An interesting article within The Hill begins to outline how much effort President Obama and the ideological cohorts within the administration went to try and get Benjamin Netanyahu defeated.

According to a source for the information within the article, at the end of the Israeli election: “I think the president, Tuesday night, felt like he lost“.

And when you look at how extensive Obama and Kerry’s efforts were including:

…”The State Department people in the end of January, early February, expedited visas for [Israeli] Arab leaders to come to the United States to learn how to vote…

…and you understand how emotionally invested Obama’s team was in that outcome, you can begin to understand the administration’s response in the face of their defeat.

(Via The Hill) President Obama’s role during the Israeli elections was larger than reported, according to a pollster for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.

“What was not well reported in the American media is that President Obama and his allies were playing in the election to defeat Prime Minister Netanyahu,” John McLaughlin, a Republican strategist, said in an interview on John Catsimatidis’s “The Cats Roundtable” radio show broadcast Sunday on AM 970 in New York.

“There was money moving that included taxpayer U.S. dollars, through non-profit organizations. And there were various liberal groups in the United States that were raising millions to fund a campaign called V15 against Prime Minister Netanyahu,” McLaughlin said.

He noted that the effort to oust Netanyahu was guided by former Obama political operative Jeremy Bird, who “set up an Obama for America-like organization in Israel called V15 that was running extremely negative ads against the prime minister.” (read more)