I have failed you, dear readers. I promised to journey into the heart of Glennbeckistan for “Restoring Honor,” or “Whitestock,” or “The Greatest Affront to American Ideals in History,” or whatever you wanna call it. Instead, I ended up watching it on C-SPAN and monitoring real-time reactions on Twitter.

The following was repurposed from my various statements made elsewhere; it should suffice as ongoing documentation of Our National Shame. (For extra credit, I implore you to read this lengthy but important article about how the Tea Party movement is underwritten by the elitist world-destroyers at Koch Industries.)

Lincoln Memorial, The National Mall, Washington, D.C., 8.28.10

“When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
-Sinclair Lewis

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity”.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Insane in the Membrane

One thing to understand right off the bat: there was not a single word of substance uttered at “Restoring Honor.” Yet the various speeches and pre-recorded video segments transcended your average jingoism and entered the realm of tailored mindwashing. Overall, the event had all the hallmarks of carefully staged cult propaganda. That it took place on the anniversary of the most stirring call to American virtue in our nation’s history is even more appalling.

Think I’m exaggerating about the cult aspects?

If you listen closely (but not too close!), you’ll hear elements of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) in both the live and canned oratory. NLP is the get-rich-quick scam version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which is actually sound science. CBT is simply the Western scientific confirmation of neurological plasticity, which has been beneficently described by Buddhists for many centuries. Buddhist practitioners employ certain techniques to their own minds to transform delusional thinking into an holistic comprehension of impermanence. Since thoughts are squirrelly and their origins not always obvious, there’s an emphasis on stillness so that the turbulent mind can settle and its essential characteristics considered. At this point, an experienced meditator can perceive subtle cognition without becoming attached to any single idea, concept or emotion. After a while, new thought patterns are established and existential strife is greatly diminished.

That’s the healthy, self-directed version.

In the West, similar strategies are used by Cognitive Behavioral Therapists to ameliorate the effects of certain pathologies in their patients. NLP, on the other hand, is endorsed by skeevy marketing dudes as a way to get gullible people to buy stuff. The former is a legitimate branch of neurophysiology, the latter a cargo cult science.

In mindwashing, the idea is to enhance a target’s susceptibility to a given idea or concept. Even before Scientology or pyramid marketing, political operatives and tent revivalists made surprisingly effective use semantic suggestion. Applied skillfully, those with positional power can plant rhetorical, emotional or ideological “seeds” with the subconscious permission of the receiver. To succeed, the operator must have a sense of the target’s value set and informational capacities.

It’s like the old-fashioned Jedi mind trick: softer noggins are the most susceptible, as are those under stress or experiencing collective turmoil. Clearly, the Tea Party is low hanging fruit. In the absence of once-stable ideological constructs (like manufactured consumer consent based on free market fantasies), these folks are putty in the hands of even a marginally-gifted communicator like Beck.

Josef Goebbels was adept exploiting these phenomena. Sarah Palin and her ilk get it. Barack Obama seemingly doesn’t.

Welcome to Bizzaro World

“Restoring Honor” was positively Orwellian; a true exercise in doublespeak. Up is down, left is right, bigotry is tolerance, aggression is compassion, reality is what they say it is, facts be damned. I mean, to not-so-subtly imply that the Framers were proponents of organized Christianity, and that Martin Luther King, Jr. would endorse the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Wow.

It’s not honor that needs restoring in this country, it’s a basic understanding of our history.

First of all, America was not intended to be a nation with fealty to either Rome or the Protestant Church of Europe. That’s the reason for the clearly articulated separation of Church and State, which has steadily eroded ever since the GOP made its pact with the Moral Majority and exiled the last conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley. Hey, didja know that Ronald Reagan — that camera-ready darling of the Religious Right — attended church far less than Obama, and regularly consulted soothsayers? Good thing he had cover from evangelicals in exchange for giving wedge issues a spotlight in the national discourse. Which turned out to be a great way to distract Americans from the hollowing out of the public sphere and the dismantling of the US labor market.

