Proven Wrong in Less Than a Day?

Yes, its true...I may have to admit that I erred. In Wednesday's post about journalist Caroline Glick's PJTV interview in advance of Obama's speech yesterday, I mentioned security policy expert Frank Gaffney's prediction that once Obama's policies vis a vis Israel come to light, the president will encounter resistance even from liberals in Congress. I pooh-pooed that as a "faint hope," in that liberals in Congress seemed quite ok with Obama's Middle East policies.

Today Politico.com reports that some Congressional liberals are indeed chafing at Obama's audacious bid to change drastically America's Israel policy, especially the pressure being brought to bear on Israel to halt settlement expansion. Rep. Anthony Wiener, a reliably liberal New York Democrat, said: “There’s a line between articulating U.S. policy and seeming to be pressuring a democracy on what are their domestic policies, and the president is tiptoeing right up to that line." Even the rabid defender of Obama policy Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida takes issue with the administration's broad definition of "settlements."

Democrats, or some of them anyway, apparently think it is unwise for Obama to be equating the relatively small issue of Israeli settlement expansion with Palestinian terrorism, Arab hostility to Israel and Iranian intransigence in regard to the nuclear issue. They are not likely to be comforted by Obama's Cairo speech, which continued the moral equivalence game to an outrageous degree, in effect blaming Israel for the "intolerable" plight of the Palestinians.

So it does appear, as Gaffney suggested, that there is a growing reluctance among Democrats to support fully Obama's new Israel policy, at least at the margins. Whether that reluctance will lead to full-throated resistance, or whether in any event it will have any effect on Obama's headlong rush into the arms of the enemies of freedom, is an open question.