AMERICA THE WEAK
US RISKS TURMOIL UNDER PREZ O
By RALPH PETERS
Posted: 4:51 am
October 20, 2008
IF Sen. Barack Obama is elected president, our re public will survive, but our international strategy and some of our allies may not. His first year in office would conjure globe-spanning challenges as our enemies piled on to exploit his weakness.
Add in Sen. Joe Biden - with his track record of calling every major foreign-policy crisis wrong for 35 years - as vice president and de facto secretary of State, and we'd face a formula for strategic disaster.
Where would the avalanche of confrontations come from?
* Al Qaeda. Pandering to his extreme base, Obama has projected an image of being soft on terror. Toss in his promise to abandon Iraq, and you can be sure that al Qaeda will pull out all the stops to kill as many Americans as possible - in Iraq, Afghanistan and, if they can, here at home - hoping that America will throw away the victories our troops bought with their blood.
* Pakistan. As this nuclear-armed country of 170 million anti-American Muslims grows more fragile by the day, the save-the-Taliban elements in the Pakistani intelligence services and body politic will avoid taking serious action against "their" terrorists (while theatrically annoying Taliban elements they can't control). The Pakistanis think Obama would lose Afghanistan - and they believe they can reap the subsequent whirlwind.
* Iran. Got nukes? If the Iranians are as far along with their nuclear program as some reports insist, expect a mushroom cloud above an Iranian test range next year. Even without nukes, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would try the new administration's temper in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.
* Israel. In the Middle East, Obama's election would be read as the end of staunch US support for Israel. Backed by Syria and Iran, Hezbollah would provoke another, far-bloodier war with Israel. Lebanon would disintegrate.
* Saudi Arabia. Post-9/11 attention to poisonous Saudi proselytizing forced the kingdom to be more discreet in fomenting terrorism and religious hatred abroad. Convinced that Obama will be more "tolerant" toward militant Islam, the Saudis would redouble their funding of bigotry and butchery-for-Allah - in the US, too.
* Russia. Got Ukraine? Not for long, slabiye Amerikantsi. Russia's new czar, Vladimir Putin, intends to gobble Ukraine next year, assured that NATO will be divided and the US can be derided. Aided by the treasonous Kiev politico Yulia Timoshenko - a patriot when it suited her ambition, but now a Russian collaborator - the Kremlin is set to reclaim the most important state it still regards as its property. Overall, 2009 may see the starkest repression of freedom since Stalin seized Eastern Europe.
* Georgia. Our Georgian allies should dust off their Russian dictionaries.
* Venezuela. Hugo Chavez will intensify the rape of his country's hemorrhaging democracy and, despite any drop in oil revenue, he'll do all he can to export his megalomaniacal version of gun-barrel socialism. He'll seek a hug-for-the-cameras meet with President Obama as early as possible.
* Bolivia. Chavez client President Evo Morales could order his military to seize control of his country's dissident eastern provinces, whose citizens resist his repression, extortion and semi-literate Leninism. President Obama would do nothing as yet another democracy toppled and bled.
* North Korea. North Korea will expect a much more generous deal from the West for annulling its pursuit of nuclear weapons. And it will regard an Obama administration as a green light to cheat.
* NATO. The brave young democracies of Central and Eastern Europe will be gravely discouraged, while the appeasers in Western Europe will again have the upper hand. Putin will be allowed to do what he wants.
* The Kurds. An Obama administration will abandon our only true allies between Tel Aviv and Tokyo.
* Democracy activists. Around the world, regressive regimes will intensify their suppression - and outright murder - of dissidents who risk their lives for freedom and justice. An Obama administration will say all the right things, but do nothing.
* Women's rights. If you can't vote in US elections, sister, you're screwed. Being stoned to death or buried alive is just a cultural thing.
* Journalists. American journalists who've done everything they can to elect Barack Obama can watch as regimes around the world imprison, torture and murder their foreign colleagues, confident that the US has entered an era of impotence. The crocodile tears in newsrooms will provide drought relief to the entire southeastern US.
Sen. John McCain's campaign has allowed a great man to be maligned as a mere successor to George W. Bush. The truth is that an Obama administration would be a second Carter presidency - only far worse.
Think Bush weakened America? Just wait.
Ralph Peters' latest book is "Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World."
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
America's First Far-Left Radical President?
By Melanie Phillips
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=618
With all eyes glued to the collapse of global capitalism as we know it, attention has been somewhat distracted from the race to lead what still remains the most powerful nation on earth - the United States. We ignore it at our peril.
From the shockingly partisan presentation by the pro-Obama media on both sides of the Atlantic, you'd think this was a contest between twin pillars of rectitude and inspirational high seriousness on the Democratic side, and a joke Republican ticket consisting of an erratic old man and a brainless, wacko, gun-toting beauty queen, who in a fit of madness John McCain picked as his vice-presidential candidate.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, the beauty queen in question, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, has struck an enormous chord with Middle America. As a result, Barack Obama's media supporters are making a huge effort to destroy her.
US Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama: Are we giving him a too much leniency?
US Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama: Are we giving him a too much leniency?
Inquiry
Now the Left thinks it has shot its moose. It has been crowing that an inquiry by Alaska's legislature has found Palin abused her office by firing Alaska's Commissioner of Public Safety for refusing to fire in turn Palin's former brother-in-law, Trooper Michael Wooten.
This really is a case of half-baked Alaska. First, the inquiry's conclusions were ambiguous. It found that Palin had violated public trust through using official action for personal interest; but it also said the firing was a proper and lawful exercise of her authority, and that personal interest had only been a contributory factor in the Commissioner's firing.
And just what was that personal interest? Palin wanted a state Trooper fired because he had assaulted his 11-year-old stepson with a stun gun, been caught drinking alcohol in his patrol car, and the Palins say was threatening to kill a member of their family.
Certainly, there was a conflict of interest because Wooten was the Governor's sister's ex-husband. But shouldn't the real question be why such a man was not fired?
What is really astounding, however, is the hue and cry over this non-event in Alaska while a raft of disturbing evidence about Senator Obama's connections is being either glossed over or not reported at all.
This may come as a shock to most people, but Obama is at the centre of a network of radical associations which he has tried to conceal.
Take for example his relationship with William Ayers, founder of the terrorist Weather Underground which bombed federal buildings in the 1960s and who has consistently maintained his radical views ever since.
