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Thomas Friedman tries to walk back his slurs against Israel and its supporters. Jonathan Tobin calls BS on him.
Last week, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman let his anger with Israel and its American supporters, including some Republican presidential candidates, get the better of him. In the course of a diatribe in which Friedman falsely claimed increasing numbers of American Jews were turning on Israel, he asserted that the ovations Congress gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” This invocation of the Walt-Mearsheimer canard about a Jewish conspiracy manipulating American foreign policy earned him the rebukes of even liberal Jewish groups who normally laud his every utterance. That has caused Friedman to backtrack on his slur, though only just a bit. In an interview with the New York Jewish Week’s Gary Rosenblatt, he said the following:
“In retrospect I probably should have used a more precise term like ‘engineered’ by the Israel lobby — a term that does not suggest grand conspiracy theories that I don’t subscribe to,” Friedman said. “It would have helped people focus on my argument, which I stand by 100 percent.”
But this weasel-worded attempt at walking back his brief foray into anti-Semitism shouldn’t convince anyone. There is no real difference between “engineered” and “bought and paid for.” Both terms seek to describe the across-the-board bi-partisan support for Israel that the ovations Netanyahu received as the result of Jewish manipulation, not a genuine and accurate reflection of American public opinion. …
Elliot Abrams writes on the subject in the Weekly Standard.
If you were an anti-Semite dedicated to spreading your hatred of Jews, what charges exactly would you make in 21st century America?
You would avoid the blood libel—too medieval to write of sacrificing Christian children to make Passover matzo. That kind of stuff circulates in Arab lands or Pakistan, but won’t sell in suburban America. And the “Christ-killer” material is also dated, what with Vatican II, Evangelical support for Israel, and the like.
There are two charges you would make. First, the rich Jews control our government. Second, those Jews are trying to push America into war so your sons will have to fight for Israel.
In the last week that is exactly what we have seen. First came the Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Perhaps it was jealousy from seeing Walt and Mearsheimer sell all those books with this line, but Friedman here tips right into the swamps.
And now we have Joe Klein, in Time magazine, in a section accurately entitled “Swampland”: …
Robert Samuelson suggests time has run our for the theories of John Maynard Keynes.
The eclipse of Keynesian economics proceeds. When Keynes wrote “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” in the mid-1930s, governments in most wealthy nations were relatively small and their debts modest. Deficit spending and pump priming were plausible responses to economic slumps. Now, huge governments are often saddled with massive debts. Standard Keynesian remedies for downturns — spend more and tax less — presume the willingness of bond markets to finance the resulting deficits at reasonable interest rates. If markets refuse, Keynesian policies won’t work.
Countries then lose control over their economies. They default on maturing debts or must be rescued with loans from friendly countries, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), government central banks (the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank) or someone. There are other reasons why Keynesian policies might fail or be weakened. But they pale by comparison with the potential veto now posed by bond markets. Ironically, the past overuse of deficits compromises their present utility to fight high unemployment.
There is no automatic tipping point beyond which a country’s debt — the sum of past annual deficits — causes bond markets to shut down. But Greece, Portugal and Ireland have already reached that point, with gross debt in 2011 equal to 166 percent, 106 percent and 109 percent of their national incomes (gross domestic product), according to IMF figures. Heavily indebted Italy and Spain could lose access to bond markets.
Thankfully, the United States is not now in this position. Interest rates on 10-year Treasury bonds hover around 2 percent; investors seem willing to lend against massive U.S. deficits. Just why is unclear. It’s not that U.S. budget discipline is noticeably superior. Economists Pedro Amaral and Margaret Jacobson of the Cleveland Federal Reserve recently compared U.S. budget performance against that of the weak European nations. …
James Pethokoukis marks the end of the year with the five worst economic ideas of the year. Then he suggests twelve policies that would help next year.
The longer the Great Stagnation/Long Recession/New Normal continues, the greater the risk that some profoundly terrible ideas — spawned by economic desperation and political opportunism – will pop up, gain a foothold and start to spread. Indeed, the past twelve months evidence the risk of a devastating policy error by Washington is escalating.
Here are the worst economic ideas of 2011, in reverse order: …
… 1. The Occupy movement. An obsession over income inequality runs through this entire list. And Occupy Wherever – so praised and embraced by Elizabeth Warren and Obama and the MSM — is a big reason why. But what would the rabble — a mix of communists, union pros, the mentally deranged, and a few truly heartbreaking stories — have us do? Time travel so as to prevent the microchip revolution and reinstate command-and-control economies in Asia? Sadly — and tellingly — the protesters haven’t uttered a peep about teachers unions or Hollywood. Just the banks.
