“When Tom DeLay was House majority leader, I found out that any legislative provision having to do with the Middle East had to be vetted and approved by AIPAC before the bill could move forward.”

So states Mike Lofgren, recently retired after 28 years as Congressional staffer, the last 16 years as senior analyst for House and Senate Budget Committees. The statement is in a footnote on p. 69 of Lofgren’s new book, THE DEEP STATE: THE FALL OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE RISE OF A SHADOW GOVERNMENT (New York: Viking, 2016).

Tom DeLay was House Majority Leader from 2003-2005. Just prior to that time, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, pushed the Iraq war.

AIPAC quietly supported the Iraq War and celebrated its own role in lobbying for the war resolution that passed Congress in October 2002.

Maybe, just maybe, ten years after the publication of The Israel Lobby, when the matter is treated so forthrightly by a person of Lofgren’s standing, and is the subject of a scholarly study that reaches similar conclusions by Kirk Beattie, and when Bernie Sanders calls out Hillary Clinton for pandering to Netanyahu at AIPAC– maybe the Israel lobby’s corruption of Congress will be fodder for the mainstream media?

(And doesn’t this kind of corruption, in plain sight, help explain the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and the distrust of the establishment politicians?)