"Jews? We don't need no stinkin' Jews!"

(Apologies to John Houston for the paraphrase from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.")

Following President Bobama’s “Middle East” speech yesterday, I was hard-pressed to remember when I ever heard such a stream of hot, steaming puke pour out of the mouth of America’s Chief Executive. I think it might have been during Watergate, or maybe when Willie the Zipper was denying having any sort of meaningful sex with Monica, and parsing the meaning of “is.”

Israel is our only friend in the Middle East. They would have flown nuclear suicide missions on Moscow for us during the Cold War, if it heated up. My father told me about liberating the Nordhausen concentration camp, where the Nazis were building V-2 rockets with slave labor. The Israelis are the most intrepid people on earth. Like America, they haven’t been perfect in forging their nation, and some of their actions—like demolishing homes in the Gaza Strip—made me wonder if they were becoming like the Nazis who tried to exterminate them, but the question was more rhetorical than anything else.

I have never been able to wrap my mind around the persecution of Jews. It has been going on for a millennium, and is still a twisted sort of international sport with most of the world. I have intimate intellectual associations with a variety of Christian “fundies”—an oxymoron if I ever heard one!—but I don’t buy into that business that “the Jews killed Jesus.” Saying that is like saying the Westboro Baptists represent all of that denomination—and I’m a “Babtist” by religious orientation. I’m also conversant with all the conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds and their control of the world’s monetary system, and all the rest of that crap. If Jews run anything, they do so on the basis of merit, creativity, and productivity, not because of some sinister hidden agenda in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. What I initially assumed were Israeli emulations of Nazi “solutions”—in the sense that abused children often grow up to become abusers—was instead an application of Mitchell WerBell’s maxim that “it takes terror to break terror.” Unlike the theologically-driven caliphates of Islam, Israel is guided by the moral center of Judaism, and that has a direct link to the teachings of Christ. I’ve never had a Jewish person tell me I have to convert to their belief system or die. No Hebrew has ever tried to enslave me.

Before there was an Israel, and the rest of the world was down on Jews either as matter of daily business or just to see the look on their faces, America was—as always—the shining city on the hill where they could find refuge. There was some ugliness and denial in the early years of War II, but when the facts came out, America made an irrevocable commitment to the rights and protection of Jewish heritage. (In telling me about Nordhausen, my father touched on the fact that a number of German soldiers trying to surrender to the Allies ended up dead on the side of the road. I don’t think he was ever a party to a black-flag mentality, but there were a lot of GIs who saw what happened, and weren’t too concerned about taking prisoners.)

Ah, but as usual, I digress.

The bonds between Israel and America are deep, and should be insoluble. Instead, they have become another poker chip for The Manchurian Candidate. He has already played his ace, banking on the legend of becoming “the man who killed Osama bin Laden,” and now he is betraying our friendship and support of Israel for the sake of appeasing those Muslim countries and satraps that will never “like” us under any circumstances. So now, he raises the stakes in the game, and makes his true agenda more obvious. We should have gotten a clue when he left the Israeli Prime Minister sitting in the Oval Office while he—Bobama—went to eat dinner during a summit conference. (Later the gentleman was shown out of the White House via the back door; another clue.)

Okay, show of hands. Who can name one other true ally of America in the Middle Eastern region of the world? Saudi Arabia? Jordan? Turkey? Pakistan?

Yeah, the Saudis like us because we buy their oil. Let’s try trading them food for oil, and see what their response is. Places like Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria are a joke. Turkey tolerated us during the Cold War because they lived next door to the USSR. Pakistan is double-dealing us faster than a back-alley three-card-monte shark, because they like the billions of foreign aid we are trading for passage rights for supplies to our troops in Afghanistan.

Speaking of which, are the Afghanis friendly to anyone? When the Brits were omnipotent empire-builders, they couldn’t do much in there. The ubiquitous, all-powerful Soviets came to bad end in their hopes of conquest, or assimilation, or whatever.

I’m sure the people of Iraq are grateful to us for rebuilding everything we broke in removing Saddam Hussein, but their tribal loyalties are much stronger than the secret treaties that created the country following War I. They fought a stalemate war with Iran for a decade in the ‘80s, but now that we have decimated their military, we will have to be there forever, or relinquish the oil fields to Iran. The Iranians were our buddies when the Shah ran things, and the Cold War was “our” dictators against “their” dictators, but we sold him out, and they became the world’s most dangerous theocracy.

So, who’s our buddy now? Libya? They have a trickle of oil, and the Qattara Depression. If The Manchurian Candidate has his way, their claim to relevance in the 21st century will be as the re-arming point for Al Qaeda, and the irony is that Bobama will be giving them the ordnance.

Israel is our only friend in that region, and to quote Mitt Romney, Bobama has thrown that nation “under the bus.” The Red Herring’s speech was one of the most egregious repudiations of an ally since Winston Churchill gave his “Iron Curtain” speech, and Churchill’s cynical assessment of the USSR had a lot more validity than Bobama’s claptrap about returning Israel to its 1967 borders. Watching him on TV, I started cussing and muttering “Why don’t you just bring them [Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al Qaeda] to the Lincoln Bedroom and [perform oral sex on them]?”

When our relationship with Israel chills, as it certainly will, we will be the poorer for it. The Israelis are no strangers to political turmoil, and I suspect they’re trying to bear with us until we can restore competent, rational leadership to our country. However, they have never depended upon the largesse of other countries, and are big kids who can take care of themselves. They are certainly not going to depend on the cult of personality that has taken precedence in America, despite our mutual history.

If bin Laden was an “ace of spades,” then Israel is the ace of hearts. Bobama has upped his ante, and this ain’t no TV poker tournament.