While Vice President Joe Biden (D), President Barack Obama (D) and Secretary of State Hilary R. Clinton (D) huff and puff about Israel's publicly announced local zoning concerns, Mideast analyst and researcher Barry Rubin recalls some previous statements from the first three threatening to blow down their straw houses.

Here is a short history of this round:

October 31, 2009: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lavishly praises Israel as making "unprecedented" concessions in stopping construction on West Bank settlements while it is still going to build in east Jerusalem.

November 1, 2009: The U.S. State Department cheers Israel's announcement that it will stop construction on West Bank settlements but not in east Jerusalem: "Today's announcement by the Government of Israel helps move forward toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

And then of course the huffing and puffing, forgetting about unilateral Israeli sacrificial concessions while ignoring Arab blatant violations of their responsibilities.

By playing a shell game, ie, criticizing Israel as it continues to act as an independent state not confined to a sanctioned and legally required ghetto to distract from serious problems such as Iran and those Arab violations, Rubin notes

Israelis are used to this pattern: give a big concession and a few months later that step is forgotten as Israel is portrayed as intransigent and more concessions are demanded with nothing in return.

(snip)

Meanwhile, even though the Palestinian Authority has refused to negotiate for 14 months; made President Brack Obama look very foolish after destroying his publicly announced September plan to have negotiations in two months; broke its promise not to sponsor the Goldstone report in the UN; and rejected direct negotiations after months of pleading by the Obama White House, not a single word of criticism has ever been offered by any administration official regarding the PA's continuous and very public sabotage of peace process efforts.

Meanwhile Iran continues to build its nuclear weapons but hey, Obama & Co have proven they can at least make loud noises even though they don't address the problems. Eventually though the real problems will drown out the meaningless loud noises and then what are they going to do? Blaming the Jews (Israel) ultimately is not a long term winning strategy.