Obama's own political career was actually launched in Ayers's Chicago house at a fundraising-event in 1995 which fired the starting gun for his run at the Illinois Senate.
Not only that, Obama and Ayers both sat on the boards of two organisations, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund. These organisations put into practice Ayers's revolutionary ideology by channelling money supposed to fund regular educational projects into extreme radical groups instead.
Obama now says he didn't know of Ayers's terrorist past and never endorsed his views, simply working with him on an educational project. But it defies belief he didn't know about Ayers, who was notorious in Chicago. In 2001, indeed, Ayers told a magazine: 'I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.'
The crucial point was that this educational project was itself a vehicle for subversion; in the view of Ayers, its driving force, education was 'the motor-force of revolution'. Moreover, Obama wrote a rave review about Ayers' book on criminal justice, which compared America to South Africa under apartheid.
Scandal
If John McCain had such strong links with ACORDN, wouldn't he be torn apart for it?
Through the Woods Fund, Obama also funnelled millions of dollars to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Described by an academic sympathiser as 'a uniquely militant organisation', ACORN played a significant role in the sub-prime scandal - which detonated America's financial crisis - by physically intimidating banks into lowering credit standards for poor and minority customers.
The Obama campaign has paid an ACORN subsidiary $800,000 to register new voters. But now, numerous states are launching investigations into massive voter fraud being carried out by ACORN activists who are being caught falsifying voter registration cards, registering fictitious individuals and hounding voters to register multiple times.
But Obama's connections with ACORN go even deeper. Even though his campaign has denied this, for several years running he trained its activists and in 1992 even ran one of its voter registration projects.
Such radical links fit with other highly dubious associations Obama has made. We all
know that, under pressure, he distanced himself from his longstanding mentor Pastor Wright, who infamously coined the phrase 'God damn America!'
But Obama never distanced himself from the anti-white teachings of his church, which was heavily influenced by the philosophy of the black racist James Cone who claimed that 'whiteness is the symbol of the antichrist'.
And after the controversy over Wright, Obama has become close to another preacher, Jim Wallis, who spews out the same anti-American message - once calling the U.S. 'the great power, the great seducer, the great captor and destroyer of human life'.
That's not all. ACORN is heavily involved with a Marxist group called the Chicago New Party, whose strategy is to force the Democratic Party to the far Left by infiltrating it and ' burrowing from within'. In 1996, the New Party exulted that one of its members who had just been successful in the political primary season was - Barack Obama.
Guilt
Whenever any of this surfaces, the Left tries to suppress it by screaming 'guilt by association'. Not so. This is guilt by participation.
The left cries 'smear' and 'racism'. On the contrary - if Obama wasn't a black Democrat, with this history his candidacy would have been toast before it got started.
Just consider if the boot had been on the other foot and McCain's political career had been launched by an abortion clinic bomber; his mentor for 20 years had been a Ku Klux Klansman, and he had paid nearly a million dollars to far-Right militias who strong-armed voters into fraudulent registrations.
Of course, there is no suggestion that Obama supports terrorism or intimidation. But the question is whether through expediency or ideological sympathy or a combination of the two, he has allowed himself to be associated with thinking that threatens the basic values of America and Western society.
This may sound too incredible for words. But what's really incredible is that, with dozens of reporters feverishly combing Alaska for any evidence to tarnish Sarah Palin, the mainstream media has largely refused to investigate any of this.
What's really incredible is that a man with such a background in anti-Western thinking can now stand on the verge of becoming the leader of the free world.
Please don't get me wrong. I am not a particular fan of John McCain. I think he is indeed erratic, and has run a lousy campaign. And the exhausted Republicans deserve to lose. But the prospect of Obama in the White House as America's first far-Left radical president is deeply worrying.
It would be a crowning triumph for the anti-Western ideology which has wrought such havoc on both sides of the Atlantic.
The reason Sarah Palin has struck such a chord is that Middle America sees her as the first candidate in its lifetime who stands against that destructive nihilism. That's why she is the key target for Western radicals who are now poised to gain the biggest prize of all.
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=618
With all eyes glued to the collapse of global capitalism as we know it, attention has been somewhat distracted from the race to lead what still remains the most powerful nation on earth - the United States. We ignore it at our peril.
From the shockingly partisan presentation by the pro-Obama media on both sides of the Atlantic, you'd think this was a contest between twin pillars of rectitude and inspirational high seriousness on the Democratic side, and a joke Republican ticket consisting of an erratic old man and a brainless, wacko, gun-toting beauty queen, who in a fit of madness John McCain picked as his vice-presidential candidate.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, the beauty queen in question, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, has struck an enormous chord with Middle America. As a result, Barack Obama's media supporters are making a huge effort to destroy her.
US Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama: Are we giving him a too much leniency?
US Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama: Are we giving him a too much leniency?
Inquiry
Now the Left thinks it has shot its moose. It has been crowing that an inquiry by Alaska's legislature has found Palin abused her office by firing Alaska's Commissioner of Public Safety for refusing to fire in turn Palin's former brother-in-law, Trooper Michael Wooten.
This really is a case of half-baked Alaska. First, the inquiry's conclusions were ambiguous. It found that Palin had violated public trust through using official action for personal interest; but it also said the firing was a proper and lawful exercise of her authority, and that personal interest had only been a contributory factor in the Commissioner's firing.
And just what was that personal interest? Palin wanted a state Trooper fired because he had assaulted his 11-year-old stepson with a stun gun, been caught drinking alcohol in his patrol car, and the Palins say was threatening to kill a member of their family.
Certainly, there was a conflict of interest because Wooten was the Governor's sister's ex-husband. But shouldn't the real question be why such a man was not fired?
What is really astounding, however, is the hue and cry over this non-event in Alaska while a raft of disturbing evidence about Senator Obama's connections is being either glossed over or not reported at all.
This may come as a shock to most people, but Obama is at the centre of a network of radical associations which he has tried to conceal.
Take for example his relationship with William Ayers, founder of the terrorist Weather Underground which bombed federal buildings in the 1960s and who has consistently maintained his radical views ever since.
Obama's own political career was actually launched in Ayers's Chicago house at a fundraising-event in 1995 which fired the starting gun for his run at the Illinois Senate.
Not only that, Obama and Ayers both sat on the boards of two organisations, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund. These organisations put into practice Ayers's revolutionary ideology by channelling money supposed to fund regular educational projects into extreme radical groups instead.
