I often refer to the Israel lobby as the "status quo" lobby because, frankly, I view it as advocating very little beyond the status quo. Its entire raison d'être seems to be to ensure that everything stays just the way it is.

True, the lobby pays lip service to the two-state solution and Israeli-Palestinian peace, but no more than that. If you attend its conferences, you can watch the audience sit on its hands when ritualistic endorsements of peace are offered but jump to its feet hootin' and hollering when the Arab bashing begins.

Oh that status quo! Don't engage Hamas. Don't insist on a settlement freeze. Don't push on roadblocks. Don't promote negotiations.

Don't do anything, in fact, except bash Palestinians, and anyone who has a kind word for them, at every opportunity. And, above all, keep Congress and the Presidential candidates in line. That's it.

It doesn't pain me to point to the failures of the lobby. It is, after all, just a conglomerate of organizations.

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Dana Milbank offers us a good take down on Douglas Feith, one of the two or three principal architects of the Iraq war.

Feith, typical of the ideologues and seekers after profit, feels no guilt whatsoever about the role he played manipulating intelligence to help lie us into the war. But he will give proceeds from his self-justifying memoir to help the troops his actions helped maim or kill. (Big deal. Feith comes from a very wealthy family).

People like me who, in addition to hating this war, are involved in helping Israel and the Palestinians achieve peace, have extra problems with Feith. Long before he decided that a US attack on Iraq would help Israel secure the West Bank, Feith had been a leading Likud activist in the United States. He is no more a Republican than Ariel Sharon was. Feith is all about "securing the realm" (his term for defending the Israeli occupation).

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It's not much but it's something. Georgetown University has decided not to renew Doug Feith's contract.

Word from campus is that both students and faculty had pretty much had it with the arch war criminal walking around campus although I also heard that he is such a goofy, pathetic guy that some students felt sorry for him. One told me, "he's like the nerdiest loser I ever saw. He cannot have done the things he's accused of. He's too obtuse."

I told her to read Arendt's "The Banality of Evil."

In any case, the Jesuits have done themselves proud by, at long last, giving Feith his walking papers. I wonder where we'll turn up next. In a McCain administration or in the dock at the Hague?