document Type: OSC Translated Text…

The city of Hims Continues to be on top of the scene of the

Syrian events due to the tightening of the military siege on it from all directions, the targeting of its suburbs and areas with violent bombardment by rocket launchers and mortar shells and the rising number of victims.

Abu-Ali Hasan, an activist in the Hims Coordination Committee, said that “the humanitarian situation in the city is very tragic but the morale of the people is high in spite of the difficult circumstances in which they are living at this stage.” He told Al-Sharq al-Awsat: “In spite of the siege, destruction, and tragedies, the people refuse describing their city as a stricken one because it is a city of dignity, sacrifice, and pride and the people are no longer wagering on the Syrian National Council, the Arab League, or the whole world but they are wagering on their sons, the revolutionaries who are the members of the Free Army, and all the people of Hims are fasting today (yesterday) to pray for victory for Almighty God.”

He said that “all the areas of Hims today (yesterday) are facing violent bombardment by rockets and mortar fire from the Air Defense College south of Hims and from the Military Academy in the area of Al-Wa’ar, west of the city,” pointing out that “what is disturbing the Free Army is the long range bombardment that targets the houses and kills innocent children and civilians, while the number of the Free Army’s martyrs is tiny compared with the civilian martyrs.”

Answering a question on what is said about the preparations of the Syrian Army to storm Baba Amr and wipe out the armed manifestations there, he said that “the army of (Syrian President Bashar) al-Asad is more coward than to dare to storm Baba Amr or any area in Hims.” He added: “They can enter a square for minutes, but they quickly withdraw in face of the strikes by the soldiers of the Free Army who go out of their defenses.”

On how do the revolutionaries in Hims get weapons and ammunition in spite of the tight siege imposed on the city, he said that “we get weapons from some traders or the dissident soldiers or from the spoils of war that the Free Army gets as a results of its operations against the regular army.”

He pointed out that “the revolutionaries in Hims are not satisfied with the performance of the National Council, which has not offered anything to the city in spite of the massacres and the destruction the city is facing and in spite of the ordeal the people are experiencing.”

He added: “We have received information, which we are going to verify, that says that prominent figures in the National Council do not want to topple the regime but want to share power with it. If this information is correct, then we will withdraw our confidence in it and will call for its collapse and to form a new national council that include ranking officers of the Free Army and civilian figures, such as Haytham al-Malih, Bassam Ji’arah, Muhyi-al-Din al-Lazqani, and Shaykh Adnan al-Ar’ur, and many other honorable figures.”

Meanwhile, the Syrian National Council yesterday called for “providing secure passages under international protection to deliver the humanitarian, relief, and medical aid,” considering that “any delay would mean a humanitarian tragedy whose consequences are awful.”

A spokesman for the National Council told Al-Sharq al-Awsat: “The Council has contacted European diplomats and the International Committee of the Red Cross to send urgent assistance to Baba Amr and all stricken areas in Syria, which are on continuous increase to include all the Syrian governorates and cities, and the response of the International Committee of the Red Cross was that it is impossible to go to areas other than those that the Syrian Army allows the Syrian Arab Red Crescent to enter to prevent the targeting of the convoys.”

(Description of Source: London Al-Sharq al-Awsat Online in Arabic — Website of influential London-based pan-Arab Saudi daily; editorial line reflects Saudi official stance….) “

Mad, Passionate Love — and Violence
Occupy Heads into the Spring
By Rebecca Solnit

When you fall in love, it’s all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let alone that you will quarrel over them, or weep about them, or be torn apart by them — or if all goes well, struggle, learn, and bond more strongly because of, rather than despite, them. The Occupy movement had its glorious honeymoon when old and young, liberal and radical, comfortable and desperate, homeless and tenured all found that what they had in common was so compelling the differences hardly seemed to matter.

Until they did.

Revolutions are always like this: at first all men are brothers and anything is possible, and then, if you’re lucky, the romance of that heady moment ripens into a relationship, instead of a breakup, an abusive marriage, or a murder-suicide. Occupy had its golden age, when those who never before imagined living side-by-side with homeless people found themselves in adjoining tents in public squares.