Obama now says he didn't know of Ayers's terrorist past and never endorsed his views, simply working with him on an educational project. But it defies belief he didn't know about Ayers, who was notorious in Chicago. In 2001, indeed, Ayers told a magazine: 'I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.'
The crucial point was that this educational project was itself a vehicle for subversion; in the view of Ayers, its driving force, education was 'the motor-force of revolution'. Moreover, Obama wrote a rave review about Ayers' book on criminal justice, which compared America to South Africa under apartheid.
Scandal
If John McCain had such strong links with ACORDN, wouldn't he be torn apart for it?
Through the Woods Fund, Obama also funnelled millions of dollars to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Described by an academic sympathiser as 'a uniquely militant organisation', ACORN played a significant role in the sub-prime scandal - which detonated America's financial crisis - by physically intimidating banks into lowering credit standards for poor and minority customers.
The Obama campaign has paid an ACORN subsidiary $800,000 to register new voters. But now, numerous states are launching investigations into massive voter fraud being carried out by ACORN activists who are being caught falsifying voter registration cards, registering fictitious individuals and hounding voters to register multiple times.
But Obama's connections with ACORN go even deeper. Even though his campaign has denied this, for several years running he trained its activists and in 1992 even ran one of its voter registration projects.
Such radical links fit with other highly dubious associations Obama has made. We all
know that, under pressure, he distanced himself from his longstanding mentor Pastor Wright, who infamously coined the phrase 'God damn America!'
But Obama never distanced himself from the anti-white teachings of his church, which was heavily influenced by the philosophy of the black racist James Cone who claimed that 'whiteness is the symbol of the antichrist'.
And after the controversy over Wright, Obama has become close to another preacher, Jim Wallis, who spews out the same anti-American message - once calling the U.S. 'the great power, the great seducer, the great captor and destroyer of human life'.
That's not all. ACORN is heavily involved with a Marxist group called the Chicago New Party, whose strategy is to force the Democratic Party to the far Left by infiltrating it and ' burrowing from within'. In 1996, the New Party exulted that one of its members who had just been successful in the political primary season was - Barack Obama.
Guilt
Whenever any of this surfaces, the Left tries to suppress it by screaming 'guilt by association'. Not so. This is guilt by participation.
The left cries 'smear' and 'racism'. On the contrary - if Obama wasn't a black Democrat, with this history his candidacy would have been toast before it got started.
Just consider if the boot had been on the other foot and McCain's political career had been launched by an abortion clinic bomber; his mentor for 20 years had been a Ku Klux Klansman, and he had paid nearly a million dollars to far-Right militias who strong-armed voters into fraudulent registrations.
Of course, there is no suggestion that Obama supports terrorism or intimidation. But the question is whether through expediency or ideological sympathy or a combination of the two, he has allowed himself to be associated with thinking that threatens the basic values of America and Western society.
This may sound too incredible for words. But what's really incredible is that, with dozens of reporters feverishly combing Alaska for any evidence to tarnish Sarah Palin, the mainstream media has largely refused to investigate any of this.
What's really incredible is that a man with such a background in anti-Western thinking can now stand on the verge of becoming the leader of the free world.
Please don't get me wrong. I am not a particular fan of John McCain. I think he is indeed erratic, and has run a lousy campaign. And the exhausted Republicans deserve to lose. But the prospect of Obama in the White House as America's first far-Left radical president is deeply worrying.
It would be a crowning triumph for the anti-Western ideology which has wrought such havoc on both sides of the Atlantic.
The reason Sarah Palin has struck such a chord is that Middle America sees her as the first candidate in its lifetime who stands against that destructive nihilism. That's why she is the key target for Western radicals who are now poised to gain the biggest prize of all.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Learning the Hard Way
Learning the Hard Way
Naomi Ragen
Sitting here in Jerusalem reading the poll numbers, I have a feeling of deja vu. There was a time in Israel when the Oslo Accords and the sincerity of Yasir Arafat were, believe it or not, controversial subjects. More than that, anyone who was against Oslo, who believed Arafat was a terrorist and a liar, and that land for peace was a deception that would lead to terror and war, was villified. What didn't they call us realists? War-mongers. Partners with Yigal Amir. There was no debate, just hysteria and villification. I have to say that even my own family felt we should 'give peace a chance' and watched the handshake on the White House lawn (which I refused to watch and which made me ill) with hope. I was informed that since I wasn't going to be serving in the army, I had no right to suggest that signing this peace agreement was a bad thing.
You know what? It intimidated me. I started to think: how could it be that everyone was so happy and enthusiastic, and I was miserable and depressed? How could they see doves and handshakes, and all I could see was terrorist bombs and dead bodies?
So I tried to see the world through their glasses. I tried to be hopeful too. And when it came time to vote, I even voted for a Peace Now candidate, not because I thought there would be peace, but because I thought that it was better for the country to at least put into practice its wrong ideas,and to experience first hand how badly it was all going to work out. That there was no other way to have unity, because if they didn't get that chance, they would never shut up, and would always blame the opposition for not giving them a chance. I stopped speaking out. I went along.
What we got, of course, was hell on earth. Thousands were killed, thousands more were injured as Arafat unleashed unbridled terrorist attacks, using the guns our government had given him to kill Israelis, many of them women and children;using the free access into Israel to blow up pizza parlors and discos and bar mitzvah celebrations.
And then came my turn, sitting in the Park Hotel with my family, including my biggest political opponent, who was all in favor of Oslo, when the building blew up.
When I came out of that alive with my husband and children, I swore never to be intimidated again. I swore that next time when no-nothings asserted political beliefs that were blatantly wrong, and would lead to disaster, I would oppose them openly, come what may. I would also never again suspend my disbelief that other people knew better, including high level academics, intellectuals, and other elites. I would keep my common sense.
The Presidential election of the most liberal and inexperienced politician in America, a man with strong Muslim ties and a strong Muslim background; a man who is linked to domestic terrorism through Bill Ayers, and to numerous pro-Islamic and anti-American advisors - all of whom side with Israel's Leftist enemies (including Israelis) as well as to anti-American, anti-Semites like Reverend Wright; a man whose supporters are among the same people who brought down the American economy with their 'liberalism' in money-lending, is just about a fait accompli. I have no idea what has happened to the America I knew. I have no idea what happened to the American Jewish community's support for Israel, how it has been washed away by deceptive self-interest and propaganda lies. But when I think what is in store for the America which is doing this to herself, and the American Jewish community who thinks by selling out Israel it will somehow achieve "change" that will benefit it, my heart aches.