But back to our Founders. These fellas were hardly the kinds of Christians Pat Robertson would recognize. Most were Enlightenment-inspired Masonic Deists with radical notions of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality borrowed from the French, of all people. (For various reasons, the French Revolution came later; they had a far worse go of it).

Some of the Founders’ statements about Christianity are so brash that Palin, Beck, et. al would find them nothing short of heretical. Here’s a taste:

“I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved — the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced.”
-John Adams

“The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion.”
-George Washington

“I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”
-Thomas Jefferson

“I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.”
-Ben Franklin

Even the Great Emancipator, whose marble effigy provided the backdrop to Whitestock, was unambiguous:

“The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion.“
-Abraham Lincoln

If you watched the rally, you’d have thought that these guys conceived the country as the first megachurch.

Glenn Beck is hardly an exemplar of Christ-like behavior. More like “Who Would Jesus Kill?” Apparently, the answer to that is Michael Moore. Here’s some Beck-style “honor” from 2005:

“I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it… No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus Do wristband, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore,’ and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I’m not sure.”

You didn’t hear any of that kind of talk at the rally. But you did hear from MLK’s niece, a notorious campaigner against the rights of homosexuals, trotted out to demonstrate the Tea Party’s deep commitment to social justice. For everyone that isn’t gay. Or Muslim. Or willing to consider secular solutions to problems perpetuated by right-wing corporatocracy.

I saw a comment on a prominent liberal blog calling the Beck event “a proto-facist rally to mobilize the brownshirts in defense of the fatherland.” While I’m not sure I’d go that far, the “support the troops” part of the show was completely out-of-step with the MLK-lauding. Unsurprisingly, it was Palin who tried to make the connection between the civil rights leader and those brave men and women who defend our nation. Here’s a response from that same liberal blog commenter: “Anybody who thinks King would have supported the current War on Terror really should read his wonderful 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech he gave at the Riverside church in Harlem. Is the military under attack? You’d think Obama was proposing to disband all branches of the armed services, the way Beck and Palin are carrying on.”

Reparation Nation

Having recently lost advertisers over having called the president a racist, Beck likely needed to put a more inclusive spin on his standard bile. But holding a funtime rally where fear-addled white folks can hear how Jesus is colorblind won’t magically erase the many things Beck has said about the threat of African-Socialist-Muslim enslavement. Here’s a few choice quotes you may have missed:

“This guy is not who he says he is. None of his bills, none of his proposals are about what he says they’re about. The health care bill is reparations. It’s the beginning of reparations. He’s going to give — if you want to go into medical school, the medical schools will get more federal dollars if they have proven that they are putting minorities ahead.”

“When the president was sitting there, or standing there, and he was talking about Native American rights in the middle of a tragedy, Fort Hood, it didn’t feel right. And it seemed, maybe to me, that he was even promising reparations.”

“Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health care bill, are transforming America. And they are all driven by President Obama’s thinking on one idea: reparations… These massive programs are Obama brand reparations — or in presidential speak, leveling out the playing field. But, just in case the universalness of the program doesn’t somehow or another quench his reparation appetite, he is making sure to do his part to pay the debt in the other areas.”

“You were voting for — not change, but change, I think, in race. You were like ‘Hey, let’s put this behind us.’ I think a lot of people were there. They weren’t necessarily for his policies because his policies and everything else are — what are they?”

I don’t care how many persons of color you trotted out at your event, Glenn. What you’re saying is clear: the scary black man in the White House is coming to take your stuff and redistribute it to minorities.

All of this offends me deeply, because I’m a Patriot. I patriotically defend Americans from the forces of bigotry and ignorance. I patriotically defend those who are unable or unwilling to see how they are being manipulated from being preyed upon for profit. I patriotically defend the right for Americans to be non-religious. I patriotically defend Americans’ right to self-determination and to reject coercion by corporations that seek to limit individual choice and shirk civic responsibility. I patriotically defend Americans from state intervention in the sexual and reproductive decisions of adults. Most importantly, I patriotically defend Americans’ right to pursue happiness and contribute to the advancement of the ideals that made this country great.

