Here we go again!  Scary sofa-samurai Robert Kagan, a neocon foreign-policy “scholar,” is also an expert on war, having watched a lot of Hollywood movies.  Kagan says that, if Obama were to use force against Iran, the election would be over—he would win overwhelmingly.  Kagan and his brother are inside-the-Beltway hucksters, always hustling and doing Israel’s bidding, although not necessarily for cash.  There are countless ways Zionists have to remunerate those American citizens who are loyal to the state of Israel.  That’s what the neoconservative movement is all about.

I remember some 20 years or so ago running into Gore Vidal at a book party in London.  We had a very close common friend, Maria St Just, Tennessee Williams’ muse, and probably the reason why poor old Tennessee was gay.  Lady St Just was the only woman he had slept with, and she was a real man-eater.  Maria was Tennessee’s literary executor, and my wife was Maria’s executor, which are two different things.  Gore pointed this out and told me to make sure people remained confused.  “Every producer the world over will come knocking at your door; you’ll have actresses stripping for you . . . ”  Well, that was the last thing I was looking for, and I made the distinction clear in print soon after.  Gore Vidal was a patrician American who wasn’t shy to question the loyalties of Zionists such as the Kristols, père et fils, and Norman Podhoretz, whom he always referred to as Poddy.  They threw mud in return, calling him an antisemite, but he was too big for them.  They failed to make him a nonperson, however hard they tried.  No Joe Sobran he.

And now we’re back where we started ten years ago.  The war drums are getting louder by the minute, the neocons are out hustling in print and on television screens, spreading the word from Tel Aviv, and the hundreds of thousands of dead in the disastrous wars of Iraq and Afghanistan are long forgotten.  Netanyahu wants to bomb Iran, and Mitt Romney has made it clear that he will send American planes and warships to assist him if he wins the White House.  Obama may be useless as President, but he at least resists playing the hit man for Netanyahu and the wild men of Likud.  He realizes that every country we “liberated”—Iraq, Afghanistan, even Libya—hates our guts.  The world knows that Israel is the only nuclear (illegal) superpower in the Middle East.  When Netanyahu calls Iran’s nuclear plants an existential threat, I’m sure he breaks down laughing in private.  Iran would be vaporized in a day if she tried to launch a nuclear-tipped missile.  The mullahs know it, Netanyahu knows it, Obama and Romney know it, yet Uncle Sam is being held hostage to the extent that Obama is begging Israel to hold off attacking Iran until after the November election.  What in hell’s name is going on here?  Are the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government taking orders from Jerusalem?  The answer, alas, is a resounding yes.

The three percent of American voters who are Jewish usually vote Democratic.  They are an educated and wealthy block who seem to set reason aside when it comes to Israel.  In order to win their vote Republicans are now debasing themselves in front of such grotesque low-life shysters as Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino owner whose looks reflect his morals.  Romney took a back seat to him in Tel Aviv, as had the ghastly Newt (“Palestinians are an invented people”) Gingrich.  AIPAC, in the meantime, has a blacklist of lawmakers who are considered not 100-percent pro-Israel.  The list is very, very small.  Politicians know their money supply will dry up if they’re perceived not to be sound on the nuclear Middle East superpower.

Netanyahu is known to regard Palestinians with contempt, and his plan to drive them out of the West Bank altogether and into Jordan is no secret.  Although North Korea, Pakistan, and India possess nuclear weapons, we have learned to live with them.  Not so where Iran is concerned, and the mullahs are not even close to achieving nuclear capabilities.  The Likudists want war because in the turmoil of its aftermath—with terrorism on land and sea, the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, and Hezbollah raining rockets on northern Israel—the army and the settlers can drive most Palestinians from their lands once and for all.

Netanyahu’s natural constituency is the settlers, ultra-orthodox maniacs who claim the West Bank as their own and see Arabs not unlike the way the Nazis considered the Jews.  The settlers find nothing wrong with brutally controlling another people against their will.  Graffiti in the streets demonstrate their hidden dreams: “No Arabs No Gentiles.”  Yes, it has come to this.  Such people, the Adelsons of this world, are telling American lawmakers and the media how and what to think and do.

Netanyahu began as a marketing man and knows exactly which buttons to push where Americans are concerned.  The ultimate con man, he will lead us to Armageddon one of these days.