Thanks, David Duke

One needs to suppress the desire to rinse one's mouth out with Listerine after saying that but in this case the odious David Duke actually has done some good.

James Taranto reports via the New York Sun that the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Stephen M. Walt, and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago have co-authored a working paper entitled "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy"

The 83-page "working paper" claims a network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq...

Walt and Mearsheimer argue that "neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel," and therefore the only possible explanation is "the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby."

I haven't read the paper but according to Taranto's detailed description of its main points, it's a lot of recycled tripe like the political-ideological anti-Semitism that we wrote about here.

The Palestinians are happily distributing copies but David Duke does the good guys a favor here by bestowing his blessing.

Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, called the paper "a great step forward," but he said he was "surprised" that the Kennedy School would publish the report.