Bret Stephens, who is a columnist for the Wall Street
Journal and sometimes editorial writer, wrote a column this week; one that is
strange even by his standard. He gave it the title: “Filibuster Hagel” and the
subtitle: “If Republicans refuse, they won't be standing on principle but
capitulating to the president.” It was published in the Journal on February 19,
2013.
What is strange about the column is that it ends this way:
“What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” Ordinarily, this would be
a reasonable thing to say but not this time because of who is meant by goose
and who is meant by gander. In fact, you find out who they are as you read the
column from start to finish because the author pulls a Yiddish on the way to
the finish.
What he does is accuse Chuck Hagel of pulling Buchanans.
This would be Buchanan as in Pat Buchanan whom he nicknames “Pitchfork Pat.” He
is the fellow who had something to say in 1990, something that did not go too
well with the likes of Bret Stephens. According to the latter, Buchanan had an
outburst to the effect that: “the U.S Congress was 'Israeli-occupied
territory.'”
So you ask: What are the similarities between Buchanan and
Hagel? And the answer is that Hagel said the following about the U.S. State
Department: It is “an adjunct of the Israeli foreign ministry's office.” But
don't get confused, my dear reader, Buchanan and Hagel are not the goose and
the gander of the story. You see, this story is not so much about Buchanan as
it is about someone else, someone more unnerving to Stephens.
Oh yes, you do encounter the usual insult thrown at Rutgers
University, the BBC and Al Jazeera – it would not be a Yiddish piece of work if
it did not diss the impeccable and the innocent along the way – but
the alarming character co-starring with Hagel in the story is an
Iranian-American academic named Amirahmadi whom Stephens accuses of being one
of the “Iranian influence peddlers.” So then, is Hagel the goose and the
Iranian academic, the gander? Nop.
But the plot thickens in that Stephens goes on to interweave
a number of Byzantine subplots of the kind you read about each time that a
Jewish network of shady characters is busted in New York or elsewhere in the
United States. All the while, however, no charge of any kind was brought
against Amirahmadi except by the New York Post which quoted the man as having
pulled what may be called an AIPAC. No, he did not say that Israel is not a
terrorist state, but said this: “Iran has not been involved in any terrorist
organization.”
Aha! you exclaim, there is the goose and there is the
gander. Wrong again. You would be wrong if you thought so because you did not
pay close attention to what was said in the title and the subtitle. Here they
are once again for your convenience: “Filibuster Hagel … If Republicans refuse,
they won't be standing on principle but capitulating to the president.”
So you ask: What's this all about? And he tells you what
it's about. He tells the story of the “Democrats who effectively filibustered
John Bolton's nomination to be U.N. ambassador in 2005 by refusing to vote for
cloture.” And there it is. There is the revelation. The goose and the gander in
the metaphor are the Bolton and the Hagel in real life. The fat lady has sung
but the moral of the story is yet to come.
Here it is: Okay, Bret, okay. I'll make you a deal. Either
you and the rest of us accept all your metaphors, or we reject them all. This
means you admit that Israel is now and has always been the number one terrorist
state, and we admit that Chuck Hagel has pulled a Buchanan on the State
Department. He should apologize to John Kerry before the Senate confirms him to
be Secretary of Defense.
If you reject the deal, the confirmation goes through
without an apology.