The Forward steps up to make the case—again—against Walt and Mearsheimer. Only this time, they’ve read not just the professors’ juvenile article but their book as well:

The professors’ basic argument is that America’s support for Israel is an anomaly. Israel’s origins and behavior are so reprehensible, they wrote, that “neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel.” No, it’s all because of the influence of the “Israel Lobby.” There is, they cautioned, nothing illicit about lobbying. Lobbying is part of American democracy. But the Israel Lobby has “a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress,” controls key access to the executive branch and suppresses dissent throughout society. Its “not surprising” goal, they wrote, is to weaken Israel’s enemies to the point that “Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying.”

More shocking, considering the professors’ distinguished resumes — Walt was academic dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, Mearsheimer a leading foreign policy expert at the University of Chicago — was their shoddy research. They invented historical facts.They twisted quotes. …

Most of the paper’s flaws survive in the book, but the longer format allowed the introduction of whole new stretches of substandard work.

The substandard work and shoddy scholarship will survive, because the professors’ charges are sensational—as they intend them to be, which the Forward makes clear. But they’re a long way from reaching their goal of freeing America from the immoral, reprehensible, dark influence of satanic Israel.

Rudy Giuliani said it best in his Foreign Affairs article:

America’s commitment to Israel’s security is a permanent feature of our foreign policy.

Well, “permanent” is a strong word. But a 10-year $30 billion commitment is pretty darn close.

The good professors’ timing is a wee bit off. But the work of anti-Semites is never done. Which is why I and people like me—who know that public anti-Semitism is the harbinger of humanity’s darkest impulses coming to the fore—will not rest until every one of their words and innuendoes has been revealed for the pernicious, evil scapegoating it is.

And we will mock Philip Weiss mercilessly.

So much for the netroots’ great shake-up of the Democratic Party:

Hillary Locks Up The Backing Of The DC Democratic Establishment

–From the K Street lobbyist corridor to the major gay and lesbian organizations to the city’s kingpin consultants and fundraisers to the big feminist groups, Hillary Clinton has acquired a near-lock on the Democratic establishment in the nation’s capital.

The level of support here for the junior New York Senator approaches what an incumbent president seeking re-election might expect.

Even Andrew Sullivan has decided that she may not be so bad after all.

Well, knock me over with a feather. I thought Barack Obama was going to be the feel-good candidate. But get a load of Rudy:

[In New Hampshire] Rudy Giuliani was telling a roomful of voters about a dream he had three times, when he interrupted himself. “Any psychiatrists here? Want me to lay down and tell you this? You do dream analysis, right?”

Minutes later the former New York mayor had moved on to the “fear of abandonment” his city suffered after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, his people’s need to be “embraced,” and America’s need to buck up because “when you concentrate on your problems so much, as a person or as a society, you sometimes lose perspective.”

Most of my fellow New Yorkers in the cohort—those who don’t scoff at the notion that he might actually get the Republican nomination, much less win an election against Hillary Clinton—are terrified of his authoritarian streak and his provocatively hectoring ways. Me, not so much. What drives me mad is his relentless, shameless, credit-seeking self-promotion; his jack-in-the-box ability to be right smack in the middle of every gathering of cameras and microphones in a 50-mile radius of City Hall; and his testy, prickly need to respond to every culture-war flare-up with a fusillade of insulting verbiage.

But Rudy 2.0 seems to be stickier than our Rudy.

On a trip [to New Hampshire] last week, Giuliani, 63, was thanked time and again for his leadership after the 9/11 attacks and almost as often for making New York a livable city. Those are the pillars of his candidacy, and he promotes them to the hilt.

Can you believe that we New Yorkers are going to get the celebrity smackdown we were so cruelly denied in the summer of 2000? If it weren’t downright tragic, it would be a hoot.

She was a fixture of downtown New York, a stellar writer, and a woman with a most generous heart:

Hillel Italie writes:

In many ways, Paley wasn’t a typical American writer. Her characters did not suffer “identity crises.” Instead of living on the road, they stayed home, in Greenwich Village. They discussed politics, dared to take sides and belonged to clubs anxious to have them as members.

“People talk of alienation and so forth,” she said in a 1994 interview with The Associated Press. “I don’t feel that. I feel angry at certain things, but I don’t feel alienated from it. I feel disgusted with it, or mad, but I don’t feel I’m not in it.”