I hope you will start calling yourselves Patriots: loudly, proudly and often.

If you live in America and currently draw breath, you know the country is in some serious straits. We’re out of work, facing dim prospects for economic growth and our towns and cities are literally falling apart. Then there’s the escalation of the culture wars, now starring an emboldened coalition of bigoted Christians, bigoted free market fundamentalists, bigoted hawks, bigoted isolationists and plain ol’ bigots.

About a year ago, Real Americans™ were rudely roused from a long, deep slumber. Imagine you’re having a pleasant dream where easy credit lets you park your Escalade in a exburban McMansion stocked with cheap goods made by exotic people in some faraway land that you will never visit, because the nice lady who cleans your house provides plenty of cultural exposure, thank you very much.

Suddenly, you’re shaken awake by Glenn Beck, who squats on your stomach wearing a red devil costume while poking you in the head with a little plastic pitchfork. “Wake up! Your government has just been taken over by a foreign-born Marxist-Muslim-Communist-Nazi!” the pudgy hobgoblin shrieks. “And he’s black!”

Then your 501K disappears, your husband loses his job at GloboChem and you’re forced to work as a greeter at Wal-Mart. Worse, you’re surrounded by brown people who have taken over several of the foreclosed homes on your block. Every night, robotic mariachi music blares from the property next door as you fret for the future. Whatever is happening to America, you don’t like it. Not one bit.

Only the local megachurch offers sanctuary. But for how long? The menu at the church Applebee’s is already in Spanish and English.

You want to crawl into a safe corner and wait until it all blows over. But Glenn says that’s not an option. You’re taxed into submission! The Constitution is being used to housebreak the Obama’s purebred puppy (it’s probably a French breed)! The Congress just made it so all brown people get free medical care, free college and bottomless refills at Hooters!

Jacked up on anxiety, you begin to congregate with other fear-addicts. The high is even more potent with a group. But it wears off too quickly. You need to maintain. At home, FOX News is now on around the clock. You listen to an audiobook by Sarah Palin while driving to pick up your husband’s unemployment check. The doctor’s office plays Rush Limbaugh as you wait to use your Medicare benefits on “restless leg syndrome,” which, having seen the TV commercial, you’re sure you have.

One afternoon, right before a scheduled rebroadcast of Sean Hannity’s “Freedom Concert,” you hear the clarion call. Glenn is summoning the True Believers to Washington. Freedom-loving patriots from across the country will descend upon Satan’s City for a historic rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech!

You had a dream, too. One you’d love to get back to. But you can’t — at least not until the government is back in the hands of conservative, God-fearing men and women who understand that the country’s economic and cultural well-being is best served by massive corporations. They are the ones that create jobs! And they’d do more of it if only Uncle Sam would stop taxing them! Who cares that they’ve already outsourced American productivity to third world countries and have multiple offshore tax shelters. Never mind that they are accelerating planetary climate destabilization. Science is for sissies! Regulation is for socialists! All you need is Glenn and Jesus™ and maybe another Botox treatment. You’ve seen the way your husband looks at that teenage checkout girl at the Gas-N-Go.

Oh, look! Americans for Prosperity are offering bus and hotel packages! Your prayers have been answered!

By the way, I’m actually going to Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally next weekend. Expect live tweets and a post-event photo essay.

…you make the best of what’s still around.

My stars, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I apologize for my absence, but there have been a great many things to attend to in the world of music-tech-policy-law. It’s been pretty much nonstop all summer, actually. But at least it keeps me distracted from all the gloom-and-doom.

Speaking of which, you’ve no doubt noticed that America is now officially an empire in decline. It’s not just me saying it, either (although if you check the record, I’ve been pretty consistent with this line since the late 1990s). Everyone from Christian Armageddonites to librul blog jockeys are weighing in on our nation’s waning.

