OK — Enough about celebutards for just a minute. Can the grown-ups talk?

When I first read the Pulitzer-winning book Arab and Jew (many moons ago), I got the basic idea that the two sides of this age-old conflict didn’t care for each other much. So politicians from non-Middle-Eastern countries (like, gosh, America) tend to at least try to stay neutral — at least until they’re trolling for votes.

Hint: American Jews are a better-organized voting block than American Muslims.

So Barack Obama went before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee this week and suddenly became a hard-liner against Iran, Hamas, etc. You get the picture. I think Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank said it best:

As a pandering performance, it was the full Monty by a candidate who, during the primary, had positioned himself to Hillary Clinton’s left on matters such as Iran. Yesterday, Obama, who has generally declined to wear an American-flag lapel pin, wore a joint U.S.-Israeli pin, and even tried a Hebrew phrase on the crowd … The transformation — mostly in tone, but occasionally in substance — might qualify as what Obama likes to call the same old Washington “okey-doke.”

My favorite part of Obama’s speech was when he went all Clint Eastwood on Iran’s army:

“… we should work with Europe, Japan and the Gulf states to find every avenue outside the U.N. to isolate the Iranian regime — from cutting off loan guarantees and expanding financial sanctions, to banning the export of refined petroleum to Iran, to boycotting firms associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, whose Quds force has rightly been labeled a terrorist organization.”

Neat-o. Good for Candidate Obama. Except that Senator Obama opposed exactly that last year. Here’s a snippet from what was known as the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment:

… the United States should designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization under section 210 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists …

Obama didn’t show up to vote on this, but he officially opposed it. He even ran attack ads in Iowa slamming Hillary Clinton after she voted for it.

Sometimes I think we ought to hold a national lottery every four years, give the winner a basic math and spelling test, and say “Tag, you’re it.”

p.s. — All you “Obamassiah” fans, hold the e-mails. I’m reasonably confident we’ll pick on John McCain plenty.