A tantalizing tidbit on the Jerry Lewis-Bill Lowery front:

The investigation has even reached into Lowery's private life. One of his two ex-wives, Melinda Morrin, has been interviewed twice by the FBI about her ex-husband's dealings, her attorney said last week.

Things can't get much bleaker than when the FBI starts questioning your ex-wife--about you.

Steve Clemons offers up a different take on the broader strategic objectives behind Israel's recent actions in Gaza and Lebanon:

The flamboyant, over the top reactions to attacks on Israel's military check points and the abduction of soldiers -- which I agree Israel must respond to -- seems to be part establishing "bona fides" by Olmert, but far more important, REMOVING from the table important policy options that the U.S. might have pursued.

Israel is constraining American foreign policy in amazing and troubling ways by its actions. And a former senior CIA official and another senior Marine who are well-versed in both Israeli and broad Middle East affairs, agreed that serious strategists in Israel are more concerned about America tilting towards new bargains in the region than they are either about the challenge from Hamas or Hezbollah or showing that Olmert knows how to pull the trigger.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah rockets reach ever deeper into Israel, Israeli air strikes for the first time target central Beirut, and the IDF re-enters northern Gaza.

The Georgia lieutenant governor's race has to be the highest-profile election for lieutenant governor in U.S. history. Have there been any others that are even close?

A word from the other half:

Being from the "other side" politically, I am a Republican but not a 100% hardcore conservative. I often come to this website to find legitimate "left" thinking . . . I think your analysis of the Democrats celebrating too often and not being in there for the long fight is bang on. I just hope they don't listen to you.

Referring to the senior senator from his state, a junior U.S. senator once told me, "He's had his head above the clouds too long."

I'm beginning to think the same thing about Joe Lieberman after reading this piece in the NYT on his tough primary battle. I'm ambivalent about the Lieberman-Lamont race, but people won't stay ambivalent for long if the picture painted of Lieberman in this piece--wounded by the slight of facing determined opposition--is accurate.

The senior senator referred to above wisely retired soon thereafter. You wonder whether Lieberman's exit will be as graceful.

How to explain the Democrats getting knocked back on their heels by Arlen Specter’s FISA proposal? I don’t have a complete explanation, but here’s what I think is a significant part of the answer.

After public outcry over domestic spying and other secret, extra-constitutional programs and a Supreme Court decision squarely against the Administration, many of us—myself included—at a deep and perhaps unconscious level presume that the Administration will have to cede some ground, compromise, reign itself it in.

The louder you argue, the more humble you should be when proved wrong, right? Argue loudly and wrongly enough times, and you start to lose credibility, right? By the unwritten Queensbury rules many of us live by, admission of error, of defeat, of poor judgment is the right and noble thing to do.

Democrats seem to have a highly evolved (and perhaps misplaced) sense of sportsmanship: magnanimous in victory; chastened in defeat. Whereas Dems will rise to a political fight when they deem circumstances warrant, Republicans consider politics nothing but a fight, with peace the exception, not the rule.

And so it is that many Democrats are unprepared to face an adversary who has a fallback position situated just inches behind the frontline, and a fallback position just inches behind that, and so on indefinitely.

When the Dems overrun a Republican position, they celebrate like drunken Hessians, only to sober up and realize they have gained very little ground at all and that the Republicans are still fighting.

I think Republicans have the more accurate view of politics. It is an ongoing battle. Power is a moving target, hard to seize, harder still to hold on to.

So rather than viewing Hamdan as a sweeping victory to be relished as a vindication of principle, Dems need to see it, as Republicans do, as a starting point for negotiations. Negotiation, like diplomacy, is war by other means.

The Republicans have opened negotiations with a demand, in the form of Arlen Specter’s proposal, which is as much as they can hope to achieve, in an effort to tilt the range of possible outcomes in their favor.

Specter’s proposal dramatically expands presidential power at the very moment that many Dems and most commentators mistakenly perceive expansive executive power to be on the wane.

There is a lesson here, and a fight to be fought, if the Democrats will sober up.

The Washington Post editorial board nails Arlen Specter's capitulation on FISA and charts the path the Administration is taking to get Congress to legalize domestic spying.

TPM must draw 80s music fans. In response to my post below, readers have let me know that Toto is touring this summer and that the Go-Go's played L.A.'s Greek Theatre last night.

Rock on.

Forever.

If Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep under a cedar tree in Lebanon in 1982 and awoke today, you could hardly blame him for thinking he had snoozed for only a few minutes.

Israel is still in Lebanon. Iran is America's great nemesis. Russia-U.S. relations remain tense. An imperial power (Britain/U.S.) is conducting a military campaign in a farflung locale (Falkland Islands/Iraq) in what is maybe its last gasp of imperialism. There is a gathering threat in the East (Japanese economy/North Korea). The news even includes mention of the death of a popular princess (Grace Kelly/Diana) in a car accident.

The only things missing are Survivor, Toto, and Air Supply.

When critics of the Iraq War suggested it would set back progress in the Middle East for a generation, I didn't take it to mean we would revert to a generation ago.

From Reuters:

The head of Italy's military intelligence agency was questioned by prosecutors for the first time on Saturday on suspicion of helping the CIA kidnap a terrorism suspect in Milan, judicial sources said.

The development makes Nicolo Pollari the highest ranking official connected to the Italian investigation -- which has already led to the arrests of his No. 2 and another leader of his Sismi intelligence agency earlier this month.

Ah, serendipity. Reading Spencer Ackerman's much linked to TNR piece on House Intel Chair Pete Hoekstra's outlandish claim that al Qaeda fellow travelers have infiltrated the U.S. intelligence community, I was reminded of an intriguing essay titled "Stabbed in the Back," from the June issue of Harper's.