I know that I am helpless to stop this juggernaut towards disaster. Perhaps it is America's turn to experience first hand what we in Israel experienced: the consequences of electing a leadership which does not have the best interests of the country in mind; which has an agenda that has nothing to do with those interests. Sometimes people have to make horrible mistakes in order to learn that they are horrible mistakes. In Israel, this included over 25,000 terrorist attacks. Children dying in the streets. Being afraid to walk to the bus stop, or enter a store.
Americans have had a wonderful life in a wonderful country. Everybody in the world wants to live in America. Now, Americans want 'change.' They are about to get it.
May God watch over them.
Naomi Ragen
Sitting here in Jerusalem reading the poll numbers, I have a feeling of deja vu. There was a time in Israel when the Oslo Accords and the sincerity of Yasir Arafat were, believe it or not, controversial subjects. More than that, anyone who was against Oslo, who believed Arafat was a terrorist and a liar, and that land for peace was a deception that would lead to terror and war, was villified. What didn't they call us realists? War-mongers. Partners with Yigal Amir. There was no debate, just hysteria and villification. I have to say that even my own family felt we should 'give peace a chance' and watched the handshake on the White House lawn (which I refused to watch and which made me ill) with hope. I was informed that since I wasn't going to be serving in the army, I had no right to suggest that signing this peace agreement was a bad thing.
You know what? It intimidated me. I started to think: how could it be that everyone was so happy and enthusiastic, and I was miserable and depressed? How could they see doves and handshakes, and all I could see was terrorist bombs and dead bodies?
So I tried to see the world through their glasses. I tried to be hopeful too. And when it came time to vote, I even voted for a Peace Now candidate, not because I thought there would be peace, but because I thought that it was better for the country to at least put into practice its wrong ideas,and to experience first hand how badly it was all going to work out. That there was no other way to have unity, because if they didn't get that chance, they would never shut up, and would always blame the opposition for not giving them a chance. I stopped speaking out. I went along.
What we got, of course, was hell on earth. Thousands were killed, thousands more were injured as Arafat unleashed unbridled terrorist attacks, using the guns our government had given him to kill Israelis, many of them women and children;using the free access into Israel to blow up pizza parlors and discos and bar mitzvah celebrations.
And then came my turn, sitting in the Park Hotel with my family, including my biggest political opponent, who was all in favor of Oslo, when the building blew up.
When I came out of that alive with my husband and children, I swore never to be intimidated again. I swore that next time when no-nothings asserted political beliefs that were blatantly wrong, and would lead to disaster, I would oppose them openly, come what may. I would also never again suspend my disbelief that other people knew better, including high level academics, intellectuals, and other elites. I would keep my common sense.
The Presidential election of the most liberal and inexperienced politician in America, a man with strong Muslim ties and a strong Muslim background; a man who is linked to domestic terrorism through Bill Ayers, and to numerous pro-Islamic and anti-American advisors - all of whom side with Israel's Leftist enemies (including Israelis) as well as to anti-American, anti-Semites like Reverend Wright; a man whose supporters are among the same people who brought down the American economy with their 'liberalism' in money-lending, is just about a fait accompli. I have no idea what has happened to the America I knew. I have no idea what happened to the American Jewish community's support for Israel, how it has been washed away by deceptive self-interest and propaganda lies. But when I think what is in store for the America which is doing this to herself, and the American Jewish community who thinks by selling out Israel it will somehow achieve "change" that will benefit it, my heart aches.
I know that I am helpless to stop this juggernaut towards disaster. Perhaps it is America's turn to experience first hand what we in Israel experienced: the consequences of electing a leadership which does not have the best interests of the country in mind; which has an agenda that has nothing to do with those interests. Sometimes people have to make horrible mistakes in order to learn that they are horrible mistakes. In Israel, this included over 25,000 terrorist attacks. Children dying in the streets. Being afraid to walk to the bus stop, or enter a store.
Americans have had a wonderful life in a wonderful country. Everybody in the world wants to live in America. Now, Americans want 'change.' They are about to get it.
May God watch over them.
Joe Biden’s Alternate Universe
Joe Biden’s Alternate Universe
Michael J. Totten - 10.03.2008 - 8:10 AM
Commentary Magazine
In Thursday night’s vice presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin, Biden said the strangest and most ill-informed thing I have ever heard about Lebanon in my life. “When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, “Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.” Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.” [Emphasis added.]
What on Earth is he talking about? The United States and France may have kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon in an alternate universe, but nothing even remotely like that ever happened in this one.
Nobody – nobody – has ever kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. Not the United States. Not France. Not Israel. And not the Lebanese. Nobody.
Joe Biden has literally no idea what he’s talking about.
It’s too bad debate moderator Gwen Ifill didn’t catch him and ask a follow up question: When did the United States and France kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon?
The answer? Never. And did Biden and Senator Barack Obama really say NATO troops should be sent into Lebanon? When did they say that? Why would they say that? They certainly didn’t say it because NATO needed to prevent Hezbollah from returning–since Hezbollah never went anywhere.
I tried to chalk this one up as just the latest of Biden’s colorful gaffes. Did he mean to say “we kicked Syria out of Lebanon?” But that wouldn’t make any more sense. First of all, the Lebanese kicked Syria out of Lebanon. Not the United States, and not France. But he clearly meant to say Hezbollah, not Syria, because he correctly notes just a few sentences later that Hezbollah is part of Lebanon’s government. He wasn’t talking about Syria. He was talking about Hezbollah all the way through, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of his outlandish assertion.
Like many who watched the debate, I was bracing myself for Palin to say something off-putting about foreign policy. She’s the one who needed the crash course, allegedly; Biden is supposedly Mr. Foreign Policy. He’s supposed to be the experienced elder statesman Senator Barack Obama chose to help him govern and fill in some of his knowledge and experience gaps. He’s supposed to know far more about foreign policy than she does.
I wasn’t exactly encouraged by Palin’s answer to one of Katie Couric’s foreign policy questions: “What happens if the goal of democracy doesn’t produce the desired outcome?” Couric used Hamas’ victory in the West Bank and Gaza as an example. Palin either dodged the question or did not understand it.
Biden, though, against all expectations and odds, managed to say something far more bizarre and off-planet than anything Palin has said on the topic to date.
