Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Barack Obama this past weekend. Surprising no one who has spent time studying the senator's career and writings, Obama showed himself to have a deeper and richer understanding of the American Jewish and Israeli experience than any previous presidential aspirants. (By the way, that includes Joe Lieberman, who is becoming a sadder and sadder self-parody with every passing day.) Some highlights:

I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris. So when I became more politically conscious, my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves. And obviously it’s something that has great resonance with the African-American experience.

One of the things that is frustrating about the recent conversations on Israel is the loss of what I think is the natural affinity between the African-American community and the Jewish community, one that was deeply understood by Jewish and black leaders in the early civil-rights movement but has been estranged for a whole host of reasons that you and I don’t need to elaborate...[snip]...

I think that the idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea, and a necessary idea, given not only world history but the active existence of anti-Semitism, the potential vulnerability that the Jewish people could still experience. I know that that there are those who would argue that in some ways America has become a safe refuge for the Jewish people, but if you’ve gone through the Holocaust, then that does not offer the same sense of confidence and security as the idea that the Jewish people can take care of themselves no matter what happens. That makes it a fundamentally just idea...[snip]...

I think the idea of Israel and the reality of Israel is one that I find important to me personally. Because it speaks to my history of being uprooted, it speaks to the African-American story of exodus, it describes the history of overcoming great odds and a courage and a commitment to carving out a democracy and prosperity in the midst of hardscrabble land. One of the things I loved about Israel when I went there is that the land itself is a metaphor for rebirth, for what’s been accomplished. What I also love about Israel is the fact that people argue about these issues, and that they’re asking themselves moral questions. Sometimes I’m attacked in the press for maybe being too deliberative. My staff teases me sometimes about anguishing over moral questions. I think I learned that partly from Jewish thought, that your actions have consequences and that they matter and that we have moral imperatives.

The rest is here.

Your weekend was incomplete if you didn't catch Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry's brilliant cameo at The American Scene arguing persuasively for the complete abolition of minimum voting age requirements. The argument works as a pincers, first by lowering resistance to the thought of toddlers lining up to fill out ballots they can't comprehend --- children are much more perspicuous than adults like to give them credit for --- and then shutting the door by pointing out the execrable qualifications and performance of adults as voters.

Our New Overlords: Aren't they adorable? Gobry places his emphasis on the first point. It's worth taking some time to flesh out the second. The standard objection to the idea of doing away with voting age requirements is that before a certain stage in development, people have neither the experience nor the basic mental tools to make informed decisions in the voting booth. Drawing the line at 18 years may be arbitrary, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere. So the thought goes.

But to state the standard objection to child-voting is to refute it. The overwhelming majority of adults have neither the experience nor the basic mental tools to make informed decisions in the voting booth. In his classic study "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," Philip Converse found that for 90 percent of the public, voting is simply an act of tribal affiliation, having nothing to do with competing political ideologies, less still with inferring voting preferences from facts, logic, and background political beliefs. (The Converse study is from the 50s, but subsequent studies have simply reinforced his findings.) In other words, if you're like 98 percent of the public, and you buy the standard objection to letting kids vote, you ought to believe you shouldn't have the right to vote either.

Besides all that, if you're ahead of the curve, you already know that voting is a sucker's game in the first place. If you were truly rational, you'd never do it. So it makes no sense to insist that voters be able to make rational, informed decisions, because no matter what you're capable of, voting is neither rational nor informed --- and irrational, uninformed people of all ages will tend to do equally well at it. (So would trained chimps.)

Still unconvinced? Then let me ratchet up the case rhetorically. Minimum voting age requirements are very much like Communism, and suffer from many similar fatal blind spots. The voting decisions an electorate makes today quite obviously not only affect today's voters, but also those of the future. By restricting the franchise to those above a certain age, we effectively socialize the preferences of everyone below that age, leaving it up to a cadre of elders to make what we hope will be enlightened decisions on behalf of everyone else. But of course, those elders don't make enlightened decisions. They make selfish, short-sighted, myopic decisions: In concrete terms, pensioners and boomers, thinking of themselves first, second, and third, are leaving as their lasting contribution to this country mind-boggling generational deficits, which Niall Ferguson and Lawrence Kotlikoff estimate at $45 trillion, or four and half times the size of the entire US economy.

