Tantrums

One of our dogs, our youngest, throws tantrums. Whenever we crate her or have her do something she doesn’t want to do she barks, growls, thrashes, and scratches furiously at the floor. She’s even snapped at me a couple of times, something we don’t tolerate. This morning the editors of the Wall Street Journal are throwing a tantrum about the president’s throwing a tantrum over the results of the Israeli elections:

You’ll have to forgive President Obama. The leader of the free world is still having difficulty accepting that the Israeli people get to choose their own prime minister, never mind his preferences.

The latest White House tantrum in the wake of Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election last week took the form of a speech delivered Monday by Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, in which he declared that “an occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end.”

When a chief of staff speaks in public, especially as the keynote speaker at a scheduled event, the President has signed off. In this case the audience was also carefully chosen: the annual conference of J Street, a left-leaning Jewish lobbying group that has never met an Israeli concession it didn’t like. Which makes it all the more distressing that Mr. McDonough would talk about Israel in language usually associated with Palestinian terror groups.

The entire editorial is pretty harsh. Unduly so for my tastes.

My general view is that we shouldn’t involve ourselves one way or another in foreign elections just as we wouldn’t want foreigners to insert themselves into ours. Indeed, I think there should be more scrutiny on foreign money coming into our elections, harsher penalties for accepting it, and that you didn’t know should be no excuse. But that’s a different subject.

For years U. S. policy has been strongly pro-Israel and in my view that has been somewhat decoupled from our actual interests. I would be happier if we took a more detached, objective approach. The corrective for years of pro-Israel policy isn’t years of anti-Israel policy, however popular that might be in college faculty lounges, and should be firmly moored in actual U. S. interests. Maybe I have a tin ear but I don’t get that impression from the Obama Administration.