One side sees it as a sign of Jesus’ imminent return and the other the logical result of three decades of laissez-faire tomfoolery, but the bottom line is eerily similar: America is well and fucked.

My favorite description comes from Glenn Greenwald of Salon, himself referring to a handful of other dire pronouncements:

It’s worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month — with a subheadline warning:  ”Back to Stone Age“ – which describes how “paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue.”  Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional.  And it was announced this week that “Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free.”

Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights — or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State — that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?

Paul Krugman of the New York Times spread some cheer in today’s edition:

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

Awesome! At times like these, it’s always good to check in with men of science, who are less susceptible to sky-is-falling rhetoric. What say you, Stephen Hawking?

Get off the planet while the getting’s good:

Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill.

(Hint: he’s betting on ill).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQcE2dq3YD0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjEXjiWonN4

But it wasn’t until an English-language version was released in 1984 that most Americans were made aware of the song’s subtext. As a Cold War Kid obsessed with megatons and Mutually Assured Destruction, I heard the message loud and clear.

Although the English version isn’t a direct translation, both takes tell the same story: colorful and harmless balloons are set loose and mistaken by the military as an incoming attack. The erroneous yet overwhelming response triggers WWIII. The song concludes with a lone female voice crooning wistfully amidst the rubble.

Over the decades, there have been any number of encounters that mirrored this narrative but thankfully fell short of aggressive response. One of the more recent incidents involved Nordic seagulls mistaken for incoming ICBMs.

Just this week, South Korea, on high-alert due to a bellicose North, had its own moment. With balloons, no less. BBC reports:

Balloons released by schoolchildren sparked a major security alert in South Korea, reports say, amid heightened tensions with North Korea A resident of Ansan, near Seoul, reported seeing 40-50 objects resembling parachutes falling on a mountainside.

The military and police mobilised a special joint task force.

Upon investigation, the objects turned out to be helium balloons released by a local school.

Retro is all fun and games until a major metropolitan area gets nuked.

Here’s the video for the original German version of 99 “Luftballons,” followed by the English translation. Maybe Nick can help us do a lyrical compare?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQYQTFudrqc

You and I, and a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we’ve got
Set them free at the break of dawn
‘Til one by one, they were gone

Back at base, bugs in the software
Flash the message, “Some thing’s out there”
Floating in the summer sky
Ninety-nine red balloons go by

Ninety-nine red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic lads, it’s a red alert
There’s something here from somewhere else

The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky
Ninety-nine red balloons go by

Ninety-nine Decision Street
Ninety-nine ministers meet
To worry, worry, super-scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry

This is what we’ve waiting for
This is it boys, this is war
The President is on the line
As ninety-nine red balloons go by

Ninety-nine knights of the air
Riding super high-tech jet fighters
Everyone’s a super hero
Everyone’s a Captain Kirk

With orders to identify, to clarify and classify
Scrambling in the summer sky
As ninety-nine red balloons go by
Ninety-nine red balloons go by

Ninety-nine dreams I have had
Every one a red balloon
Now it’s all over and I’m standin’ pretty
In this dust that was a city

If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here is a red balloon
I think of you and let it go

Boy, was I in for a shock. Since the Republican defeat of a year and a half ago, Palin resigned her position as governor, “wrote” a “book” and has generally caused mayhem on the political scene. When I listened to an NPR report this week, I learned that, while “…only 37 percent of Americans say they have a favorable impression of Palin. But among Republicans, that number jumps to 66 percent.” What? As many as thirty-seven percent of Americans have a favorable impression of Palin?

You have probably noticed this was a big week for female candidates. At least highly conservative Republican female candidates. To quote NPR once more, “Last month, Palin gave her seal of approval to South Carolina gubernatorial hopeful Nikki Haley. At a rally in Columbia, Palin said she came to give a “shout-out to a strong pro-family, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, pro-development, conservative reformer.”

