John Podhoretz who, mirabili dictu, by the time the season passes will have become editor of Commentary, had been preparing for real life at the New York Post. But the laws of primogeniture intervened and now here he is dispensing all kinds of insidious bits of gossip, not at this point about Barack Obama but about Joe Biden, the flimsy Obama file having already long ago been exhausted. See Contentions in Commentary on-line. There's a quote from an angry Menahem Begin but only a vague allusion to what Biden is said to have said to the Israeli prime minister. The entire story comes from another story by the former editor of Ma'ariv, an Israeli newspaper, in another Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post. in 1992. Where, for God's sakes, is a citation from the official records of the committee hearings?
The committee meetings, however, were supposed to have taken place not in 1992 but ten years earlier, in 1982, exactly 26 years ago. Is it likely that a nasty exchange between the prime minister of Israel and a distinguished Democratic senator would not have been noticed? By anyone, by me, for example? Biden is alleged to have threatened to cut economic aid to Israel if the building of West Bank settlements was not curtailed. This was the line of the at once unctuous and crude James Baker, who stole the election from Al Gore in 2000 on behalf of George Bush before whom I assume Podhoretz, p