Will younger voters behave any more altruistically? Of course not. If you're the average American, anyone my age who has taken a look at these figures has nothing but bottomless resentment for the debt you're leaving us (or at least should); but rest assured, we'll have our revenge. In the meantime, there's nothing to fear from abolishing the voting age: Infants (and dogs) couldn't squander what has been risibly called "our most precious freedom" any worse than most of the people who will read this already have.

Related: Babies might love Barack Obama even more than Jewcy does. Check out this hard-hitting report from CNN, below:

Playing farce in the history of the Cinco de Mayo Week '08 to the tragedy of the possible conquest of Lebanon by Iran Hezbollah, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is fighting off allegations that he accepted bribes from American Jewish businessman Morris Talansky to help fund his wife's art career, and unlike previous Olmert scandals, this one credibly threatens both Olmert's political career and the viability of his Kadima party.

Toni O'Loughlin: "The scandal threatens to demolish the already shaky coalition government and raises questions about whether a general election would be required if Olmert resigns. It also risks overshadowing next week's visit by the US president, George Bush, who has scheduled the trip to celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary and to shore up the faltering peace talks with the Palestinians."

Avi Green: "I see that Ehud Barak is still stalling and biding for time...All he's doing is stalling out of his apparently being more interested in a government seat than in true responsibility. I suggest he start to rethink his position, because his colleagues are getting very restless."

Nathan Guttman: "The [Talansky] case is being described in the Israeli press as the most serious of three investigations currently being conducted into Olmert’s affairs...Talansky and Olmert first crossed paths when the Long Island businessman directed the American fundraising operation for Shaare Tzedek Hospital and the then-mayor was a guest at events organized by the group in the United States."

Amir Oren: "The investigation into Olmert's relationship with the man dubbed 'Mr. T' has once again proven two ancient truths about the media. One is that 'the medium is the message,' as Marshall McLuhan averred in his classic work, entitled Understanding Media. The other is that the presence of the observer alters the outcome of the experiment he is there to observe. The proof can be found in the surprising twists that the press has woven into the story's plot by reporting on it. The media midwifed the affair, kept it from dying and has turned itself into the arena for the coming rounds."

Bernard Avishai: "Indeed, the best scenario is not unlikely --- not if the Bush administration supports it actively, and helps keep restless ministers (like former Likud defense minister Shaul Mofaz) bailing water instead of abandoning ship. It is that Livni and Barak will govern together for a year or so, and reconstitute the Israeli center, while putting the taint of corruption behind them. Only this will deny Netanyahu his second act. Something must."

The eastern world seems to be exploding this week. After the US-backed Future Movement government in Lebanon declared Hezbollah's private telecommunications network illegal, the Iran- and Syria-backed militia responded by attacking Beirut and seizing control of much the city.

Jeffrey Goldberg: "Hezbollah has been doing a bang-up job this week undermining Lebanon's future on behalf of its sponsors, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Syrian intelligence. It is simultaneously doing effective work undermining its apologists in the West. We've heard the arguments over and over again: Hezbollah is social service agency; Hezbollah wants to join the Lebanese political process; Hezbollah is not in fact dominated by murderous Jew-haters. And so on. It's been a tough year already for Hezbollah's apologists...."

Nicholas Noe: "The open question then, as it has been for the last 30 years, now seems to be whether the Israelis might be the ones to intervene if March 14 steadily loses its capacity to cling on to its remaining levers of power - or whether Israel might be content to sit back and watch its bitter enemy fight its own countrymen. Nasrallah certainly thinks the former might be the case, saying yesterday that Hizbullah is well equipped to fight on two fronts. Either way, having reached a point where the spectre of yet another Israeli invasion and/or another civil war is being seriously discussed as imminent...."

The Beirut Spring: "Unleashing the sectarian monster can seem like a good idea to Islamists allied with the Future Movement and to the Saudis, but they had better think twice before letting that genie out of the bottle. All parties, including the Future movement should actively portray this as a security and political situation, not a sectarian one."

