July 23^rd

Thomas Sowell goes on record today as wondering if President Obama really has this country’s best interest as his top priority. Naturally, it’s all about the Iranian agreement. Sowell proclaims that “Back in the days of our nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union some of the more weak-kneed intelligentsia posed the choice as to whether we wanted to be ‘Red or dead.’ Fortunately there were others…President Ronald Reagan persevered in a course that critics said would lead to nuclear war. Instead it led to the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War.”

I am amazed that Sowell is too dense to see the parallels between President Obama’s diplomatic efforts to avoid war and President Reagan’s efforts to do the same. There were critics, then and now, who insisted that the other side could not be trusted; Sowell is not only blind to this similarity, he is one of the leading critics of such diplomacy now, just as  the “weak kneed intelligentsia” were  in Reagan’s time.

There is an interesting disconnect between the concerns of the national press and Thomas Sowell, Mona Charen and Cal Thomas—the conservative columnists I’ve been jousting with. These columnists are obsessed with the Iran agreement.  The rest of the commentators are talking about Donald Trump, the murders of our servicemen at a recruiting station, the apparent suicide of a woman jailed after being pulled over to allow a police car to pass her.

These commentators are all listed by the Jewish World Review a publication devoted, so it claims, to various cultural understandings. The review lists all of the above conservative columnists on its roster and, in addition, Ann Coulter, George Will, Charles Krauthammer and others. The editor claims that “it is hard to understand a religious person who votes Democrat.”  You get the picture. It is apparent that pro-Israel and Republican are linked at the hip!

Now there is a full court press by the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to lobby congress against this agreement. This outfit has 100 thousand members and many of them are converging on Washington to lobby their legislators to kill this deal. There are already ads on television hinting that if the agreement is passed we will be at grave risk of nuclear war. Thirty million dollars will be spent on this advertising. Rarely, if ever, has another country so brazenly intruded itself into our country’s political affairs and we are paying for it. Our one-sided support for Israel does not play well in any part of the Middle-East. Maybe it’s time for these right wing columnists to tell us just where their allegiance lies.