The prematurity has a simple explanation: We want the election to happen now; no one wants George Bush to be president any more. He is a disgrace and a failure. While Cheney is just crazy. It is truly scary to have this kind of leadership. If you polled the elite, I venture that most of them are actually frightened; and that few have any confidence in Bush. He is not a lame duck. He's a mad duck. (And I am someone who gives Bush credit for the fact that there have been no terrorist attacks in nearly 6 years...)

Yet impeachment (which I favor) is obviously unpopular. Wise men don't seem to think it is a good idea. We are in some kind of war, these are dangerous times. Impeachment is enormously disruptive.

The answer is obvious. Bush and Cheney should both resign. Bush would cement his legacy. He would show that he is actually, as he claims, a spiritual man, who did not want to sacrifice one more American life to his obstinate pride. And he would do something historic and great (and thumb his nose at the Clintons one more time): make Pelosi President.

These journalists are out of touch. They don't understand the seismic consequences of the Iraq war, which is slowly transforming our politics (beginning with the Congress). Journalists failed us in that war; Judy Miller disgraced the New York Times by carrying the water for Richard Cheney and thereby misleading a society, with the gravest consequences. In fact, you might say that Judy Miller's testimony is her most honest reporting yet about the way the Iraq war was engineered. Thank you, Judy and Scooter; now I know why the VP's tragic/literary chief of staff routinely took hours of out of his days to talk to reporters.

This trial has demonstrated the corruption of "access journalism," which these journalists like to style as "professional." The crisis of leadership that Iraq represents is also theirs. In the Information Age, they failed us by pushing this war on the basis of false information about WMD and no information about the hidden agendas. It turns out that the less access you had, the more clearthinking you were about what a bad idea it was to invade Iraq. Why does Barack Obama look so good right now? He wasn't in the Senate, that's why; he wasn't compromised. I.F. Stone and Noam Chomsky always said, it's more important to read than to go to a cocktail party.

The professional bloodletting that is happening in the Libby trial, the destruction of all those promises journalists made to the White House—this can only serve journalism right now by restoring traditional virtues of the writing business: a sense of vocation that has nothing to do with corporate salary, a sense of citizenship that has nothing to do with Meritocratic Election, and a sense of detachment that wants nothing to do with imperialistic misadventures that are bound to cause untold suffering in another part of the world.

Hope so.

Not to belabor the obvious, but my father was saying that these big sociological questions are going to be brokered and renegotiated beneath the surface, quietly, and Jews and gentiles will adjust to a new reality. Smart guy, my dad.

I bring all this up because I just watched Obama in Springfield. You can prepare all you want for a big moment, but then the moment happens, and we're all changed. I'm excited. And I have to think one of the consequences of Obama's globally democratic dream is that, without it being explicit, without his having a fight with big Jewish backers—without fireworks—U.S. policy in the Middle East is going to shift.

I'm an optimist. But I think what's happening right now in the Jewish community is part of it. Jews are being forced to confront the contradictions in Zionism (as playwright David Zellnik says, describing his play, "Ariel Sharon Stands at the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl"). Despite the AJC's best efforts, all Jews are Wrestling With Zion (to quote the title of Alisa Solomon and Tony Kushner's great anthology on the subject that the AJC attacked). This is the water we're all swimming in now, questions about Zionism; and I'm betting that without fireworks, the next generation of Jews is going to think differently about this, the ground is changing under them.

I'll cite one little fact that I think makes my point. In a Zionist history I was reading the other day, I read that the purchases of land in Palestine by Jewish agencies in the early part of the last century had covenants on them. The covenants said, This land can only be sold to Jews. (When I remember the citation, I'll stick it in.) Those covenants still exist, I'm sure. You can try and justify that type of discrimination in a million ways, but there it is. Real estate covenants barring sales to blacks and Jews are what my generation helped destroy in this country 30 years ago. Obama was borne up on that idealism, and his campaign is about bringing that idealism to America's actions in the world. He's half-everything, right? The ideology of Zionism is simply out of step with that spirit, and if Obama succeeds, Zionism will lose its hold on Jewish-American intellectual life. Without fireworks.

Norman Finkelstein has also criticized me, for trying to make my bones by being mean to Chomsky, something he says a lot of people on the left do. Finkelstein says I should have shown more grace.

Just to stand up for myself for a second, let me say that: a, the guy had a bad night, and I said so, justly. Alas I was also a 7-letter word that begins with a about it, and I apologized for my tone. Enuf.

b, Chomsky was wrong about Walt and Mearsheimer last year. He was wrong because he does not seem to have a sociocultural or psychological bone in his body, but tends to (fudging that one; I haven't read him) see everything in Marxist terms, always talking about the corporations. And so he would finger Cheney's evil Halliburton backstory, ignoring the fact that Cheney also had a long AEI backstory, in bed with neocon intellectuals who obviously influenced him (his wife worked there, too), and whom he then moved into the White House en masse, and whom he and Bush then listened to; and Chomsky thereby immunizes a powerful ethnic-religious lobby of any role in the Iraq disaster.

