From Pelosi to Oshry: Zero Degrees of Separation

Let's get depressed! Glennzilla:

The degree of mandated orthodoxy on the Israel question among America's political elites is so great that if one took the statements on Gaza from George Bush, Pelosi, Hoyer, Berman, Ros-Lehtinen, and randomly chosen Bill Kristol-acolytes and redacted their names, it would be impossible to know which statements came from whom.  They're all identical:  what Israel does is absolutely right.

It's even worse than that. On Israel, there's no particular difference in substance between the statements of Nancy Pelosi and, say, Pamela Oshry. As Glennzilla goes on to glumly observe, wingnuts -- the very people who have been so colossally and disastrously wrong about Iraq -- are completely in charge of the way Israel/Palestine is discussed in America. They have a monopoly on the definition of "legitimate" opinions about the conflict, the ones you can express officially. Hence they are able to get away with the most preposterous and insulting declarations -- that disagreeing with Israeli actions makes one an "anti-Semite"; that Israeli and American interests are identical; that criticizing Israel equals support for terrorists.

What this means is that discussion of Israel/Palestine is at best puerile and at worse insane. Here's both, from Krauthammer:

Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.

Anyone who can look at dead children and preserve "moral clarity" is a psychopath. Clearly.

Or take Online Tough Guy Michael Goldfarb, who reads this story, which ends with this line: "A man cradled the burned, limp body of a child he pulled from the rubble," and then muses:

These people willingly send their own children to their deaths simply to make a statement -- to accomplish nothing but the murder of two Israeli civilians and signal their commitment to the fight. The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it's not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause.

I think Islamic radicals are precisely as "rational" as Michael Goldfarb.

American political discourse is desperately immature, and this is not because certain bloggers like to say "fuck" on the Internet.