Abu Muqawama: "Hizbollah may very well get the government to back down...But the fact is, if civil war does break out, Hizbollah is going to get the blame from basically everyone but Syria, Iran, and other Shia worldwide. This is not 2006 and this is not Israel that Hizbollah is staring down. This is 2008 and these are other Lebanese --- Sunni and Druze and Christian. Hizbollah can't count on the support from anyone but a few pariah states."

Michael Young: "Now the party's true intentions are out there for everyone to see. Hizbullah can no longer hide behind its 'resistance,' a fictitious 'national opposition' or imaginary social protests. It is confirming on a daily basis that its minimal goal is to keep alive a Hizbullah state within the state and to force most Lebanese to accept this, even as the party infiltrates the government bureaucracy and has free rein in the airport and ports."

Charles Malik: "Hezbollah's militant takeover of Beirut and its systematic destruction of the authority of the state and freedom of the press suggests a sophisticated and planned campaign to take power."

Christopher Albritton: "When I entered Lebanon on July 13, 2006 to get to the war, an Iranian man came in at the same time — I saw his passport. We exchanged glances and went our separate ways. Friends in Hamra and nearby ‘hoods report that Hezbollah gunmen have taken the streets and are telling people to stay indoors. They’re also taking pro-government people from their homes. One friend near Sporting Club reported a Shi’ite man in her (mixed) neighborhood was taken by gunmen as he was screaming, 'I’m from the Dahiyeh!'"

Lee Smith: "A Shia-Sunni conflict in Lebanon might well damage Iran's own efforts to jump the sectarian divide. What level of control does Tehran have over Hezbollah at this stage while the Party may well be in an existential fight over its role not just as an armed militia, but as a Lebanese party? Further, and perhaps most importantly to Washington, what will Hezbollah's actions, and Tehran's decisions, say about Iran's war against the US-backed order throughout the rest of the region – from Gaza (Hamas vs. Israel and Egypt), through the Arab Gulf states, and most especially Iraq?"

Two weeks before Cindy McCain swore to NBC's Ann Curry that her "husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all," Commentary's Jennifer Rubin spoke to John McCain on a conference call and baited him into describing Barack Obama as --- simultaneously --- the stealth candidate of Hamas, the Sandinistas, and the Weather Underground. Obama responded yesterday on CNN, saying that McCain was "losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination."

How would the campaign Abe Greenwald assures us is the veritable Platonic form ofSenator Tamburlaine the Great: McCain's Potemkin stroll through a Baghdad market in April 2007 allowed terrorists to set up an ambush that killed 21 people...and provided his campaign with a fitting metaphor maturity and masculine wisdom react? Why, with a near-instantaneous hysterical shriek from senior aide Mark Salter, of course. Salter, who seems to have earned his seniority as the campaign's point-man on hysterical shrieking, wants to make it clear just how offensive was Obama's "not particularly clever way of raising John McCain's age as an issue" --- presumably at least slightly more offensive than when Salter called Arianna Huffington "a flake and a poser and an attention-seeking diva" for telling the truth about Salter's boss.

But Salter's real point is to make sure the journalists on his mass-mailing list clearly understand the difference between "legitimate" and illegitimate campaigning. For example, calling your opponent an enemy of the state is a totally "legitimate question...about his judgment and preparedness." However, for Obama to respond to that charge with the charitable interpretation that it's an example of the toll running for president can take on someone's mind (rather than, say, an asshole being true to his nature) is an illegitimate attempt "to delegitimize" the legitimate question of whether Obama is an enemy of the state.

Now, I confess that I can't quite see the conceptual distinction the McCain camp is trying to draw, but then, I didn't learn virtue from a segregationist who taught me to put aside any "reservations about my destiny" of dying an honorable death in battle and going to Valhalla, so I'll have to defer to the expert. Here goes:

So: Unfortunately I still don't get it. Maybe the McCain line between legitimacy and illegitimacy looks incredible to you, too, perhaps even evidence of a candidate having lost his bearings in pursuit of the presidency, but that just goes to show that you and I need to study the Episcopal School Code of Honor a little harder.