Here is another Jew with a brain that is installed upside
down inside his cranium. This time it is Bret Stephens, a columnist and
associate editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal. His latest project is
titled “Axis of Fantasy vs. Axis of Reality” and subtitled: “France , Israel
and Saudi Arabia
confront an administration conducting a make-believe foreign policy.” It was
published in the Journal on November 12, 2013.
The column is about the people who live in fear because they
believe that Iran
will become a nuclear threat at some point in the future. Stephens asserts that
these people live in the real world. The column is also about the people who
point to the current activities of Iran , and reject that possibility.
Stephens asserts that these people live in a world of fantasy. Thus, to Bret
Stephens, what is imagined may happen in the future is real, whereas what is
observed is happening right now is nothing but fantasy. You see, the poor thing
sees the world upside down which is a peculiar sort of dyslexia.
The author of the column takes about a third of it to
describe the career that Wendy Sherman has had up to now. She is the American
who is sitting at the table with the Iranians negotiating on their nuclear
program. The aim of Stephens is clearly to badmouth her, something he tries to
do by imagining the future and seeing it as clearly as you and I see current
realities – or so he believes. Look how he does that: “When the history of
foreign policy is written 20 years from now, the career of Wendy Sherman will
be instructive.” So you want to know: How is that?
To answer, he cherry picks moments in her career which he
believes will denigrate her not because of what she did or failed to do, but
because she was associated with people and organizations that will mean failure
to some of those who might be reading his column. And so, he tells that Wendy
Sherman worked on the Dukakis Campaign, at Fannie Mae, at the State department
and at the Albright-Stonebridge Group – moments that amount to no more than a
small fraction of the long and illustrious career she has had, and continues to
have.
Believing he has by now convinced the readers that Wendy
Sherman has been a failure, he tries to rub that perception on the entire Obama
administration which is, after all, associated with her. Guilt by association
being a very real thing to him even when there is no guilt to be shared, he
goes about accomplishing his task in this way: “This administration in
particular is stuffed with fail-uppers – the president, the vice president, the
secretary of state and the national security adviser, to name a few.” Thus, the
vision he had with regard to what history will say about Sherman 20 years from now, has given form to
how he rates the current performance of the entire Obama administration.
And this is how he reinforces that vision: “The
administration so wanted a deal they would have been prepared to take this one.
This is how people for whom [future] consequences are abstractions operate.” He
goes on to say you must forget about the current reality of “the pique the
French President felt at getting stiffed by the U.S. in his Mali intervention
and later in his aborted attack on Syria.” To Stephens, this is no more than
fantasy because the reality is that “the French understand that the sole reason
Iran
has a nuclear program is to build a nuclear weapon.” You see, my friend, to
this Jewish author, what is observed is fantasy because what is real is what he
speculates the French understand what it is that motivates the Iranians.
Finally, he ends the column with this lamentation: “The
tragedy for France and its fellow members of its Axis is that they may lack the
power to master a reality they perceive so much more clearly than the Wendy
Shermans of this world.”
And the mention of power is the key word that alerts you to
the fact that the paranoia engulfing the Bret Stephens of this world can be
made to rub off on those in the Congress who have the real power to cause
serious damage to the world.