Young Jewish Bloggers Love Wesley Clark

So why didn't AIPAC come down like a ton of bricks on Wesley Clark for his attribution of Jewish "money people" to a conceivable war in Iran? The American Conservative Editor Scott McConnell sees young Jewish bloggers coming to Clark's defense as the critical reason why Clark came out with fewer reputational scars and avoided any serious career damage.

But things took a different course, for significant reasons. It hasn’t yet been established that the blogosphere has changed the nature of American politics in any fundamental way…But blogs may foment serious debate about difficult subjects and change the climate of opinion in meaningful ways. In the aftermath of…the Clark episode, it seemed as if this was actually happening.

For within a day or two, one could read in the blogs some surprising assertions that amounted to a truth defense of Wes Clark. It seemed to come primarily from young, or comparatively young, Jewish bloggers. Observations that had been bandied about for years in private seemed to burst forth where many people could see them. This was welcome and suggests a broadening and deepening of the peace movement that so notably failed to stop the Iraq War. Suddenly there were Jewish voices talking about the Israel lobby as an established fact and, to be frank, as a bit of a problem. Significantly, these were not voices from an older and more alienated Chomskyian Left but from an American Prospect-like liberal mainstream.