The Article: This Is The Point In The Blow Job Where I Have To Be Careful What I Say.

The Text: Ordinarily, I am a candid, even verbose individual, but this is a particularly sensitive time for me, so I will try to remain brief. We have reached a juncture at which I, the recipient of this mind-blowing oral sex, must make some kind of statement that is both timely and appropriate. Unfortunately I am uncertain how to proceed.

Clearly, I don’t want this blow job to stop.

This is a very delicate matter. Everything has been going fantastically, and the last thing I want to do is to spoil a particularly good blow job by saying the wrong thing. But what to say? Silence is not an option, since she’s likely to take that as disapproval. Or even apathy. No, it’s settled. I have to say something and I have to say something soon.

The Article: Voices in the Wilderness, a multi-author article published by the National Interest on the Mearsheimer and Walt book on the Israel Lobby.

The Text: When the “The Israel Lobby” first appeared as an article in the London Review of Books, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt instantly became the targets of a barrage of unjustified and vicious personal attacks. Such influential pundits as Martin Peretz, Eliot Cohen and Alan Dershowitz—Walt’s colleague at Harvard—casually charged the pair with anti-Semitism, the nuclear option in any political debate. Under the circumstances, it was difficult not to feel respect for Mearsheimer and Walt’s courage and disgust with the assault on them, sentiments I expressed on the pages of The National Interest.

With this in mind, it is no surprise that their new book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, was controversial even before it appeared in print. Organizers cancelled several scheduled events with the authors, even at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a respected organization normally open to debate. Also unusual for major books, quotes on the back cover praise only Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s previous books—a clear signal that it was difficult to persuade prominent people to provide their names in a way that could appear to support this one.