I never get to say this, but Kaus is right: The rules have changed. Credit for this goes in no small measure to Walt and Mearsheimer, who made their statement aggressively enough and forthrightly enough that they shifted the acceptable window for conversation. It may still be that you're not supposed to agree with Walt and Mearsheimer, but so long as you don't mention them, you can echo their arguments and buy into pieces of their analysis. This was largely the effect of bad strategy on the part of their detractors: By so cynically and aggressively calling them anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, they compelled lots of other folks to defend them, work through their ideas, and prove that nothing happened when you voiced impolitic-yet-obvious statements like some Jewish neoconservatives view the containment and even destruction of Israel's adversaries as an important objective for American foreign policy. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with that perspective, nor even with the idea that zionists, like corn farmers, have a powerful political lobby, but you weren't supposed to say so before. Walt and Mearsheimer may have lost the public argument, but they won in creating the debate.