»
Michael J. Totten - 10.03.2008 - 8:10 AM
Commentary Magazine
In Thursday night’s vice presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin, Biden said the strangest and most ill-informed thing I have ever heard about Lebanon in my life. “When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, “Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.” Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.” [Emphasis added.]
What on Earth is he talking about? The United States and France may have kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon in an alternate universe, but nothing even remotely like that ever happened in this one.
Nobody – nobody – has ever kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. Not the United States. Not France. Not Israel. And not the Lebanese. Nobody.
Joe Biden has literally no idea what he’s talking about.
It’s too bad debate moderator Gwen Ifill didn’t catch him and ask a follow up question: When did the United States and France kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon?
The answer? Never. And did Biden and Senator Barack Obama really say NATO troops should be sent into Lebanon? When did they say that? Why would they say that? They certainly didn’t say it because NATO needed to prevent Hezbollah from returning–since Hezbollah never went anywhere.
I tried to chalk this one up as just the latest of Biden’s colorful gaffes. Did he mean to say “we kicked Syria out of Lebanon?” But that wouldn’t make any more sense. First of all, the Lebanese kicked Syria out of Lebanon. Not the United States, and not France. But he clearly meant to say Hezbollah, not Syria, because he correctly notes just a few sentences later that Hezbollah is part of Lebanon’s government. He wasn’t talking about Syria. He was talking about Hezbollah all the way through, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of his outlandish assertion.
Like many who watched the debate, I was bracing myself for Palin to say something off-putting about foreign policy. She’s the one who needed the crash course, allegedly; Biden is supposedly Mr. Foreign Policy. He’s supposed to be the experienced elder statesman Senator Barack Obama chose to help him govern and fill in some of his knowledge and experience gaps. He’s supposed to know far more about foreign policy than she does.
I wasn’t exactly encouraged by Palin’s answer to one of Katie Couric’s foreign policy questions: “What happens if the goal of democracy doesn’t produce the desired outcome?” Couric used Hamas’ victory in the West Bank and Gaza as an example. Palin either dodged the question or did not understand it.
Biden, though, against all expectations and odds, managed to say something far more bizarre and off-planet than anything Palin has said on the topic to date.
»
Sunday, October 5, 2008
George Bush Resigns
BUSH'S RESIGNATION SPEECH
Well, not really. But it's a speech he might give, written for him by an ordinary Maine-iac [a resident of the People's Republic of Maine ].
I'll cut right to the chase here: I quit. Now before anyone gets all in a lather about me quitting to avoid impeachment, or to avoid prosecution or something, let me assure you: There's been no breaking of laws or impeachable offenses in this office.
The reason I'm quitting is simple. I'm fed up with you people. I'm fed up because you have no understanding of what's really going on in the world. Or of what's going on in this once-great nation of ours. And the majority of you are too damned lazy to do your homework and figure it out.
Let's start local. You've been sold a bill of goods by politicians and the news media.
Meanwhile, all you can do is whine about gas prices, and most of you are too damn stupid to realize that gas prices are high because there's increased demand in other parts of the world, and because a small handful of noisy idiots are more worried about polar bears and beachfront property than your economic security.
We face real threats in the world. Don't give me this 'blood for oil' thing. If I were trading blood for oil I would've already seized Iraq 's oil fields and let the rest of the country go to hell. And don't give me this 'Bush Lied...People Died' crap either. If I were the liar you morons take me for, I could've easily had chemical weapons planted in Iraq so they could be 'discovered.' Instead, I owned up to the fact that the intelligence was faulty.
Let me remind you that the rest of the world thought Saddam had the goods, same as me. Let me also remind you that regime change in Iraq was official US policy before I came into office. Some guy named ' Clinton ' established that policy. Bet you didn't know that, did you?
Now some of you morons want to be led by a junior senator with no understanding of foreign policy or economics, and this nitwit says we should attack Pakistan , a nuclear ally. And then he wants to go to Iran and make peace with a terrorist who says he's going to destroy us. While he's doing that, he wants to give Iraq to al Qaeda, Afghanistan to the Taliban, Israel to the Palestinians, and your money to the IRS so the government can give welfare to illegal aliens, who he will make into citizens, so they can vote to re-elect him. He also thinks it's okay for Iran to have nuclear weapons, and we should stop our foreign aid to Israel. Did you sleep through high school?
You idiots need to understand that we face a unique enemy. Back during the cold war, there were two major competing political and economic models squaring off. We won that war, but we did so because fundamentally, the Communists wanted to survive, just as we do. We were simply able to out spend and out-tech them.
That's not the case this time. The soldiers of our new enemy don't care if they survive. In fact, they want to die. That'd be fine, as long as they weren't also committed to taking as many of you with them as they can. But they are. They want to kill you, and the bastards are all over the globe.
You should be grateful that they haven't gotten any more of us here in the United States since September 11. But you're not. That's because you've got no idea how hard a small number of intelligence, military, law enforcement, and homeland security people have worked to make sure of that. When this whole mess started, I warned you that this would be a long and difficult fight. I'm disappointed how many of you people think a long and difficult fight amounts to a single season of 'Survivor.'
Instead, you've grown impatient. You're incapable of seeing things through the long lens of history, the way our enemies do. You think that wars should last a few months, a few years, tops.
Making matters worse, you actively support those who help the enemy Every time you buy the New York Times, every time you send a donation to a cut-and-run Democrat's political campaign, well, dang it, you might just as well Fed Ex a grenade launcher to a Jihadist. It amounts to the same thing.
In this day and age, it's easy enough to find the truth. It's all over the Internet. It just isn't on the pages of the New York Times, USA Today, or on NBC News. But even if it were, I doubt you'd be any smarter. Most of you would rather watch American Idol or Dancing with Stars.
I could say more about your expectations that the government will always be there to bail you out, even if you're too stupid to leave a city that's below sea level and has a hurricane approaching.
I could say more about your insane belief that government, not your own wallet, is where the money comes from. But I've come to the conclusion that were I to do so, it would sail right over your heads.
So I quit. I'm going back to Crawford. I've got an energy-efficient hou se down there (Al Gore could only dream) and the capability to be fully self-sufficient for years. No one ever heard of Crawford before I got elected, and as soon as I'm done here pretty much no one will ever hear of it again. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to die of old age before the last pillars of America fall.
