THE LOBBY STRIKES BACK

Philip Giraldi has another excellent article up in the American Conservative at the moment.  It's titled, Why the US spies on Netanyahu.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-the-u-s-spies-on-netanyahu/

It's about the brouhaha over NSA listening in to Israeli communications with members of the US Congress.  Since everyone in America over the age of reason already knows that the NSA listens to pretty much everything, this has all the hallmarks of a made-up controversy.  So let's be honest about it.

All this press attention is part of the Israel lobby’s counterattack against all the bad publicity it got over the Iran Nuclear deal. Too many ordinary Americans  noticed how Congress is more attentive to the interests of a foreign power and it’s American ethnic allies than to the general interest.  So now, the lobby is feigning to protect the “integrity” of the same congress critters they already bought and sold.  They don't want any branch of our government impeding in their bribery of our legislative branch.  

I suspect that something else is the case as well.  The lobby seems to have very little respect for either the character or the intelligence of we run of the mill Americans.  The harangues get less and less plausible as time passes while the lobby gets more and more used to getting what it wants.  I strongly suspect that the lobbies failure over Iran was both a shock and a challenge.  We schlemiels aren't falling for the sales pitch anymore!

Why should we?  What's in it for Us?  We are incessantly bombarded with appeals, both subtle and gross, for the US to yet again "Lead" in the Middle East.  Each appeal involves the expenditure of our blood and money in adventures in making the Middle East safer for Israel.  We spend and bleed yet Israel never feels safe.  Israel is not just another state with whom we have diplomatic relations.  It is a state representing the religious and genetic interests of a powerful ethnic faction within our republic.  We have been here before.  There was a time when other groups with similar grievances presented like problems.  For much of the nineteenth century Irish Americans were a constant voice against our continued good relations with Great Britain.  They went so far as to lead a sort of bungling invasion of Canada.  As late as the 80's there was sympathy for the IRA; the same IRA that tried to assassinate Margaret Thatcher. The government never exceeded to the wishes of that ethnic-religious lobby.  There are/were others.  

Our constitution guarantees the right to lobby.  This guarantee has for the most part contended with regional and economic interests.  It is poorly designed to accommodate interests of blood with foreign loyalties.  I doubt the founders foresaw a time when domestic factions with foreign loyalties openly sought to spill american blood and coin for their own alien ends.  I can think of only one such case and it's from the nineteen thirties.

A brief thought experiment is in order here. Say it’s 1938 and the FBI is wiretapping the German Embassy and the German American Bund. Would the Israel Lobby of today have any qualms about that intelligence operation?

What is the difference between the Bund and AIPAC anyway?