Via The Goldfarb’s maladroitly titled post, Bill Sweetman lists seven “memes that killed the F-22“, including:

Meme number 1: The F-22 hasn’t been used in Afghanistan or Iraq. In itself this is a statement of the obvious. What makes it a meme is the corollary that the F-22 is militarily irrelevant. However, there are many capabilities that haven’t been used in those theaters — submarines, for instance — but nobody seems to panic as we keep spending money on those.

Well, in the event that the Navy comes asking for a brand new set of fantastically expensive invisible submarines that to do nothing more than run up the U.S.’s already considerable military advantage while having no application to the actual wars we are currently fighting, we might consider panicking. Or at the very least releasing a report saying it’s a bad idea.

Sweetman concludes that “whether you think it was smart or not to kill the F-22, the public argument has been dominated by assumptions that are, at best, unproven.” That may be true, but I would suggest that many if not most of those assumptions were on the pro-F-22 side, and at the end of the day the program was killed because no one could come up with a good enough argument for why we needed it.

Read the list for yourself, but I think that the seven memes, when taken together as they should be, actually form, Voltron-like, an impressively solid argument for killing the fighter.

Michelle Malkin appeared on Fox and Friends this morning promoting the hysterical claim that millions of “illegal lawbreakers, border jumpers, visa overstayers, and deportation fugitives” will be receiving health care because House Democrats decided to vote down an amendment to the health care bill proposed by Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) that would have used immigration to drive yet another wedge into the volatile health care debate:

MALKIN: The democrat leaders are vehemently denying that the Obamacare would cover illegal lawbreakers, border jumpers, visa overstayers, deportation fugitives, but I think their actions speak louder than words…Remember that Obama at the same time has parallel plans to grant amnesty. And what you’re really seeing is that universal health care is being used as a vehicle, as a means to achieve other ideological and partisan ends. And one of those ends is amnestizing the entire illegal alien population so they can be guaranteed democrat voters in the future.

Watch it:

While Malkin and others are paranoid that Democrats are working towards greater “ideological and partisan ends,” it’s members of the GOP who are using every trick in the book to derail the health care bill and smear immigration reform before it even hits the floor. The Heller Amendment would have required each and every individual to prove his or her public health insurance or credit eligibility using the Income and Eligibility Verification System (IEVS) and the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) programs. Dragging complex citizen verification systems from the immigration debate into health care reform and giving private insurance providers access to them would’ve forced Congress to address database errors, misuse, abuse and hammer out details on complaint and redress procedures, privacy protections, educational outreach, and increased funding.

Democrats are “vehemently denying” that America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 will cover undocumented immigrants because there’s specific language in the bill which excludes them. Secondly, though Malkin chooses to adamantly oppose comprehensive immigration reform and boil it down to “amnestizing,” the Obama administration and members of Congress have made clear that an electronic verification system and other enforcement measures must accompany any earned legalization program for undocumented immigrants.

Ultimately, the progressive’s “grand plan” involves an ambituous legislative agenda which seeks to remove barriers to quality health care and fix the broken immigration system through separate pieces of legislation because they are in fact two very different goals. The only thing that will actually “guarantee democrat voters” in the future is if the GOP continues to thwart progress on both issues in an effort to please its aging right-wing base.

Observing the tension between the U.S. and Israel over the issue of settlements over the last few months, and the debate here in the U.S. over the wisdom of Obama’s approach, a real point of division between the conservative pro-Israel community and the progressive pro-Israel community, in which I include myself, is that the former seem to believe that the U.S.-Israel special relationship, in addition to involving close economic, cultural and military ties, should also require the special privileging of Israeli national-historical claims over Palestinian claims.

The discord over Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem has revealed this divide pretty starkly. To state the obvious, Jerusalem is a hugely sensitive issue. Both Israelis and Palestinians have strong historical ties to the city, and both claim it as their capital. Many Israelis have memories of when Jews were denied access to their holy sites by the 1948-1967 Jordanian occupation, and understandably react strongly against any hint that the city might again be divided.

In this article in the Jewish Week describing how Netanyahu is appealing to the American Jewish community to oppose the U.S. pressure on Jerusalem settlements, the ADL’s Abe Foxman, while acknowledging that Obama’s approach is “not a departure, policy-wise,” said:

What troubles many in the Jewish community isn’t that the U.S. is raising the issue of settlements, but that it looks like Washington is negotiating with Israel on behalf of the Palestinians — and that part of that involves the central issue of Jerusalem. So in a way, it looks like the U.S. is basically predetermining final-status issues in those negotiations.

It’s pretty clear that Israel is actually the party who, by continuing to build up the Jewish presence in Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods while tightly constraining Arab growth, is trying to predetermine the final status of Jerusalem. The U.S. is simply asking Israel to stop this until Jerusalem’s status can be decided through negotiations — which has been U.S. policy since 1967, and is the reason why the U.S. Embassy remains in Tel Aviv. Foxman’s claim really doesn’t make much sense unless one is working from the assumption that treating Israeli and Palestinian claims equally is inherently unfair to Israel.

But, as President Obama made clear in his Cairo speech, he does treat Israeli and Palestinian claims equally. This was hugely significant, something that has been recognized in the Middle East far more than here in the U.S. By holding up Palestinian nationalism as co-equal with Israeli nationalism and treating Palestinians as deserving of statehood in their own right, not merely as some sort of consolation prize or as a secondary plot in a Jewish national redemption story, Obama became the first president to really explicitly recognize “two states for two peoples” as more than just a slogan.

As significant a shift as this was, though, it doesn’t necessarily means that the U.S.-Israel relationship must become weaker, or any less special, and I don’t think it should. If anything, that outcome would be a result of continuing Israeli intransigence on necessary steps toward two states, such as ceasing building on land it has previously committed to negotiating over. I do think, however, that President Obama could do a better job communicating this distinction to the American and Israeli people.