I don’t have the energy to point out the contradictions between being “pro-life” and “pro-gun.” Nor do I think the majority of our readers need me to do so. And I can’t get even get started on people who call Palin, a woman who is against abortion even in cases of rape and who, as mayor of Wasilla, made victims of sexual assault pay for their own rape kits, a “feminist.”

As Undead Molly pointed out in her Logic Fallacy Bingo post, we ignore idiots at our own peril. People laughed at Bush II. People laughed at Reagan. Both were two-term presidents. Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Were she alive today, Mead might amend that to say “Never doubt that a small group of ill-informed, bigoted citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

How’s that whole hopey-changey thing workin’ out for ya? As in I sure do hopey our dependence on fossil fuels don’t changey the environment too much!!

or…

I don’t do this often, but I’m gonna take a minute to explain an issue that I work on at my real job. Why? Because it’s one of the most important policy debates of our time, and it doesn’t get much coverage in the media.

I’m talking about net neutrality.

Net neutrality is the principle that protects the open internet. It’s also the web as we know it. Without open internet platforms, there wouldn’t have been a Google or eBay. If we lose net neutrality, we might never see the next great innovation.

Picture this: you have a favorite local pizza parlor. It’s Friday night, and you want a pie delivered. You call your local joint — let’s call it Joe’s Pizza — only to have an operator come on and say, “please hold while we prioritize calls for Domino’s.” That doesn’t happen on the phone, why should it happen online?

The web was built on open technological structures that don’t favor one type of data over another. The ISPs hate that. They want to charge content providers (basically anyone who puts stuff on the internet) a higher fee for the faster delivery of their sites and services. If you couldn’t afford to — or didn’t want to — pay a toll, you’d get stuck on the slow lane while the big dogs cruise along at light speed.

I care about this because I’m a content producer myself. As a musician and writer, I depend on some basic assurances that my stuff isn’t disfavored because Black Eyed Peas‘ reps cut a direct deal with the devil Comcast.

Losing net neutrality would be devastating to small businesses who depend on the open internet to compete alongside the biggest companies. Oh, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my internet service provider to tell me where I go, what I say and whether I’m even allowed to say it (and to whom). They’ve done this before, you know — just ask Pearl Jam.

The internet is the most revolutionary communications platform since the printing press. Why? Because its open structures allow anyone to have a voice. Now, I may not like a majority of what they’re saying, but that doesn’t change the fact that the internet is too important to let a handful of powerful telecommunications and cable companies mess with.

The April 6 decision at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out the FCC’s presumed legal authority for regulating the internet. This is a huge blow to the Commission, particularly as they work to establish basic rules that would preserve its essential characteristics of openness. The ruling also affects huge portions of the National Broadband Plan, which contains proposals for getting affordable high-speed internet service to more Americans. Because of this decision, both efforts are currently in limbo.

My organization, Future of Music Coalition, has been working for a decade to make sure that musicians can compete online right alongside the biggest companies. We’ve always understood that it would be a huge mistake to place bottlenecks and gatekeepers — basically everything that was wrong with the original music industry — on the internet. We’ve advocated for net neutrality because it’s crucial to artists’ ability to reach fans on their own terms.

When we first started talking about net neutrality, there weren’t many examples of legitimate, music-related sites and services to point to. Now, there are new ones every day. We want this legitimate digital music marketplace to grow, and we want all artists to be able to participate. Net neutrality means innovation can keep happening and musicians can keep making connections with fans without having to ask permission first.

And that’s why I’m all into it.

So what happens next?

Well, there’s a growing call for the Commission to reclassify broadband internet under a different section of the Telecommunications Act so it can have more solid legal footing to do its work. (My wife’s org is doing some heavy lifting on that front.) Probably the most cogent (and comprehensible) explanation of where we go from here comes from University of Michigan law professor Susan Crawford. Her recent New York Times Op-Ed is pretty much required reading.

