How Stupid Does Liberal Make-Believe Have to Get Before the Jewish Journal Won't Publish It? The perennially frustrating Slate.com (they always get so close to being reasonable, just before they pirouette back to liberal-conventional-wisdom land) has an interactive chart up. The chart purports to explain "who likes whom, who can't stand each other, and who's not sure". For the Israel-EU relationship, the chart lists them as the highest kind of relationship - friends - and then has this description:

Now maybe words like "disproportionate" and phrases like "cannot be justified" are signifiers of friendship in some places on this planet, but among civilized western nations they're marks of deep disagreement and potential hostility. In a surprise to no one who didn't have a hand in making this chart, the relationship between Israel and those EU countries doing the criticizing has been endangered - precisely because the criticisms that Slate seems to be describing as acts of friendship. Still, this Slate analysis is better than some of the other coverage we've been reading - it's not so much dishonest as just plain incoherent.