Romney: if Palestinians weren't lazy and stupid they'd be rich like the Israelis

I'm paraphrasing here of course. Actually, since that "corporations are people too" debacle, the Mittster seems to have a new team checking over his speeches, because I haven't been taking my Acme Stupid-O-Meter into the shop nearly as much as in the early months of his campaign.

Needless to say, that caused quite a stir amongst the usual crowd of anti-American anti-Israel pinkos. Well, now there's some heavy artillery coming to Romney's defense.

Enter Richard Landes. Dick is nominally a History prof at Boston University, a job that affords him a goodly amount of spare time.

He uses that time wisely. He started up a web-site to defend Israel from biased reporting. True, there were already at least a dozen organizations looking after that file, almost all of them based in the US, oddly enough, but Dick thought there was still some stuff slipping through the cracks.

He is also a staunch, and I mean really staunch defender of capitalism. You could say he's from the "Milton Friedman is the Messiah" school.

Anyway, between his love for Milton and his love for the Holy Land, Landes is the kind of guy who can call up Rupert Murdoch and ask for an op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal whenever he wants. So when he saw the pinko hordes castigating poor Mitt, he made that call.

Here is the result. It's well worth a read.

It's a challenging article to be sure, and among other points it certainly screams out "I'm a history Professor at a big school and who the hell are you?"

I won't go into the quibble I have with comparing the Europe of the industrial revolution that Weber was talking about to the post WW I era in the Arab world. That's not just apples and oranges; it's elderberries and watermelons.

But I do want to draw your eye to paragraph eight.

Yup, while Romney may have had a bit of a point, the more important point is that Palestinians in the occupied territories are the envy of their fellow Arabs.

Why? Because of their "proximity" to the Zionists! (Landes' word, not mine.)

Is that not rich! It's not an occupation; it's PROXIMITY.

But he's not done yet. Know why that proximity has been so good for the Palestinians?

Because unlike the Western imperialists, the Zionists "settled the land without conquest!"

Oh-oh... looks like the Stupid-o-meter just bent the needle...