M. J. Rosenberg may or may not be right in saying that the Israel Lobby cost Clinton the nomination. I suspect he is, but it actually does not matter, I think that this will be the lesson that is learned from the 2008 primary and that is what will have the lasting effect.

If Clinton had not voted for the war there would have been no opening for Obama to run. In fact if Clinton had refused to back Bush on the war the establishment media would have been forced to report the war very differently. It would have galvanized opposition to the war much earlier and the history of 2004 would have been very different.

Clinton could still have won by expressing regret for her vote in 2006. But she didn't and then went on to compound the error by voting for the AIPAC drafted Kyl-Lieberman motion 'lets bomb Iran'.

There are only two explanations for wanting to start a third war with Iran when the US is already losing a war in Iraq and in danger of losing a war that actually matters in Afghanistan. The first is that you want the US to remove all Israel's potential adversaries while it is still capable of doing so and the second is that you want to curry favor for people who do.

Note that this is not the same as 'support for Israel'. This is the type of scheme that a bunch of thousand miles away expatriate irredentists dream up.  Then they tell everyone at home that anyone who disagrees with their little plan is a racist, anti-Semite or whatever.

Until recently the likes of AIPAC have got away with this scheme. But now it is falling apart, not least because there is much more discourse between people living in Israel and people living in America and both can read the other's press. It does not take much effort to discover that the AIPAC/Lieberman position is a minority one in Israel, out on the far fringes of the right of Likud.

But AIPAC has been undermined in a second way, despite the fact that AIPAC's traditional support base in the US has been liberal Jews and despite the fact that rather a lot of 'big-blogs' are written by liberal Jews, it is hard to think of any major liberal blogger who toes the AIPAC line.

Support on the right is somewhat more complex. There is certainly an element on the right who sees the opportunity for a new 'Southern strategy', the right replaces the Democrats as the unquestioning supporters of Israel. But this approach has two problems, the first is that Jews are not southern red-necks disgruntled by the ending of segregation. The second is that most of the targetted population know that the GOP has a large anti-Semitic faction that is currently looking for scapegoats to blame the whole Iraq fiasco on: Wolfowitz, Perle, Libby, Bolton, Rice. We can be sure of one thing: no white males need apply for this particular position unless they are a Jew.

Carrying water for AIPAC is no longer an electoral advantage in the Democratic party. Their positions are political poison with the net-roots.

This is what happens with all political lobbies in the end - they overreach and become poison.