Among the bloggers untangling the Freeman saga, Time's Joe Klein and the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan have been the most balanced and probing. Their links lay out the cases made by the critics and the defenders—and point to Freeman's actual remarks, which you should definitely read if you want to draw your own conclusion. It's certainly possible to come out on either side, no matter which way you lean going into the debate. Freeman has been self-consciously contentious on the Middle East. Critics have most frequently cited this remark, which he made during one of his speeches:

Demonstrably, Israel excels at war; sadly, it has shown no talent for peace. For almost forty years, Israel has had land beyond its previously established borders to trade for peace. It has been unable to make this exchange except when a deal was crafted for it by the United States, imposed on it by American pressure, and sustained at American taxpayer expense. For the past half decade Israel has enjoyed carte blanche from the United States to experiment with any policy it favored to stabilize its relations with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors, including most recently its efforts to bomb Lebanon into peaceful coexistence with it and to smother Palestinian democracy in its cradle.

Certainly there's much truth here, though it's the sort of truth that can't safely be argued in American politics (even if it's quite common in Israeli politics). Still, someone could file similar charges against the Palestinians and some of their Arab allies—especially that first eye-catching sentence—but Freeman doesn't.

On Tuesday, when Freeman withdrew his name from consideration, he issued a withering statement—which was published on Foreign Policy's Web site—condemning the "tactics of the Israel Lobby," which "plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth."

Has any other officeholder, aspiring or otherwise, ever released such an outburst? Upon reading it, President Obama must have heaved a sigh of relief that he'd sidestepped a serious shit storm.