Oh, and by the way, Cheney's quitting too. That means Pelosi is your new President. You asked for it. Watch what she does carefully, because I still have a glimmer of hope that there are just enough of you remaining who are smart enough to turn this thing around in 2008.
So that's it. God bless what's left of America.
Some of you know what I mean. The rest of you, kiss off.
PS - You might want to start learning Farsi, and buy a Koran.
=
Well, not really. But it's a speech he might give, written for him by an ordinary Maine-iac [a resident of the People's Republic of Maine ].
I'll cut right to the chase here: I quit. Now before anyone gets all in a lather about me quitting to avoid impeachment, or to avoid prosecution or something, let me assure you: There's been no breaking of laws or impeachable offenses in this office.
The reason I'm quitting is simple. I'm fed up with you people. I'm fed up because you have no understanding of what's really going on in the world. Or of what's going on in this once-great nation of ours. And the majority of you are too damned lazy to do your homework and figure it out.
Let's start local. You've been sold a bill of goods by politicians and the news media.
Meanwhile, all you can do is whine about gas prices, and most of you are too damn stupid to realize that gas prices are high because there's increased demand in other parts of the world, and because a small handful of noisy idiots are more worried about polar bears and beachfront property than your economic security.
We face real threats in the world. Don't give me this 'blood for oil' thing. If I were trading blood for oil I would've already seized Iraq 's oil fields and let the rest of the country go to hell. And don't give me this 'Bush Lied...People Died' crap either. If I were the liar you morons take me for, I could've easily had chemical weapons planted in Iraq so they could be 'discovered.' Instead, I owned up to the fact that the intelligence was faulty.
Let me remind you that the rest of the world thought Saddam had the goods, same as me. Let me also remind you that regime change in Iraq was official US policy before I came into office. Some guy named ' Clinton ' established that policy. Bet you didn't know that, did you?
Now some of you morons want to be led by a junior senator with no understanding of foreign policy or economics, and this nitwit says we should attack Pakistan , a nuclear ally. And then he wants to go to Iran and make peace with a terrorist who says he's going to destroy us. While he's doing that, he wants to give Iraq to al Qaeda, Afghanistan to the Taliban, Israel to the Palestinians, and your money to the IRS so the government can give welfare to illegal aliens, who he will make into citizens, so they can vote to re-elect him. He also thinks it's okay for Iran to have nuclear weapons, and we should stop our foreign aid to Israel. Did you sleep through high school?
You idiots need to understand that we face a unique enemy. Back during the cold war, there were two major competing political and economic models squaring off. We won that war, but we did so because fundamentally, the Communists wanted to survive, just as we do. We were simply able to out spend and out-tech them.
That's not the case this time. The soldiers of our new enemy don't care if they survive. In fact, they want to die. That'd be fine, as long as they weren't also committed to taking as many of you with them as they can. But they are. They want to kill you, and the bastards are all over the globe.
You should be grateful that they haven't gotten any more of us here in the United States since September 11. But you're not. That's because you've got no idea how hard a small number of intelligence, military, law enforcement, and homeland security people have worked to make sure of that. When this whole mess started, I warned you that this would be a long and difficult fight. I'm disappointed how many of you people think a long and difficult fight amounts to a single season of 'Survivor.'
Instead, you've grown impatient. You're incapable of seeing things through the long lens of history, the way our enemies do. You think that wars should last a few months, a few years, tops.
Making matters worse, you actively support those who help the enemy Every time you buy the New York Times, every time you send a donation to a cut-and-run Democrat's political campaign, well, dang it, you might just as well Fed Ex a grenade launcher to a Jihadist. It amounts to the same thing.
In this day and age, it's easy enough to find the truth. It's all over the Internet. It just isn't on the pages of the New York Times, USA Today, or on NBC News. But even if it were, I doubt you'd be any smarter. Most of you would rather watch American Idol or Dancing with Stars.
I could say more about your expectations that the government will always be there to bail you out, even if you're too stupid to leave a city that's below sea level and has a hurricane approaching.
I could say more about your insane belief that government, not your own wallet, is where the money comes from. But I've come to the conclusion that were I to do so, it would sail right over your heads.
So I quit. I'm going back to Crawford. I've got an energy-efficient hou se down there (Al Gore could only dream) and the capability to be fully self-sufficient for years. No one ever heard of Crawford before I got elected, and as soon as I'm done here pretty much no one will ever hear of it again. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to die of old age before the last pillars of America fall.
Oh, and by the way, Cheney's quitting too. That means Pelosi is your new President. You asked for it. Watch what she does carefully, because I still have a glimmer of hope that there are just enough of you remaining who are smart enough to turn this thing around in 2008.
So that's it. God bless what's left of America.
Some of you know what I mean. The rest of you, kiss off.
PS - You might want to start learning Farsi, and buy a Koran.
=
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Obama, Rezko, Student Loans, Million Dollar Homes
This is from a listmember's friend. I can verify that all this information is available online. Is it incorrect? Or is is true, and just being hidden by pro-Obama supporters in the major media? Please do some research, and let's see what we come up with. If you find anything below which is not true, please let me know and I will immediately correct.
Naomi
To All My Friends,
This is long, but, please take the time to read it.
This election has me very worried. So many things to consider.
I watch all the news channels, jumping from one to another. I must say this drives my husband crazy. But, I feel if you view MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, you might get some middle ground to work with. About six months ago, I started thinking "where did the money come from for Obama". I have four daughters who went to College, and we were middle class, and money was tight. We (including my girls) worked hard and there were lots of student loans.
I started looking into Obama's life. Around 1979 Obama started college at Occidental in California . He is very open about his two years at Occidental, he tried all kinds of drugs and was wasting his time but, even though he had a brilliant mind, did not apply himself to his studies.
"Barry" (that was the name he used all his life) during this time had two roommates, Muhammad Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, both from Pakistan .
During the summer of 1981, after his second year in college, he made a "round the world" trip. Stopping to see his mother in Indonesia , next Hyderabad in India , three weeks in Karachi , Pakistan where he stayed with his roommate's family, then off to Africa to visit his father's family.
My question - Where did he get the money for this trip? Nether I, nor any one of my children would have had money for a trip like this when they where in college. When he came back he started school at Columbia University in New York . It is at this time he wants everyone to call him Barack - not Barry.