Now before you go thinking that I’m all snuggly-wuggly with the FCC, may I remind you that my peeps and I have given them a lot of crap over their arbitrary broadcast indecency policies, their handling of media ownership rules and payola. But as the Federal Fucking Communications Commission, it seems reasonable that they should have some say over the most significant communications tool in human history. Or what are they even there for?

This stuff is a huge reason why I’ve been so busy lately. But it’s a good kind of busy. Because this shit is important.

What’s that old Chinese proverb/curse? “May you live in interesting times.” Mission accomplished.

You may have read about the Chrisitianist militia from Michigan that got hauled in for planning to blow up some law enforcement officials. I have no idea why they’re called Hutaree. Maybe it’s a toothless redneck pronunciation of “Huckabee.” From the official indictment:

According to the plan, the Hutaree would attack law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession [for cops previously killed by the group] with Improvised Explosive Devices with Explosively Formed Projectiles, which constitute weapons of mass destruction.

The militia is also known for their action-packed training videos. In one, they burn a UN flag and replace it with something that kinda resembles the Gonzo fist. Weirder still, they use a Sisters of Mercy track in at least two of their YouTube clips. (For those born on the wrong side of 1980, SOM was a goth band far more popular with pale sissies than gun-obsessed gov’t-haters.)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiUtGgxyibc

And if that’s not enough, check out these Hutaree wedding photos featuring members of the clan slinging assault rifles while dressed to the nines in combat fatigues.

God Bless America!

If you pay attention to the high-stakes tomfoolery that is international diplomacy, you may have heard about the supposed “humiliation” suffered by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the hands of notorious meanie-pants Barack Obama.

Here’s some backstory. The White House is irritated by Israel’s recent announcement of planned expansion of Jewish settlements into East Jerusalem. The timing was pretty horrible — Vice President Joe Biden, a staunch ally of Israel, was in the middle of a visit, and US envoy George Mitchell was about to facilitate indirect talks between Palestinian and Israeli leadership. The London Times:

After failing to extract a written promise of concessions on settlements, Mr Obama walked out of his meeting with Mr Netanyahu but invited him to stay at the White House, consult with advisers and “let me know if there is anything new”, a US congressman, who spoke to the Prime Minister, said.

“It was awful,” the congressman said. One Israeli newspaper called the meeting “a hazing in stages”, poisoned by such mistrust that the Israeli delegation eventually left rather than risk being eavesdropped on a White House telephone line. Another said that the Prime Minister had received “the treatment reserved for the President of Equatorial Guinea.”

Sources said that Mr Netanyahu failed to impress Mr Obama with a flow chart purporting to show that he was not responsible for the timing of announcements of new settlement projects in east Jerusalem.

I’m sorry, Mr. President, but how can you not be impressed by flow charts?

Netanyahu is in something of a pickle at home. His hard-right Likud party is the majority coalition, and they don’t seem at all interested in negotiations. If you believe this piece in the New Yorker, Likud is starting to sound a lot like the American’s Tea Party, at least in terms of how they view Obama:

Polls and conversations with right-leaning Israelis have long reflected a distrust of Obama and a free-floating anxiety about what they imagine to be his view of the world—specifically, his indifference to Israel. At the margins, and sometimes within them, one even hears the familiar aspersions about the President’s middle name, his childhood interlude in Indonesia, and his marination in a South Side milieu supposedly composed of incendiary preachers, black nationalists, fading Weathermen, and (Oy! Vey ist mir!) Palestinian intellectuals.

Yet many in the US see Obama as having always had a special relationship with Jews:

As a rising politician with Ivy League connections, Obama had financial backing from all over, including from a class of young black entrepreneurs. But he has had Jewish mentors throughout his career. Philanthropists like Bettylu Saltzman, Penny Pritzker, and Lester Crown were crucial to his campaigns. His friend and neighbor the late Arnold Jacob Wolf was a rabbi. Michelle Obama’s cousin Capers C. Funnye, Jr., is the first African-American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and the spiritual leader of Beth Shalom, a congregation on the South Side. One of Obama’s closest colleagues in Springfield was Ira Silverstein, an Orthodox Jew, with whom he shared an office suite in the Capitol building; Obama acted as Silverstein’s shabbos goy, turning on lights and pushing elevator buttons for him on Saturdays.

