Michael Cohen comments on Rick Perry’s “deeply clownish” press conference:

If Rick Perry truly believes that the Obama Administration is “appeasing the Palestinians” he either has no idea what is happening in the Middle East or he doesn’t know what the word appeasement actually means.

Perry may not have any idea what’s happening in the region, and it’s always possible that he doesn’t know what the word means, but the answer is more straightforward than that. Perry doesn’t have to know what’s going on to denounce the administration’s policy, and all that he needs to know is that the word is a loaded and negative one that his advisers said would do political damage to his opponent. Perry is going treat anything that Obama has done or failed to do on these issues as appeasement, because the accusation of appeasement is the inevitable line of attack that he and other Republicans are always going to use when it comes to policy on Israel and Palestine. Accusations of appeasement are very much like accusations of “isolationism,” and their utility comes from how wildly inaccurate and inappropriate they are. If Obama reiterated and briefly took seriously standing U.S. policy on settlement-building on occupied territory, to take one example, that will be lumped in as an example of appeasement. The goal is obviously not to describe the policy or even to contest the policy on its merits, but to define it as a policy that is supposedly both treacherous and weak, which then allows it to be dismissed out of hand. The point is to make policies that Perry et al. reject politically toxic. Naturally, anything that can conjure up associations with enabling Nazism or its modern-day equivalent also serves Perry’s purpose in making the charge.