All sorts of other equalizing forces were present, not least the police brutality that battered the privileged the way that inner-city kids are used to being battered all the time. Part of what we had in common was what we were against: the current economy and the principle of insatiable greed that made it run, as well as the emotional and economic privatization that accompanied it.

This is a system that damages people, and its devastation was on display as never before in the early months of Occupy and related phenomena like the “We are the 99%” website. When it was people facing foreclosure, or who’d lost their jobs, or were thrashing around under avalanches of college or medical debt, they weren’t hard to accept as us, and not them.

And then came the people who’d been damaged far more, the psychologically fragile, the marginal, and the homeless — some of them endlessly needy and with a huge capacity for disruption. People who had come to fight the power found themselves staying on to figure out available mental-health resources, while others who had wanted to experience a democratic society on a grand scale found themselves trying to solve sanitation problems.

And then there was the violence.

The Faces of Violence

The most important direct violence Occupy faced was, of course, from the state, in the form of the police using maximum sub-lethal force on sleepers in tents, mothers with children, unarmed pedestrians, young women already penned up, unresisting seated students, poets, professors, pregnant women, wheelchair-bound occupiers, and octogenarians. It has been a sustained campaign of police brutality from Wall Street to Washington State the likes of which we haven’t seen in 40 years.

On the part of activists, there were also a few notable incidents of violence in the hundreds of camps, especially violence against women. The mainstream media seemed to think this damned the Occupy movement, though it made the camps, at worst, a whole lot like the rest of the planet, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, seethes with violence against women. But these were isolated incidents.

That old line of songster Woody Guthrie is always handy in situations like this: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.” The police have been going after occupiers with projectile weapons, clubs, and tear gas, sending some of them to the hospital and leaving more than a few others traumatized and fearful. That’s the six-gun here.

But it all began with the fountain pens, slashing through peoples’ lives, through national and international economies, through the global markets. These were wielded by the banksters, the “vampire squid,” the deregulators in D.C., the men — and with the rarest of exceptions they were men — who stole the world.

That’s what Occupy came together to oppose, the grandest violence by scale, the least obvious by impact. No one on Wall Street ever had to get his suit besmirched by carrying out a foreclosure eviction himself. Cities provided that service for free to the banks (thereby further impoverishing themselves as they created new paupers out of old taxpayers). And the police clubbed their opponents for them, over and over, everywhere across the United States.

The grand thieves invented ever more ingenious methods, including those sliced and diced derivatives, to crush the hopes and livelihoods of the many. This is the terrible violence that Occupy was formed to oppose. Don’t ever lose sight of that.

Oakland’s Beautiful Nonviolence

Now that we’re done remembering the major violence, let’s talk about Occupy Oakland. A great deal of fuss has been made about two incidents in which mostly young people affiliated with Occupy Oakland damaged some property and raised some hell.

The mainstream media and some faraway pundits weighed in on those Bay Area incidents as though they determined the meaning and future of the transnational Occupy phenomenon. Perhaps some of them even hoped, consciously or otherwise, that harped on enough these might divide or destroy the movement. So it’s important to recall that the initial impact of Occupy Oakland was the very opposite of violent, stunningly so, in ways that were intentionally suppressed.

Occupy Oakland began in early October as a vibrant, multiracial gathering. A camp was built at Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, and thousands received much-needed meals and healthcare for free from well-organized volunteers. Sometimes called the Oakland Commune, it was consciously descended from some of the finer aspects of an earlier movement born in Oakland, the Black Panthers, whose free breakfast programs should perhaps be as well-remembered and more admired than their macho posturing.

A compelling and generous-spirited General Assembly took place nightly and then biweekly in which the most important things on Earth were discussed by wildly different participants. Once, for instance, I was in a breakout discussion group that included Native American, white, Latino, and able-bodied and disabled Occupiers, and in which I was likely the eldest participant; another time, a bunch of peacenik grandmothers dominated my group.

This country is segregated in so many terrible ways — and then it wasn’t for those glorious weeks when civil society awoke and fell in love with itself. Everyone showed up; everyone talked to everyone else; and in little tastes, in fleeting moments, the old divides no longer divided us and we felt like we could imagine ourselves as one society. This was the dream of the promised land — this land, that is, without its bitter divides. Honey never tasted sweeter, and power never felt better.

Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19% in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland,” the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.

The police attacking the camp knew what the rest of us didn’t: Occupy was abating crime, including violent crime, in this gritty, crime-ridden city. “You gotta give them hope, “ said an elected official across the bay once upon a time — a city supervisor named Harvey Milk. Occupy was hope we gave ourselves, the dream come true. The city did its best to take the hope away violently at 5 a.m. on October 25th. The sleepers were assaulted; their belongings confiscated and trashed. Then, Occupy Oakland rose again. Many thousands of nonviolent marchers shut down the Port of Oakland in a stunning display of popular power on November 2nd.

That night, some kids did the smashy-smashy stuff that everyone gets really excited about. (They even spray-painted “smashy” on a Rite Aid drugstore in giant letters.) When we talk about people who spray-paint and break windows and start bonfires in the street and shove people and scream and run around, making a demonstration into something way too much like the punk rock shows of my youth, let’s keep one thing in mind: they didn’t send anyone to the hospital, drive any seniors from their homes, spread despair and debt among the young, snatch food and medicine from the desperate, or destroy the global economy.

That said, they are still a problem. They are the bait the police take and the media go to town with. They create a situation a whole lot of us don’t like and that drives away many who might otherwise participate or sympathize. They are, that is, incredibly bad for a movement, and represent a form of segregation by intimidation.

But don’t confuse the pro-vandalism Occupiers with the vampire squid or the up-armored robocops who have gone after us almost everywhere. Though their means are deeply flawed, their ends are not so different than yours. There’s no question that they should improve their tactics or maybe just act tactically, let alone strategically, and there’s no question that a lot of other people should stop being so apocalyptic about it.

Those who advocate for nonviolence at Occupy should remember that nonviolence is at best a great spirit of love and generosity, not a prissy enforcement squad. After all, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who gets invoked all the time when such issues come up, didn’t go around saying grumpy things about Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.

Violence Against the Truth

Of course, a lot of people responding to these incidents in Oakland are actually responding to fictional versions of them. In such cases, you could even say that some journalists were doing violence against the truth of what happened in Oakland on November 2nd and January 28th.

The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported on the day’s events this way:

“Among the most violent incidents that occurred Saturday night was in front of the YMCA at 23rd Street and Broadway. Police corralled protesters in front of the building and several dozen protesters stormed into the Y, apparently to escape from the police, city officials and protesters said. Protesters damaged a door and a few fixtures, and frightened those inside the gym working out, said Robert Wilkins, president of the YMCA of the East Bay.”

Wilkins was apparently not in the building, and first-person testimony recounts that a YMCA staff member welcomed the surrounded and battered protesters, and once inside, some were so terrified they pretended to work out on exercise machines to blend in.

I wrote this to the journalists who described the incident so peculiarly: “What was violent about [activists] fleeing police engaging in wholesale arrests and aggressive behavior? Even the YMCA official who complains about it adds, ‘The damage appears pretty minimal.’ And you call it violence? That’s sloppy.”

The reporter who responded apologized for what she called her “poor word choice” and said the phrase was meant to convey police violence as well.

When the police are violent against activists, journalists tend to frame it as though there were violence in some vaguely unascribable sense that implicates the clobbered as well as the clobberers. In, for example, the build-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the mainstream media kept portraying the right of the people peaceably to assemble as tantamount to terrorism and describing all the terrible things that the government or the media themselves speculated we might want to do (but never did).

Some of this was based on the fiction of tremendous activist violence in Seattle in 1999 that the New York Times in particular devoted itself to promulgating. That the police smashed up nonviolent demonstrators and constitutional rights pretty badly in both Seattle and New York didn’t excite them nearly as much. Don’t forget that before the obsession with violence arose, the smearing of Occupy was focused on the idea that people weren’t washing very much, and before that the framework for marginalization was that Occupy had “no demands.” There’s always something.