Arieh tells me she got the word from someone else: "I received [the correction] from a good friend in Israel, active in the Israeli peace movement since he made aliya / moved there in the mid-1960s."

Thank you.

But I'm going to try to not be self-serving here. The fascinating thing about this Jewish perestroika is that it liberates everyone. Not just my camp, the anti- or non-Zionist camp that wonders if the dream of a Jewish state hasn't slid hopelessly away, but also the We-are-very-upset-about-Israel's-current-policies-but-we-love-her-and-believe-in-her camp. The Zionist left is angered and embarrassed by the AJC report, feel that it's broadbrush and reactionary, and so are standing up with renewed energy, as if the ball is about to be handed to them, at last—the rightwing having shot itself in the foot.

Gershom Gorenberg, who is in that camp, yesterday said the real story is that the left is alive, it's empowered groups like the Union of Progressive Zionists, which is harshly critical of the occupation. Isn't it great they haven't been thrown off the Israel on Campus Coalition, Gorenberg writes, despite the best efforts of the ZOA. And he is right. Tamara Shapiro, the 24-year-old who runs UPZ, is an amazing young woman, idealistic and tough. She brought Breaking the Silence to America last year; she gets it from the right (ZOA) and the left (me). Now the AJC report has given her more room to operate, by blasting open the debate. (Leonard Fein makes the same point in the Forward this week).

Just as the AJC gave leftish John Judis of the New Republic freedom to talk about something he has probably been secretly bitching about for years: the pressure on Jewish intellectuals to be loyal to Israel, from people like his boss, Marty Peretz (he didn't say that part out loud). When is Mickey Kaus, another not-all-the-way-on-the-reservation Jewish intellectual whose career has been boosted by Peretz, going to speak up about this pressure? Or Mike Kinsley? Time is now, boys. Everyone's letting their hair down in the sweatlodge.

The best analysis I've seen yet of the politics of the Jewish left in America is from Daniel Sieradski—"Mobius," of Jewschool. He explains to me that the two big roadblocks are a, ideological differences, and b, dough.

Well now in The New Republic, John Judis has joined me in legitimizing this question. Here is the money quote:

This is intellectually valiant work, Judis should be applauded; and TNR praised for running the piece. As for the demand made on Jewish intellectuals to be loyal to Israel, it is one that anyone who has worked for the New Republic (I did it once, and carried Marty Peretz's anti-U.N. water for him) has experienced.

Wow, I'm just stunned by this. It's another achievement of the AJC report, which Judis's piece addresses (and of Walt-Mearsheimer, who broke the whole thing open). Don't you see what is happening? The dual-loyalty question is being mainstreamed. The degree to which neocons and neolibs and American Jewish journalists generally have been recruited in passive/unconscious identification with Israel is, as I've said here before, a legitimate issue. The suppression in the American Jewish community of any alternative discourse to Zionism—well, thanks to the AJC, the bridges are being dynamited...

It has also got the AJC into a fight it doesn't want with Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, a longtime friend of Israel, who is named in the report because of his column last summer saying the founding of Israel was a well-intentioned "mistake." Cohen is upset.

Well, the AJC has not set matters straight with Cohen. It is still fiddling. On its website the AJC crows that it got the Times to run a correction of its characterization of the AJC as a "conservative" group. This is a pure expression of vanity (Jewish groups like to think of themselves as liberal). In the Jerusalem Post, David Harris, the AJC's director, goes on for several paragraphs about the good news that he obtained a correction, and then seeks to justify the report: "[T]he individuals [author Alvin] Rosenfeld mentions are on the political fringes in asserting that Israel has no right to exist and should either be destroyed or morphed into a so-called binational state, which means the end of Israel as we know it."

Harris then says this is not true of Richard Cohen, but he has nonetheless made "disturbing" comments about Israel.

This is called digging yourself deeper into a hole.

Today in the American Prospect, Gershom Gorenberg echoes the charge that the AJC is unfair to Richard Cohen—while by and large defending the report, by adding his own attack on anti-Zionists and non-Zionists:

Gorenberg's analogy of the Palestinian refugees' claims to the claim of, say, a former Diaspora Californian like himself to emigrate to Israel out of ideas he studied in a yeshiva that include religious messianism (as he states in his book The End of Days) is highly problematic. I think Gorenberg, a wonderful journalist by the way, is wrong.

Cohen undertakes a broader defense of the AJC's targets: "It's sad that the American Jewish Committee commissioned and published Rosenfeld's report. I can't imagine what good will come out of it. Instead, it has given license to the most intolerant and narrow-minded of Israel's defenders so that, as the AJC concedes in my case, any veering from orthodoxy is met with censure... Shame." Cohen gets at the great (backfired) achievement of the AJC paper and its coverage in the Times. It has ennobled the critics, and not just the critics Gorenberg, who made aliyah, wishes to defend.

Zionism's DNA is being examined by American Jews. Tony Judt and Alisa Solomon are at last being heard widely, in their call on the American Jewish community to examine the religious nationalist ideology that has helped foster violence in the Middle East. Liberal integrationists like myself, who chose not to make aliyah, are at last being heard. Call it poison, call it illegitimate: the world seems interested in what we have to say.