Responding to the Obama administration’s announcement of talks with Iran, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens engages in the sort of criticism that the Wall Street Journal would probably decry as “blaming America” were it coming from the left:

Events are fast pushing Israel toward a pre-emptive military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, probably by next spring. That strike could well fail. Or it could succeed at the price of oil at $300 a barrel, a Middle East war, and American servicemen caught in between. So why is the Obama administration doing everything it can to speed the war process along?

That’s a heck of an opening paragraph, one that both attempts to absolve Israel of responsibility — after all, Israel is only being “pushed by events” — and place the blame on the American president for not behaving as Israel would prefer. It’s a pretty neat trick to hand Obama responsibility for war which Stephens and his paper are pretty clearly in favor. (How killing huge numbers of Iranians in bombing raids and further inflaming the Middle East squares with Stephens’ past calls for making “common cause” with Iranian dissidents is unclear, but it is reminiscent of a certain now-discredited “freedom agenda.”)

Writing that “it is not in the U.S. interest that Israel be the instrument of Iran’s disarmament,” Stephens then demonstrates why:

For starters, its ability to do so is iffy: Israeli strategists are quietly putting it about that even a successful attack may have to be repeated a few years down the road as Iran reconstitutes its capacity. For another thing, Iran could respond to such a strike not only against Israel itself, but also U.S targets in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

Having argued that Israel will do what it believes to be necessary regardless of how small the chance of success, and of the likely extraordinarily negative consequences both for the U.S. and for the region as a whole, Stephens then insists that “it is an abdication of a superpower’s responsibility to outsource matters of war and peace to another state.” Well, sure, if it were true. But superpowers aren’t required to precisely adopt the threat perspective of their smaller partners. It’s not “outsourcing” for the U.S. to differ with Israel’s analysis of the situation, nor is it an “abdication” for the U.S. to formulate policy according to that differing analysis, no matter how reckless the Netanyahu government may be.

Stephens disagrees with Obama on Iran and agrees with Netanyahu, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s just comically tendentious to suggest that it’s somehow irresponsible for the Obama administration not to follow the foreign policy of the Likud Party. President Obama believes that direct talks with Iran are an important tool for changing Iran’s behavior — a position that is shared by five former secretaries of state, as well as three-quarters of Americans. If Israel does choose to launch a preventive strike on Iran, it will bear the blame, but we’ll all share the consequences.

In an editorial posted this weekend, former Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) didn’t just wrongly proclaim that “illegal aliens will receive health care under Obamacare,” he also protested the inclusion of legal immigrants in health care legislation. Goode believes that all immigrants are to blame for the current health care crisis and that restricting immigration and kicking 12 million undocumented immigrants out of the country will bring down health care costs:

“Like virtually every issue that faces the nation, our health care problem is greatly exacerbated by mass immigration — both legal and illegal…Fixing our broken health care system is not easy, but making some basic changes to our immigration policy is. Securing our borders, enforcing our laws, ending birthright citizenship and chain migration, and reducing our levels of legal immigration; would do much more to lower health care costs than any government program.“

Goode argues that the health care debate shouldn’t just focus on the issue of the eligibility of undocumented immigrants, but also on the coverage of legal immigrants. Goode believes that legal immigrants are a drain on the system, and quotes the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) — a biased organization described as having “never found any aspect of immigration it likes” — to point out that since all immigrants are less likely to have health insurance than native-born Americans, then the best solution is to exclude them from health care reform and make it even harder for them to access health care. Goode juxtaposes the percentage of uninsured immigrants versus the lower percentage of uninsured citizens as evidence. However, US citizens make up the majority (78%) of those who are uninsured and the majority of the growth in the number of uninsured individuals in recent years consisted of US citizens. Immigrants are healthier than US citizens, use less medical care, use less expensive care, and do not impose a disproportionate financial burden on the U.S. health care system.

Goode also uses the health care debate as an opportunity to argue in favor of overturning the 14th Amendment, which automatically grants US citizenship to those born within the country’s borders. According to Goode, “anchor babies,” a derogatory term used to refer to the US-born children of immigrants, “could make the entire family eligible for tax funded health care.” Goode apparently overlooked the sections in the House health care bill which state that only family members who are “affordable credit eligible individuals” will receive government assistance and define an “affordable credit eligible individual” as someone who is lawfully present in the US.

Goode received a lot of attention in 2006 when he admitted he fears that “we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt…strict immigration policies.”