joining me now bret stephens and peter beinart. brett, let's start with you, you essentially accused chuck hagel of being an anti-semite. >> i said there was an odor of prejudice. >> what evidence do you have thats is the case? >> he had this famous statement that i'm sure you heard several times by now about the jewish lobby intimidating a lot of people. a lot of that discussion about that quote had to do with this line, the jewish lobby. as opposed to say the pro-israel lobby which is a very diverse collection of organizations. some of them with very different motives. what got me really wasn't so much the adjective, although i found the adjective odd, it was the verb, intimidates. chuck hagel for 12 years was a senator from the state of nebraska. i looked it up. there are about 6,100 jews in the state of nebraska. i can imagine many lobbies that might have intimidated hagel when he was in the senate. the ethanol lobby, for example, the farm lobby, various other kinds of lobbies. the nra, the pro-life lobby and so on. it's hard t

. >> bret: chad really does do work for us up there on the hill for fox. joining me is stephengton times. your take on how this is developing and really how it may develop. we are already at 10:36 eastern time. we have not seen the vice president come out from the democratic caucus meeting where i guess he is trying to twist arms of skeptical democrats. >> yeah, you know, he has been in there for more than an hour. the longer he is in it there doesn't necessarily mean the deal is in jeopardy but there are a lot of democrats venting over the details of it. in particular the estate tax rate and just the straight level of income for the rates returning to the clinton era, the 400 for individuals and $450,000 for families as you talked about earlier. there are a lot of democrats who think that obama campaigned very specifically on 250 and should have stuck with 250. you know, we'll see. i imagine that they do get enough democrats to go along with it. the bigger challenge at least in the senate, the bigger challenge will absolutely be the house. you know, if they put it for a vote t