Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview: Martin Peretz, 'Obama Is a Child of the New Left'

And interesting interview with Marty Peretz, at WSJ, "Martin Peretz: From Truman to McGovern to Obama":

Is it too late for the president to visit Israel and mend fences? "Obama can't visit Israel," Mr. Peretz responds. "The Israeli public is uncontrollable. There would be a lot of unpleasantness. If he visited the Knesset—the Knesset is one of the most rambunctious parliaments in the world."

Such rapprochement, moreover, is foreclosed by Mr. Obama's indifference to the basic Zionist ideal, which was on full display in his 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world. There Mr. Obama cited the Holocaust—not millennia of Jewish ties to the land—as the basis for Israel's legitimacy. "It took him three-and-a-half years to get to the point where he could recite some version of Zionist narrative," Mr. Peretz sighs. "My father first went to Palestine in 1912"—that is, three decades before the destruction of European Jewry and the establishment of Israel.

All this stands in jarring contrast to the Democratic Party's foreign-policy traditions, Mr. Peretz argues. "You know, I disagreed with Bill Clinton on some things and I didn't disagree with him on others," Mr. Peretz recalls. But Mr. Clinton's administration "was in the deep tradition of the Roosevelt-Truman idea." He concludes: "In any case, I think the Democratic Party was restored to a center role. Yes, it took a lot for the Clinton administration to rescue Bosnia. And it took a lot for the Democrats to admit to a mistake in Somalia." But they eventually did both.

"We're now in a new era," Mr. Peretz warns. "I think that Obama is a child, or maybe let's say a grandchild, of the New Left, with casual moral judgments made about very intricate ethical alternatives." Later he thunders: "Leading by following—it's really a sick phrase."

Obama's a progressive asshole, that's what he is. Screw the f-ker.