Obama’s Jewish friends and supporters report that they were convinced of his ease among Jews and of his advocacy for a two-state solution, with an emphasis on justice for the Palestinians and on real security for the Israelis. Obama also listened carefully to the arguments of Palestinian friends, such as the historian Rashid Khalidi. And why not? Obama told fund-raising audiences that it was entirely possible to support Israel, even passionately, without endorsing the platform of Likud and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. One of his mentors in Chicago, Abner Mikva, a former congressman, federal judge, and counsel to Bill Clinton, jokingly told the Chicago Jewish News during the campaign, “I think when this is all over, people are going to say that Barack Obama is the first Jewish president.”

Netanyahu has to understand that he can’t stand in defiance of the US forever — we give Israel not only arms, but also international legitimacy. The country’s policies aren’t always popular with the rest of the world, but America’s “special relationship” with Israel guarantees a lot of political (and military) cover. And, were he to do the math, Netanyahu would see clearly that demographic shifts in the region will severely impact the future viability of Israel in the abscence of a negotiated Palestinian state. So it’s in his best interest to come to the table. Except that the hard-liners in his party won’t let him.

Which leads me to my prediction.

You may also have heard that Iran is in flagrant noncompliance with their nuclear program. Western intelligence agencies and international inspectors now believe that the country is pursuing new sites, which makes the Israeli stance that much more hawkish. But it also may represent an opportunity to jumpstart direct negotiations between Israel and Palestine.

Look at it like this: Israel wants nothing more than to launch an attack to knock out suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. The US hasn’t been too keen on that, as we see it as potentially destabilizing to our security efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s nothing like an attack on an Muslim nation — even one as mistrusted as Iran — to inflame anti-Western sentiment on the Arab street. Even a so-called “surgical” airstrike would give Al Queda a rallying point, potentially upset the balance in Saudi Arabia and put Europe on high alert.

Still, it’s not hard to imagine a backroom quid pro quo deal going down between the American and Israeli administrations. We’d simply stand down when Netanyahu authorized a strike. On the international stage, we’d defer to Israel’s “sovereign right to protect her security.” This would be in exchange for participation in a new “road map” for a Palestinian state, with a far more aggressive timeframe than that suggested by the previous administration. It would also give Netanyahu political cover with the Likud hardliners, who won’t be able to say he’s not aggressively safeguarding Israel from perceived external threats.

Win-win, right? Not so fast.

This maneuver will not, and I repeat, WILL NOT solve our Iran problem. If anything, a strike will play right into the theocracy’s hands — Ahmadinejad and the mullahs have a very precarious grip on authority, and an attack would only help them consolidate their power in the name of national security. Even the segment of the Iranian public that hates the current leadership would rally behind it if attacked by Israel. And keep in mind that Israeli airstrikes would likely only delay a nuclear Iran, not prevent it.

So if we choose this carrot with Israel, we must be prepared for a short-to-medium term regional flare-up. This could complicate our efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and finally get the hell out of Iraq. Yet if we manage to accelerate the peace process between Israel and Palestine and have the structures in place to achieve a Palestinian state by, say, 2015, it could be worth it in the long run. Iran will continue marginalize itself with or without nukes, and we simply do not have the capacity to attempt regime change by force. So we have to live with that. On the other hand, we’d be dealing Al Queda a major PR blow by cutting through their bullshit Palestine propaganda.

Has the White House gamed this out? The status quo is untenable, and Israeli-Palestinian peace is an even shinier trophy for Obama than health care reform. How aggressively will the US pursue it? What concessions are we willing to make?

What do YOU think of the likelihood of what I’ve just described playing out in the really real world?