Quote of the Day:
A Netanyahu victory would be bitter news for Mr. Obama, who worked hard to defeat the Israeli leader, including an attempt to stop and then belittle his speech to Congress this month.
–Wall Street Journal
After delivering that speech, outlining the existential threat a nuclear Iran would pose to Israel, embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to pull off a stunning re-election victory last night, becoming in line to be Israel’s longest-serving prime minister since David Ben-Gurion, a founding father. As John Podhoretz notes, Bibi gambled and won.
As the above quote from an editorial, written before the final tally of votes, in today’s Wall Street Journal indicates, President Obama may be feeling chagrined this morning. Or perhaps more than chagrined:
A powerful U.S. Senate investigatory committee has launched a bipartisan probe into an American nonprofit’s funding of efforts to oust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the Obama administration’s State Department gave the nonprofit taxpayer-funded grants, a source with knowledge of the panel's activities told FoxNews.com.
The fact that both Democratic and Republican sides of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations have signed off on the probe could be seen as a rebuke to President Obama, who has had a well-documented adversarial relationship with the Israeli leader.
I would hate to think that money from American taxpayers was used to try to defeat the prime minister of our strongest ally in the Middle East, a man many of us admire for his courage and for risking re-election to warn us about the perils we face from a bad deal with Iran, but it appears that this may be the case.
Why do our president and his circle always seem to have a left-wing faculty lounge view of the world that encourages us to shortchange our allies in favor of the bad guys? Terror-exporting Iranian President Rouhani = good moderate, while Netanyahu and courageous Egyptian leader al-Sisi, who has told radical Muslims to clean up their act = not so good.
Also revealing the juvenile view of the world that prevails in ObamaWorld, David Axelrod, Svengali and senior advisor to President Obama before leaving to join the punditocracy, shamefully tweeted that Netanyahu’s victory was because of the prime minister's “demagoguery” (setting off an amusing trail of responses that can be read at Twitchy).
Israeli politics are different from ours, but Ben Shapiro still thinks that U.S. conservatives could learn some lessons from Bibi. Bibi had a here-I-stand quality and he wasn’t afraid to call out the opposition. Mitt Romney is a very good man, but I can’t help but thinking that saying he was “disappointed” when the Obama campaign practically accused him of causing a woman to die of cancer was insufficient. Shapiro has five things U.S. conservatives might want to take from Netanyaahu.
Don’t Back Down From A Fight. Netanyahu’s U.S. ambassador, Ron Dermer, knew that Netanyahu was dramatically at odds with President Obama over Obama’s pending nuclear arms deal with Iran. When Dermer negotiated an appearance by Netanyahu before a joint session of Congress with Speaker of the House John Boehner, and Obama retaliated by refusing to see Netanyahu, Netanyahu did not apologize or back down. Instead, he silently embraced the face-off with President Obama, who foolishly elevated Netanyahu by using the media to slam Netanyahu repeatedly. Netanyahu, meanwhile, steadfastly stated that he would use any opportunity, particularly one before the most powerful legislature in the world, to lay out the case against a “bad deal” with Iran. The American media went berserk; the Israeli left media went insane, suggesting that Netanyahu had permanently damaged Israeli-American relations. The polls stated that the speech could actually hurt Netanyahu domestically. Netanyahu went anyway. The result: a boost in the polls and a decline for Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog.
Just to be clear, I don’t think this calls from the kinds of Pickett’s Charges we’ve all too often seen from GOP leaders. Netanyahu was nothing if not purposeful. It paid off big for Israel and for those who are alarmed about the seemingly inexorable bad deal with Iran.