Please. What we should be focusing on is a) the level of income mobility in society and b) the absolute income gains of the broad middle. Income inequality zoomed in the late 1990s but since incomes were rising broadly, no one much cared if the rich got richer even faster. Everybody was winning. There was no Occupy Silicon Valley back then, despite the fantastic northern California weather.
Occupy and its fellow travelers have no apparent interest in advocating policies that would boost innovation and growth and incomes. But I do. So here are 12 ideas for 2012, some of which I gleaned from two of this year’s best economic policy books, Race Against the Machines and Launching the Innovation Renaissance:
1. Pay teachers more but get rid of tenure so the bottom five percent of teachers can be replaced by even average ones.
Nile Gardiner has fun with Joe Biden’s embarrassing prescriptions for Europe.
Joe Biden has caused a bit of a stir this week with his bizarre suggestion that “the Taliban per se is not our enemy”, just a decade on from the 9/11 attacks, carried out by al-Qaeda, and aided and abetted in Afghanistan by none other than the Taliban. The comments formed part of a wider interview on foreign policy given by Biden to Leslie Gelb of Newsweek. The stupidity of the vice president’s remarks on the war in Afghanistan were matched only by his reckless, almost surreal advice on the European financial crisis, which is so out of touch with reality that I doubt even the delusional Herman Van Rompuy would agree with him. Joe Biden’s solution for the EU’s massive debt crisis? A mammoth Obama-style bailout across the Atlantic, but this time in euros not dollars: …
… Fortunately, as I’ve noted previously, the views of the Obama administration, with its history of economic failure, have become an irrelevance on the EU crisis. After all, the US administration’s $787 billion taxpayer-funded “stimulus” was a failure, notable largely for its contribution to fueling the biggest budget deficit since World War Two. With their track record, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are probably the last two leaders on earth to be giving advice on a debt crisis issue, and the message coming from Washington is clearly the wrong one. The best thing that European leaders can do is to study the economic policies of the Obama presidency and do exactly the opposite, by cutting spending, ending excessive borrowing, slashing the size of the public sector, lowering taxes, freeing businesses from red tape, and taking a huge axe to big government.
WSJ Editors closely examined the EPA’s complaints about Wyoming drinking water and natural gas fracking.
… the EPA’s credibility is also open to review. The agency is dominated by anticarbon true believers, and the Obama Administration has waged a campaign to raise the price and limit the production of fossil fuels.
Natural gas carries a smaller carbon footprint than coal or oil, and greens once endorsed it as an alternative to coal and nuclear power. But as the shale gas revolution has advanced, greens are worried that plentiful natural gas will price wind and solar even further out of the market. This could mean many more of the White House’s subsidized investments will go belly up like Solyndra.
The other big issue is regulatory control. Hydraulic fracturing isn’t regulated by the EPA, and in 2005 Congress reaffirmed that it did not want the EPA to do so under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The states regulate gas drilling, and by and large they have done the job well. Texas and Florida adopted rules last week that followed other states in requiring companies to disclose their fracking chemicals.
But the EPA wants to muscle in, and its Wyoming study will help in that campaign. The agency is already preparing to promulgate new rules regulating fracking next year. North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple says that new EPA rules restricting fracking “would have a huge economic impact on our state’s energy development. We believe strongly this should be regulated by the states.” Some 3,000 wells in the vast Bakken shale in North Dakota use fracking.
By all means take threats to drinking water seriously. But we also need to be sure that regulators aren’t spreading needless fears so they can enhance their own power while pursuing an ideological agenda.
Michael Barone posts on the pipeline blunder.
How misguided was Barack Obama’s decision to refuse to approve the Keystone XL pipeline?
How misguided was Custer’s decision to ride into Little Big Horn?
Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that Americans favor building the Keystone XL pipeline by a 60%-24% margin. The fact that only 16% are unsure represents a very high level of knowledge about a project that was largely unknown except to readers of the oil and gas trade press a few months ago. And why shouldn’t Americans favor a pipeline that allows us to import oil from friendly nearby Canada rather than from unfriendly Venezuela or distant and dicey Saudi Arabia? …