Keep in mind as well that Oakland’s police department is on the brink of federal receivership for not having made real amends for old and well-documented problems of violence, corruption, and mismanagement, and that it was the police department, not the Occupy Oakland demonstrators, which used tear gas, clubs, smoke grenades, and rubber bullets on January 28th. It’s true that a small group vandalized City Hall after the considerable police violence, but that’s hardly what the plans were at the outset of the day.

The action on January 28th that resulted in 400 arrests and a media conflagration was called Move-In Day. There was a handmade patchwork banner that proclaimed “Another Oakland Is Possible” and a children’s contingent with pennants, balloons, and strollers. Occupy Oakland was seeking to take over an abandoned building so that it could reestablish the community, the food programs, and the medical clinic it had set up last fall. It may not have been well planned or well executed, but it was idealistic.

Despite this, many people who had no firsthand contact with Occupy Oakland inveighed against it or even against the whole Occupy movement. If only that intensity of fury were to be directed at the root cause of it all, the colossal economic violence that surrounds us.

All of which is to say, for anyone who hadn’t noticed, that the honeymoon is over.

Now for the Real Work

The honeymoon is, of course, the period when you’re so in love you don’t notice differences that will eventually have to be worked out one way or another. Most relationships begin as though you were coasting downhill. Then come the flatlands, followed by the hills where you’re going to have to pedal hard, if you don’t just abandon the bike.

Occupy might just be the name we’ve put on a great groundswell of popular outrage and a rebirth of civil society too deep, too broad, to be a movement. A movement is an ocean wave: this is the whole tide turning from Cairo to Moscow to Athens to Santiago to Chicago. Nevertheless, the American swell in this tide involves a delicate alliance between liberals and radicals, people who want to reform the government and campaign for particular gains, and people who wish the government didn’t exist and mostly want to work outside the system. If the radicals should frighten the liberals as little as possible, surely the liberals have an equal obligation to get fiercer and more willing to confront — and to remember that nonviolence, even in its purest form, is not the same as being nice.

Surely the only possible answer to the tired question of where Occupy should go from here (as though a few public figures got to decide) is: everywhere. I keep being asked what Occupy should do next, but it’s already doing it. It is everywhere.

In many cities, outside the limelight, people are still occupying public space in tents and holding General Assemblies. February 20th, for instance, was a national day of Occupy solidarity with prisoners; Occupiers are organizing on many fronts and planning for May Day, and a great many foreclosure defenses from Nashville to San Francisco have kept people in their homes and made banks renegotiate. Campus activism is reinvigorated, and creative and fierce discussions about college costs and student debt are underway, as is a deeper conversation about economics and ethics that rejects conventional wisdom about what is fair and possible.

Occupy is one catalyst or facet of the populist will you can see in a host of recent victories. The campaign against corporate personhood seems to be gaining momentum. A popular environmental campaign made President Obama reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada, despite immense Republican and corporate pressure. In response to widespread outrage, the Susan B. Komen Foundation reversed its decision to defund cancer detection at Planned Parenthood. Online campaigns have forced Apple to address its hideous labor issues, and the ever-heroic Coalition of Immokalee Workers at last brought Trader Joes into line with its fair wages for farmworkers campaign.

These genuine gains come thanks to relatively modest exercises of popular power. They should act as reminders that we do have power and that its exercise can be popular. Some of last fall’s exhilarating conversations have faltered, but the great conversation that is civil society awake and arisen hasn’t stopped.

What happens now depends on vigorous participation, including yours, in thinking aloud together about who we are, what we want, and how we get there, and then acting upon it. Go occupy the possibilities and don’t stop pedaling. And remember, it started with mad, passionate love.

TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit is the author of 13 (or so) books, including A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and Hope in the Dark. She lives in and occupies from San Francisco.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.

Copyright 2012 Rebecca Solnit

Translated by Juan Cole
from Whinfield 36.

“I don’t think a wise thing at this moment is for Israel to launch a military attack on Iran…”

He also said such a strike “would be destabilizing” and “not prudent.” He added,

“…we are of the opinion that the Iranian regime is a rational actor. And it’s for that reason, I think, that we think the current path we’re on is the most prudent path at this point.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu, who in the past has called for expulsion of Palestinians from their West Bank home and boasted of derailing the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, accused Dempsey of “serving Iranian interests,” according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (“The Land”), which wrote:

“We made it clear to Donilon that all those statements and briefings only served the Iranians,” a senior Israeli official said. “The Iranians see there’s controversy between the United States and Israel, and that the Americans object to a military act. That reduces the pressure on them.”

