Friday, November 12, 2010

Cantor and Israel

When Genêt tried his luck at a partisan divide-and-conquer move on the Washington administration, Jefferson and Hamilton formed a united front against him.

Eric Cantor is apparently not as principled as his Virginia forefather.

I have no problem with Cantor sympathizing with Israel. Any citizen and certainly any representative voting on foreign affairs issues has a right to his opinion and a right to disagree with and vote against the president. To meet with a foreign head of state and tell that head of state he has his back seems like a different matter entirely. There's a reason why foreign policy isn't conducted by the states. There's a reason why the Constitution has arranged executive powers in the way that it has. This is a disconcerting precedent, which I think is being downplayed because everyone (rightly) considers Israel an ally. But there's a difference between being a solid ally and getting a sentimental attachment to a foreign nation-state and subverting Constituional division of powers to pursue that attachment.

4 comments:

  1. Oh, please
    When people like the Kennedys support the IRA, nobody says squat nor when Negroes support Nelson Mandela.
    Let a Jew support his people overseas and somehow that's BAD! go away, moron.

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  2. As an admin, it's always difficult to decide whether or not to delete comments like this. To a certain extent they make for criticism enough of themselves, and so seem worth leaving up.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sounds fine to me, Evan.

    And I'll remind the commenter that I said I was perfectly fine with Cantor supporting Israel.

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  4. So I googled our friend emanuel - he has a habit of overreacting to anything he perceives as being anti-Israel or anti-semitic.

    Needless to say this blog is neither, so you can rest easy emanuel. You can also update your vocabulary for referencing different ethnic groups.

    ReplyDelete

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