NYTImes, Israel, Eric Cantor and the Tea Party, and me, parsing, again

Or not parsing, just offering up a then and now contrast for your consideration.

The Times today considers the tensions between the new Republican House’s more-pro-Israel-than Obama posture and its cost-slashing Tea Party wing. Here’s the top:

WASHINGTON — When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel came to the United States recently for another round of tense talks with the Obama administration, he got a decidedly warmer welcome from one of the rising Republican stars on Capitol Hill, Representative Eric Cantor, the incoming majority leader of the House.

But while Mr. Cantor and other newly empowered Republicans are eager to promote themselves as Israel’s staunchest defenders in Washington, the reconfigured American political landscape is a more complex and unpredictable backdrop for Middle East peacemaking.

Scores of Tea Party-backed candidates are entering Congress, many of whom favor isolationist policies and are determined to cut American foreign aid, regardless of its destination. Rand Paul, the newly elected Tea Party-backed senator from Kentucky, bluntly told the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, an influential pro-Israel lobbying group, that they were going to disagree about the need for foreign aid and suggested that they move on to other topics, according to a person briefed on the meeting.

I’m not sure about the "decidedly warmer welcome" part. At first, I, too, thought that seven hours of Benjamin Netanyahu and Hillary Rodham Clinton facetime can’t have been good. But since then, both sides said that that meeting actually went well, and its length had more to do with hammering out details. Or that could be spin.

But meantime, speaking of spinning, consider Cantor’s statement in the same NYTimes story:

The night before Mr. Netanyahu met with Mrs. Clinton in New York to try to salvage Middle East peace talks, he sat down with Mr. Cantor in his hotel suite. The two men discussed the Republican triumph in the elections and the “existential threat” that Iran posed to Israel, Mr. Cantor said.

“It is my strong belief that U.S. security goes hand in hand with Israeli security,” Mr. Cantor said in an interview. “Whether this administration puts this into practice or not is another question, but that is the stated position of the administration.”

"Hand in hand," I would agree, is the stated position of the administration, put in a number of speeches, particulary Vice President Joe Biden’s in Tel Aviv last March. But it was not quite how Cantor put the relationship to me in our interview a week or so before the election. These are the two quotes I pulled from my notes then:

Israel’s survival is directly connected to America’s survival.

Israel’s security is synonymous with our own.

Is "goes hand in hand" the same as "synonymous?" Does the Obama administration see Israeli and U.S. security needs as "synonymous"?

I’m ducking this one, and will leave it to others to parse.