Do you know what the tuition is at Columbia ? It's not cheap! to say the least. Where did he get money for tuition? Student Loans? Maybe. After Columbia , he went to Chicago to work as a Community Organizer for $12,000.
a year. Why Chicago ? Why not New York ? He was already living in New York .
By "chance" he met Antoin "Tony" Rezko, born in Aleppo Syria , and a real estate developer in Chicago . Rezko has been convicted of fraud and bribery this year. Rezko, was named "Entrepreneur of the Decade" by the Arab-American Business and Professional Association".
About two years later, Obama entered Harvard Law School . Do you have any idea what tuition is for Harvard Law School ? Where did he get the money for Law School ? More student loans? After Law school, he went back to Chicago .
Rezko offered him a job, which he turned down. But, he did take a job with Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. Guess what? They represented "Rezar" which Rezko's firm. Rezko was one of Obama's first major financial contributors when he ran for office in Chicago . In 2003, Rezko threw an early fundraiser for Obama which Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendelland claims was instrumental in providing Obama with "seed money" for his U.S. Senate race.
In 2005, Obama purchased a new home in Kenwoood District of Chicago for
$1.65 million (less than asking price). With ALL those Student Loans - Where did he get the money for the property? On the same day Rezko's wife, Rita, purchased the adjoining empty lot for full price. The London Times reported that Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born Billionaire loaned Rezko $3.5 million three weeks before Obama's new home was purchased. Obama met Nadhmi Auchi many times with Rezko.
Now, we have Obama running for President. Valerie Jarrett, was Michele Obama's boss. She is now Obama's chief advisor and he does not make any major decisions without talking to her first. Where was Jarrett born? Ready for this? Shiraz, Iran! Do we see a pattern here? Or am I going crazy?
On May 10, 2008 The Times reported, Robert Malley advisor to Obama was "sacked" after the press found out he was having regular contacts with "Hamas ", which controls Gaza and is connected with Iran . This past week, buried in the back part of the papers, Iraqi newspapers reported that during Obama's visit to Iraq , he asked their leaders to do nothing about the war until after he is elected, and he will "Take care of things".
Oh, and by the way, remember the college roommates that where born in Pakistan ? They are in charge of all those "small" Internet campaign contribution for Obama. Where is that money coming from? The poor and middle class in this country? Or could it be from the Middle East ?
And the final bit of news. On September 7, 2008, The Washington Times posted a verbal slip that was made on "This Week" with George Stephanapoulos. Obama on talking about his religion said, "My Muslim faith". When questioned, "he make a mistake". Some mistake!
All of the above information I got on line. If you would like to check it - Wikipedia, encyclopedia, Barack Obama; Tony Rezko; Valerie Jarrett: Daily Times - Obama visited Pakistan in 1981; The Washington Times - September 7, 2008; The Times May 10, 2008. Now the BIG question - If I found out all this information on my own, why haven't all of our "intelligent" members of the press been reporting this?
A phrase that keeps ringing in my ear - "Beware of the enemy from within"!!!
Naomi
To All My Friends,
This is long, but, please take the time to read it.
This election has me very worried. So many things to consider.
I watch all the news channels, jumping from one to another. I must say this drives my husband crazy. But, I feel if you view MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, you might get some middle ground to work with. About six months ago, I started thinking "where did the money come from for Obama". I have four daughters who went to College, and we were middle class, and money was tight. We (including my girls) worked hard and there were lots of student loans.
I started looking into Obama's life. Around 1979 Obama started college at Occidental in California . He is very open about his two years at Occidental, he tried all kinds of drugs and was wasting his time but, even though he had a brilliant mind, did not apply himself to his studies.
"Barry" (that was the name he used all his life) during this time had two roommates, Muhammad Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, both from Pakistan .
During the summer of 1981, after his second year in college, he made a "round the world" trip. Stopping to see his mother in Indonesia , next Hyderabad in India , three weeks in Karachi , Pakistan where he stayed with his roommate's family, then off to Africa to visit his father's family.
My question - Where did he get the money for this trip? Nether I, nor any one of my children would have had money for a trip like this when they where in college. When he came back he started school at Columbia University in New York . It is at this time he wants everyone to call him Barack - not Barry.
Do you know what the tuition is at Columbia ? It's not cheap! to say the least. Where did he get money for tuition? Student Loans? Maybe. After Columbia , he went to Chicago to work as a Community Organizer for $12,000.
a year. Why Chicago ? Why not New York ? He was already living in New York .
By "chance" he met Antoin "Tony" Rezko, born in Aleppo Syria , and a real estate developer in Chicago . Rezko has been convicted of fraud and bribery this year. Rezko, was named "Entrepreneur of the Decade" by the Arab-American Business and Professional Association".
About two years later, Obama entered Harvard Law School . Do you have any idea what tuition is for Harvard Law School ? Where did he get the money for Law School ? More student loans? After Law school, he went back to Chicago .
Rezko offered him a job, which he turned down. But, he did take a job with Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. Guess what? They represented "Rezar" which Rezko's firm. Rezko was one of Obama's first major financial contributors when he ran for office in Chicago . In 2003, Rezko threw an early fundraiser for Obama which Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendelland claims was instrumental in providing Obama with "seed money" for his U.S. Senate race.
In 2005, Obama purchased a new home in Kenwoood District of Chicago for
$1.65 million (less than asking price). With ALL those Student Loans - Where did he get the money for the property? On the same day Rezko's wife, Rita, purchased the adjoining empty lot for full price. The London Times reported that Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born Billionaire loaned Rezko $3.5 million three weeks before Obama's new home was purchased. Obama met Nadhmi Auchi many times with Rezko.
Now, we have Obama running for President. Valerie Jarrett, was Michele Obama's boss. She is now Obama's chief advisor and he does not make any major decisions without talking to her first. Where was Jarrett born? Ready for this? Shiraz, Iran! Do we see a pattern here? Or am I going crazy?
On May 10, 2008 The Times reported, Robert Malley advisor to Obama was "sacked" after the press found out he was having regular contacts with "Hamas ", which controls Gaza and is connected with Iran . This past week, buried in the back part of the papers, Iraqi newspapers reported that during Obama's visit to Iraq , he asked their leaders to do nothing about the war until after he is elected, and he will "Take care of things".
Oh, and by the way, remember the college roommates that where born in Pakistan ? They are in charge of all those "small" Internet campaign contribution for Obama. Where is that money coming from? The poor and middle class in this country? Or could it be from the Middle East ?
