that pesky Jewish lobby

The New Yorker magazine has finally found a left-wing cause it can't support: the campaign by Chicago's John Mearsheimer and Harvard's Stephen Walt to rid us of the Israeli incubus. Their book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, will be published on Tuesday (and is already No. 89 on Amazon best sellers). TNY goes to great lengths to salute the two professors, to condemn Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands, and to excoriate (surprise!) the Bush administration, but in the end sensibly concludes that "their account is not so much a diagnosis of our polarized era as a symptom of it." In short, Mearsheimer and Walt are like the staff of TNY: so addled by their hatred of Bush that they can't think straight.

Unlike their British colleagues, Dan Plesch and Martin Butcher, authors of a paper on the forthcoming assault upon Iran, Mearsheimer and Walt can at least write a coherent English sentence. See the short version of their argument in the London Review of Books.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford