Mr. Schumer’s
forceful decision not to approve the Iran/Putin/Obama deal has been called a
“break in the dike.” Democrats in the recent past have tended to march in
lockstep with President Barack Obama. Mr. Schumer is a threatening crack in
Democratic foreign policy obduracy. It is just through such cracks in the
political asphalt, said Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that lonely flowers bloom.
Though he has
expressed misgivings, Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, has
decided to support the deal; his doubts may be a sign of moral and foreign
policy sanity. Then again, perhaps Mr. Murphy’s reservations – he’s not quite
sure the Iranians with whom Mr. Obama has made common cause are honorable – represent
little more than a rhetorical fig leaf, an exit plan should Iranian leaders
prove by deeds that their words -- Death
to America! – are more reliable than instantaneously revised deals with “the
Great Satan.” In Islam, it is considered a manly virtue to lie persuasively to great
and lesser Satans, and the Iranians have shown themselves to be almost saintly
in this regard. The consequences that flow from such deals do not appear for
some time, and modern politicians are used to acting in the moment without fear
of consequences, however predictable.
Mr. Blumenthal has
been brooding over the question: to deal, or not to deal? Former U.S. Senator
Joe Lieberman use to be called, somewhat disdainfully, “the Hamlet of the Senate,”
because he was known for having chewed over issues of moment too often and too
long. Mr. Blumenthal is a worthy competitor in this regard. Hamlet, it will be
recalled, dithered over the existential question “to be, or not to be?” Some
would insist that the leaders of Israel are entertaining exactly the same dreadful
question. Jewish and Catholics
politicians are prone to dither over the cognate question: to be, or not to be
Jewish or Catholic? For reasons not fully examined, Protestants don’t have this
problem and, of course, the Islamic faithful know exactly who they are.
Mr. Schumer’s
decision, the break in the dike, occurred pretty much at the same time Mr.
Obama, a non-repentant perpetual campaigner, announced that Republicans who
were offering some resistance to the president’s deal with the ayatollah Ali
Hosseini Khamenei were, in fact, making “common cause” with unnamed Iranian “hardliners.”
All the Iranians are hardliners, and none are so unyielding as those who made
deals with American Presidents and feckless Secretaries of State. It was as if
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, having returned from Germany
following his tete a tete with Adolf Hitler and waving his “deal” under the
noses of his political opponents, were to label as “hardline” Nazis everyone In Britain whose views of
Hitler were more firmly grounded in objective reality than his own.
Mr. Schumer’s lucid
objections to the Khamenei-Obama pact cannot fit on a bumper sticker nor should
they be comfortably dismissed by proponents of the deal as Jewish propaganda
written by The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful American pro-Israeli
lobbying group. Connecticut born New York Times editorial writer Carol Giacomo supposes that Mr. Schumer is cribbing from
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Republican opponents who believe Mr.
Obama put in the poke he bought the very pig he is now fitfully trying to sell to
politically nervous Democrats.
Mr. Schumer isn’t
buying it.
Mr. Blumenthal
likely is not buying it either, though party loyalty, the equivalent of politeness
in a non-savage society, has caused him to bite his tongue; that and the dread
suspicion that any support of Israel, however necessary, might paint him into
the most uncomfortable corner for a political Jew or Catholic – that of a
supporter of Israel or Papist Rome. John Kennedy solved this problem by
sloughing off his Catholicism.
When Hillarie Belloc,
a fierce orthodox Catholic, was running for a seat in Parliament, he was
accosted by a woman on the campaign trail who called him a Papist, at which he
reached into his pocket, fetched his rosary beads, shook them above his head
and said, “Madam, do you see these beads? I pray on them every night before I
go to bed and every morning when I wake up. And if that offends you madam, I pray God He
spare me the IGNOMINY of representing you in Parliament.”
The retort was a bit
edgy, but it pointed to a man with a spine. Sooner or later, Mr. Blumenthal,
the Hamlet of the Senate, may find his.
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