I went looking for the piece online to re-read it, but it wasn't up yet. Then, as if on cue, Harper's posted it Friday. If you haven't read Ackerman's piece, read it first, then go take a look at "Stabbed in the Back":

Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.

In the final analysis, I'm skeptical of unified theories of anything, perhaps especially of history, but they can be useful tools to explain some phenomenon. If you fish, you know polarized sunglasses cut the glare on the water and let you see the fish. Similarly, the "Stabbed in the Back" hypothesis is a useful lens to filter 20th and early 21st century events and distill modern American nationalism. Especially now.

Hmmm.

WP: "The House Government Reform Committee has subpoenaed the former law firm of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff for records of any contacts he or members of his lobbying team had with the Bush White House."

In the last week I've heard a number of people ask why bloggers, or I guess spefically progressive bloggers, have devoted so little column space to the events in Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. And I've joked, as I've ventured onto this terrain, about how nothing is more likely to heighten the temperature of your in box like stating any opinions on this vexed subject.

But none of these lighthearted words can do justice to the sorts of email you get.

It's funny, if that's the word for it, because I'm much more accustomed to getting critical emails from hypernationalist and/or hypersensitive Jews taking me to task over this or that viewpoint I've expressed about the Middle East. (Of course, nothing compares to sublime ridiculousness of having a gentile right-winger warn me that my views on the Middle East verge on anti-semitism. For some, it seems, Bush-loyalty is the new sign of the covenant.) Just a week ago I was foolish enough to exchange a series of emails with a reader who was offended that I hadn't booted my guest blogger TPM Reader DK for having the temerity to print an email hostile to Israel as an example of the range of opinions he'd received on the subject.

For some of my Jewish friends and, it seems, more and more non-Jews of a certain political persuasion, there is just an inability to recognize that the dispossession of Arabs was an essential element to the fulfillment of the Jewish people's national aspirations in Palestine. (That was a blindness that a ben Gurion or a Dayan never made. Read their writings, their speeches, especially their letters. They understood this.) There is too often an inability or I suppose simply a willfull refusal to recognize the roots of Palestinian militant violence and terrorism (and I don't equate the two) in the fact that the population of the West Bank and Gaza have been living under military occupation for some forty years.

As some of you know, before I became a journalist I was studying to be an historian. And the topic of my doctoral dissertation was the nexus of economic relations and organized violence between Indians and English settlers in mid-17th century New England. And over several years as I researched and wrote and pulled together my ideas on the subject there were troubling and disconcerting moments because I could see the echoes and patterns of what happened there in the 17th Century in what happened between Jews and Palestinians in the 20th. There continues to be this dangerous obtuseness among the political classes in this country that 'terrorism' is just terrorism whether it's bin Laden's buddies trying to figure out how to blow up the world or Palestinian militants trying to drive settlers off the West Bank.

But on a day like today I see a different picture, though magified perhaps by the febrile intensity of email. It comes when I'm again exposed to the other side of the coin. American politics leans heavily in Israel's direction; and so does the American media. But there is out there a broad constituency of ignorant and malevolent hatred of Israel and, really, Israelis, that, I think, masks its malevolence even to itself through being awash its own self-righteousness. I think I understand the Palestinians' rage. In any case, I respect it. For this trash from Americans who only seem able to see Jewish evil in the midst of this protracted conflict I can't have anything but contempt. And it puts me on my guard.

Walter Pincus on journalistic courage: "Journalistic courage should include the refusal to publish in a newspaper or carry on a TV or radio news show any statements made by the President or any other government official that are designed solely as a public relations tool, offering no new or valuable information to the public."

Boy is this a stupid article. From the AP: Lieberman's in trouble with Lamont and Hillary's having no trouble with Tasini. Why? All because of money apparently. Lamont's a millionaire. Hillary's got a big war chest. Wicked stupid.

"It's just like the good ol' days."

Justin Rood on the media's ecstatic reception of Valerie Plame Wilson.

Why is CNN's John King still repeating the Republican bamboozle (for a detailed forensic debamboozlement see this post) that Joe Wilson 'said Dick Cheney sent him to Niger'.

I guess the work of debamboozlement is not over.

For those of you who didn't think that Katherine Harris' Senate candidacy could yield any more surprises...

I think David Ignatius strikes the right balance, understands the interplay of factors in what's now playing out in Lebanon. We don't know whether Iran 'green-lighted' the Hezbollah incursion into northern Israel a few days ago, as some are suggesting, with little or no direct evidence. But it is quite foolish to see what happened as an isolated incident, or merely a tit for tat with over what's happening in Gaza. There is an Iran-Syria axis. They are patrons of Hamas and Hizbollah. And everything here is connected. Our muscling with the Iranians over their nuclear program and the bedeviled situation in Iraq. These are all pieces on the same chessboard. Events transpire on many levels. And have many causes. But I think it is correct to see a good part of this as the soundings of groups allied with Syrian and Iran, and to a degree acting in concert with him, to strike a new balance of power in the region (in the context of Israeli withdrawals from occupied territory, growing Iranian power and American distraction and enervation in Iraq.)

With that said, I think Israel is entirely within her right to react strongly to these provocations.

But what you have every right to do isn't always wise to do, as Ignatius explains. A strong response is probably a prerequisite from the Israelis. But it's not sufficient and it can easily backfire. For the Israelis and for the US. They risk slipping into the same quicksand they did almost twenty-five years ago. Outside powers -- and that means the US and Europe -- have to be involved here.

(ed.note: Nothing like a post on the Middle East to raise the temperature of the email in box. If you disagree, I'd love to hear from you. I've been set straight by dissenting emails many times before. But attacking emails will just be ignored.)