| No, Harry Reid Is Not Yoda. Harry Reid, proud of his most shameful moment: "As my staff will tell you," Reid said to me when we spoke the next day, "I've done a number of things because no one else will do it. I've done stuff no one else will do." I expected him to give an example of a successful parliamentary maneuver or perhaps a brave political endorsement, but instead he mentioned one of the most disreputable episodes of his long career, when, during the 2012 presidential campaign, he falsely accused Mitt Romney of not having paid his taxes. (Even though the facts were wrong, the accusation spurred Romney to release his tax returns, which showed he had only paid 14.1 percent.) "I tried to get everybody to do that. I didn't want to do that," Reid said. "I didn't have anything against him personally. He's a fellow Mormon, nice guy. I went to everybody. But no one would do it. So I did it." That's from a mostly glowing profile by Jason Zengerle in New York magazine, a piece that at one point compares him to Yoda: Reid is as stern and blunt as ever, and the combined effect of his mental and physical condition has given him a Yoda-ish quality. As he busied himself trying to prepare his Democratic colleagues to battle Trump without him, it was easy to imagine Reid as an aging Jedi master training his young apprentices. Dear friends in the media: You can't complain about "fake news" and lament the poor ethics, overheated rhetoric, petty partisanship and sheer nastiness of our elected leaders, and then turn around and compare Harry Reid to Yoda. When you do that, you whittle away at the disincentive to do things like tell blatant lies and make baseless accusations about your political enemies. Yes, it's awful when Donald Trump does this sort of thing about his rivals. But where do you think Trump would get the idea that he could lie blatantly and suffer no consequential rebuke? Whatever criticism Reid endured, it wasn't enough to make him think of his public lie as mistake. Reid's been pretty open about his ruthlessly cynical view about how he likes to get things done in Washington: Is there a line he wouldn't cross when it comes to political warfare? "I don't know what that line would be," [Reid] said. Harry Reid is everything the political press claims to abhor in politics, but he never quite gets the full-throated denunciation we've seen thrown at… oh, say Todd Akin. Lawmakers of every party notice this, and conclude that if you're powerful enough, the media will continue to give you the benefit of the doubt, if for no other reason than to maintain access to sources. The Obama Administration's Final Middle Finger to Israel It's easy to tune out the latest brouhaha about Israel at the United Nations. Delivering full-throated denunciations of Israel while offering mumbled, mealy-mouthed requests to North Korea, Syria, Iran, and other despotic regimes that export arms and terror? That's just what the United Nations does. Syria blows up, chemical weapons get launched, refugees flood Europe, terror attacks in the streets of great cities… and the United Nations still finds time to denounce Israel. Should the United States withdraw from the United Nations? The UN might behave better if we rattled that saber a bit – at least get them to pay for the $16 million in parking tickets those diplomats have accrued. At the very least, we should start deducting the annual parking fee sum from our contribution to the institution's budget. But what's different about this brouhaha is that the United States, under direction of the president, chose to let the usual anti-Israel invective go ahead, and now, we learn, actively facilitated it: The resolution, which declared Jewish settlement anywhere in the West Bank including the Old City of Jerusalem to be in violation of international law, passed by 14-0, with the United States abstaining—a game-changing action that broke with decades of diplomatic guarantees to Israel and which enraged American Jewish political leaders in both parties. A wealth of evidence is now emerging that, far from simply abstaining from a UN vote, which is how the Administration and its press circle at first sought to characterize its actions, the anti-Israel resolution was actively vetted at the highest levels of the U.S. Administration, which then led a pressure campaign—both directly and through Great Britain—to convince other countries to vote in favor of it. Tablet has confirmed that one tangible consequence of the high-level U.S. campaign was a phone call from Vice President Joseph Biden to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which succeeded in changing Ukraine's vote from an expected abstention to a "yes." According to one U.S. national security source, the Obama Administration needed a 14-0 vote to justify what the source called "the optics" of its own abstention. "Did Biden put pressure on the Ukrainians? Categorically yes," said a highly-placed figure within the Israeli government with strong connections to Ukrainian government sources, who confirmed to Tablet that the Americans had put direct pressure on both the Ukrainian delegation—and on Poroshenko personally in Kiev. "That Biden told them to do it is 1000% true," the source affirmed. For starters, everyone should stop trying to persuade us that the Obama administration is pro-Israel or isn't anti-Israel. This is a giant obscene gesture to Israel to close out the Obama administration. Why would Obama do it? 1. Because he can with no consequence to himself at the ballot box. 2. Because he can with no consequence to Hillary Clinton or any other Democrats at at the ballot box. 3. Because it represents a way to "get back" Netanyahu before he leaves office. Back in March, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a really long piece on "the Obama Doctrine" in world affairs, and tucked away was this little detail that the outgoing president thinks that he's surrounded by idiots who don't understand their own national interest: Over the next three years, as the Arab Spring gave up its early promise, and brutality and dysfunction overwhelmed the Middle East, the president grew disillusioned. Some of his deepest disappointments concern Middle Eastern leaders themselves. Benjamin Netanyahu is in his own category: Obama has long believed that Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution that would protect Israel's status as a Jewish-majority democracy, but is too fearful and politically paralyzed to do so. Obama has also not had much patience for Netanyahu and other Middle Eastern leaders who question his understanding of the region. Note: If multiple Middle Eastern leaders, who have spent their whole lives in the region, question Obama's understanding of that region… shouldn't the president reexamine his conclusions a bit? Obama's fan-base in and out of the media kept telling us what a great analytic mind he has, he was the political equivalent of Spock, and so on. In one of Netanyahu's meetings with the president, the Israeli prime minister launched into something of a lecture about the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives, and Obama felt that Netanyahu was behaving in a condescending fashion, and was also avoiding the subject at hand: peace negotiations. Finally, the president interrupted the prime minister: "Bibi, you have to understand something," he said. "I'm the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don't understand what you're talking about, but I do." Other leaders also frustrate him immensely. Early on, Obama saw Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, as the sort of moderate Muslim leader who would bridge the divide between East and West—but Obama now considers him a failure and an authoritarian, one who refuses to use his enormous army to bring stability to Syria. And on the sidelines of a nato summit in Wales in 2014, Obama pulled aside King Abdullah II of Jordan. Obama said he had heard that Abdullah had complained to friends in the U.S. Congress about his leadership, and told the king that if he had complaints, he should raise them directly. The king denied that he had spoken ill of him. In recent days, the president has taken to joking privately, "All I need in the Middle East is a few smart autocrats." Obama has always had a fondness for pragmatic, emotionally contained technocrats, telling aides, "If only everyone could be like the Scandinavians, this would all be easy." Gee, why would any foreign leader think Obama doesn't understand the Middle East? ADDENDA: Oof. Carrie Fisher, RIP. 
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