When Bad Intentions Go Bad

Josh Marshal has an excellent article on his Talking Points Memo site about how Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermeer and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are in the midst of doing serious damage control over the massive breach of protocol when the Israeli leader agreed to a Republican invitation to speak to Congress without information the President of the United States.  And to do so two weeks before Israel general elections.

In an interview here with The Atlantic, Ambassador Marshall is now laying full blame at the feel of Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) for explicitly tell him that he shouldn't inform the president and explaining why that was perfectly okay.

Grossly irresponsible as this makes Mr. Boehner, I particular love Marhsal's explanation why this doesn't remotely let Ambassador Dermeer off the hook (or additionally, Prime Minister Netanyahu).  He writes --

"This is just demonstrably silly for anyone who is passingly familiar with commonsense or diplomatic protocol. And let's press the point a bit further. Dermer is not someone born in a Polish shtetl who's spent his life farming on a Kibbutz in the Galilee or a sabra working the same fields. He's not a recent immigrant from Russia who's lived the last twenty years in Tel Aviv or Ashdod. Not only was Dermer born and raised in the United States. He began his career as a Republican political operative before emigrating to Israel. He actually worked with Frank Luntz on Gingrich's 'Contract with America'! He's very familiar with partisan and DC politics in the United States. There's just no plausible back story or explanation that would make such a lapse of knowledge or judgment remotely plausible."

You can read about the miscalculations by the far-right Israelis and now their subsequent attempts to backpeddle in Josh Marshal's article here.