New Washington Post conservative blogger
has her
up and running today. The deal this time around was for the Post to find a blogger more directly invested in the conservative movement than
. They do seem to have done that, I think. It’s hard to tell, because reading Rubin’s blog is like reading the
. There are words in sentences—”South wins the second trump in dummy, discards a diamond on the ace of clubs, ruffs a club, takes the ace of diamonds and exits with the queen”—but if the reader is not an initiate, it’s baffling.
So Rubin gets
with an interrobang:
Obama admininstration pressures AIPAC?!
This refers to a
written by
Secretary of State
Senator Charles Schumer and
Vice President
Senator Carl Levin in which the two asked the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee
to express support for the New START treaty. Apparently this is “extraordinary.” Later, in her follow-up postings, Rubin described the writing of the letter as a matter, variously, of ”
,” ”
,” and “dragging” AIPAC into, uh, public affairs. The fact that the senators made the letter public is “an attempt to bully the group.”
The crux of the complaint—as
by Bill Kristol, Rachel Abrams, and
famous Israeli Jew
, of the Emergency Committee for Israel—maybe seems to be that AIPAC (or a group that isn’t AIPAC, taking offense on AIPAC’s behalf?) regards the treaty as “far outside its area of concern.” But mostly they’re mad about the “bullying” involved in…writing a letter? And…making it public? So that…people…including people who disagree with it? Are able to…read the letter…and respond?
The Emergency Committee for Israel, Rubin writes, “would no doubt claim the actions of these two senators are exceptionally unusual, and would set a dangerous precedent.” Because why? Because they are openly asking a foreign-policy lobbying group to lobby about foreign policy, by suggesting that a particular foreign-policy goal aligns with that group’s interests?
The concepts and the emotions don’t really seem to line up, at least not in an intelligible or audible register. The atmosphere is that of the commentary pieces in China Daily about the
or
—the argument in the writing only makes sense if the reader accepts the premise behind it. I suppose that counts as a new perspective.