Likely officials of the far right wing Likud Party were especially angered by Dempsey’s assessment that the Iranian leadership is made up of “rational actors.” Israel and its media agents in the United States have expended enormous resources in attempting to convince the US public that the Iranian leadership is made up of mad mullahs obsessed with the end of the world who would gleefully light the nuclear match that brought about an apocalypse. (All this completely untrue and mere racist pablum.) To have the top military man in the United States undo the work of millions of dollars worth of propaganda must have been galling indeed.

Netanyahu’s charge that Dempsey is “serving Iran” is completely unacceptable and deserves a stern rebuke from the Obama administration if it is not going to make itself look like a complete set of wusses.

Dempsey served in the Gulf War and deployed twice to Iraq during the Iraq War. “General Dempsey’s awards and decorations include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Distinguished Service Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters, the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit with two Oak Leaf Clusters, the Bronze Star with “V” Device and Oak Leaf Cluster, the Combat Action Badge, and the Parachutist Badge.”

If it is the fact, as the Israeli right wing kept loudly insisting, that Saddam Hussein was a dire threat to Israel, then they might show a little gratitude and respect to a man like Dempsey, who deployed to Iraq to take down that regime and build a new one.

It is not OK that Netanyahu and Barak spoke this way about this man.

Why Barack Obama continually lets Netanyahu humiliate him is completely beyond my understanding. He should call off the March 5 meeting now planned with Netanyahu and let him cool his heels till he apologizes.

And, I’ll bet you that the supposedly super-patriotic Republican candidates won’t dare so much as say “boo” to Tel Aviv over this insult to Dempsey– in fact, the chicken hawks are likely to pile on him on behalf of their Christian and Jewish Zionist donors.

Israel receives on the order of $3 billion a year from US taxpayers, roughly on average $1000 a person in the last few decades that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has dragooned us all into paying into Netanyahu’s coffers. It includes civilian aid. This, despite Israel’s status as a middle income country better off than a lot of European states. If we count indirect US support for Israel, including trade concessions, the sum is much greater. And if we count US military costs policing the Middle East to keep it safe for Netanyahu, the price would skyrocket. Israel is the biggest recipient of American foreign aid. It has never been clear to anyone over here what exactly we get in return for that.

All that fancy military equipment Israel is brandishing at Iran and threatening to use to shanghai American servicemen into military engagement with that country? We paid for it.

It is, of course, Netanyahu who serves the purposes of the Islamic Republic of Iran. His saber rattling has gotten Iranians’ back up and killed what was left of the protest movement. Iranians are very nationalistic and won’t risk a division in their ranks when they are under the gun from an outside power.

Santorum sent his spokesperson Alice Stewart out to explain that when he condemned President Obama’s “theology” for “not being based on the Bible,” what he actually meant to do was to condemn Obama for being an environmentalist. This explanation is, of course, not plausible.

Then Stewart put her foot in it by saying what she really meant, which was that he was condemning Obama for his radical Islamic theology.

She called back to retract, but as Freud pointed out, sometimes these slips of the tongue are ways for a person’s subconscious to express itself publicly.

This incident follows Santorum’s other spokesman Foster Friess, who came out to urge “girls” to put a “bayer aspirin between their knees” for birth control.

Santorum team: Not ready for prime time.

Santorum: Never will be ready for prime time.

“Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it – It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it ? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue ? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?

In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. The government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations, has been the victim.

So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. [The Middle East] has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government. the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of [the Middle East], entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of [Middle Eastern] ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.

Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.

Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing (with powers so disposed, in order to give trade a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the government to support them) conventional rules of intercourse, the best that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary, and liable to be from time to time abandoned or varied, as experience and circumstances shall dictate; constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that, by such acceptance, it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more. There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism; this hope will be a full recompense for the solicitude for your welfare, by which they have been dictated. “