And the final bit of news. On September 7, 2008, The Washington Times posted a verbal slip that was made on "This Week" with George Stephanapoulos. Obama on talking about his religion said, "My Muslim faith". When questioned, "he make a mistake". Some mistake!
All of the above information I got on line. If you would like to check it - Wikipedia, encyclopedia, Barack Obama; Tony Rezko; Valerie Jarrett: Daily Times - Obama visited Pakistan in 1981; The Washington Times - September 7, 2008; The Times May 10, 2008. Now the BIG question - If I found out all this information on my own, why haven't all of our "intelligent" members of the press been reporting this?
A phrase that keeps ringing in my ear - "Beware of the enemy from within"!!!
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Obama: Hamas and Hezbollah Have ‘Legitimate Claims’
September 29, 2008
Exclusive: Sen. Obama Says Hamas and Hezbollah Have ‘Legitimate Claims’
Nicholas Guariglia
Sen. Obama’s former top foreign affairs advisor, Robert Malley, recently had to resign his role in the Obama campaign due to holding meetings with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Mr. Malley’s favorable views of Hamas have been widely known for years. Malley had written extensively, sometimes co-writing articles with the late Yasser Arafat’s advisor Hussein Agha, blaming Israel, not Arafat, for the failure of the Camp David talks.
Had Malley’s views on (and meetings with) Hamas not been unveiled, who knows where Mr. Malley would have ended up in a potential Obama administration? Perhaps he would have been the Secretary of State. This is a sad and frightening possibility, or probability, because Sen. Obama is the least-vetted man in U.S. political history.
Nobody likes “gotcha!” politics. Both Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama have made serious gaffes during the course of this election, which began earlier and has lasted longer than any other election in American history. Both men are being recorded and watched at all times, and they’re human. Missteps and goof-ups are to be expected. Just ask Joe Biden.
But this issue is different. In a New York Times article, written by David Brooks on May 16th of this year, Sen. Obama made a very revealing admission that has gone overlooked by the mainstream press. The article, entitled “Obama Admires Bush,” focused on Sen. Obama’s views regarding the Middle East. The “Bush” in question was George H.W. Bush, the senior, and throughout the interview Obama displays his affection for old-school James Baker/Brent Scowcroft foreign polic y realism.
About midway through the interview, however, the man who wants to be President of the United States gave a whopper of a quote. In Brooks’ words:
The U.S. needs a foreign policy that “looks at the root causes of problems and dangers.” Obama compared Hezbollah to Hamas. Both need to be compelled to understand that “they’re going down a blind alley with violence that weakens their legitimate claims” (emphasis mine).
Why has no one to date has asked the would-be Commander-in-Chief what he means by “legitimate claims”? Certainly there is a large distinction to be made between Palestinian and Lebanese innocents vs. the terrible Hamas and Hezbollah organizations. The former have aspirations which, if addressed, would help the United States geopolitically. But the latter? To suggest these terrorist groups have legitimate claims? Something does not sit right, there.
To be fair, Mr. Obama acknowledges that the two groups are conducting vicious violence, and previously in the article asserts that Hezbollah is “not a legitimate political party.”
Which is all well and good. So what does he mean when he says Hamas and Hezbollah, specifically, have legitimate claims? They both consider themselves at war with the West, they both want to destroy Israel, and they both want to impose a puritanical version of Islam over their people. Clearly, any grievances they might have – which to the amoral and relativist would seem “legitimate” – should be overlooked and ignored, no?
This is more than a gaffe. It occurred during an interview with a respected journalist. It is in print.
What are the implications of this statement? Is Sen. Obama implying he opposes Hezbollah and Hamas merely due to their actions and not their beliefs? Is he solely against20what these Jihadist groups do, and not what they represent? That’s like hating the gas chambers but excusing the fascism; opposing the gulags but delving into the nuances about the “legitimacy” of Stalinism.
The Third Reich complained about a raw deal at Versailles and a lack of Lebensraum, or “living space,” for the white race. The Bolsheviks harped about the excesses of the bourgeoisie. None of these “claims,” legitimate or not, were even considered by Western statesmen serious about the continuity of the Western way of life – and rightly so. Hamas and Hezbollah could stop the neck-slicing and car bombing tomorrow, and they would still be theocratic and neo-fascistic movements attempting to usurp their citizenry and democratic principalities in Palestine and Lebanon.
In fact, that is the route most Jihadist groups go: they use insurrection and terrorism to achieve governmental power and the apparatus of the state, then they morph into dictatorial regimes which no longer need to rely primarily on asymmetrical violence to brutalize their population and threaten their neighbors.
It is a disgrace that Sen. Obama has not had the chance to clarify himself, and an even further disgrace that nobody has held his feet to the fire on this issue (amongst others). Hezbollah and Hamas have combined to kill hundreds of Americans. Before 9/11, Hezbollah was the one terrorist group which had killed the most Americans throughout the world.
To put this statement by Sen. Obama into further context, consider this: Hamas and Hezbollah are both direct proxies of Iran. The same Iran which is blowing up Americans and Iraqis in Iraq.
The same Iran which Sen. Obama once promised to negotiate with without diplomatic preconditions.
The same Iran which Sen. Obama apparently believes does not, or would not, work with Sunni Jihadists (Iran being a Shi’ite country).
On top of all this, last year Sen. Obama voted against labeling Iran’s elite paramilitary unit, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, a “terrorist organization.” Sen. Obama did not want to des ignate the Revolutionary Guards – who created Hezbollah, and directly train and arm Hezbollah and Hamas to this day – a terrorist group.
The Revolutionary Guards, along with their surrogates, have been involved in some of the most egregious and destructive terrorist activities all across the world since 1979. And since 2003, they’ve killed U.S. forces in Iraq.
Again, Sen. Obama voted against calling them “terrorists” – and just several weeks ago, said Hezbollah and Hamas had “legitimate claims.”
More vetting of Sen. Obama’s views about the Middle East needs to happen before we have another foreign policy debate, let alone hold an election.
More context, still: Hamas actually endorsed Sen. Obama, to which Obama replied:
It’s conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, “This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he’s not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush.”
That’s a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they’re not confused about my unyielding support for Israel’s security.
While Hamas might not be confused about Sen. Obama’s views, I am. The press is supposed to be the watchdog for the American people. It took more than a year after the rantings of Rev. Wright were reported for the pastor’s hateful sermons to break the news nationally. It took prompting from Sean Hannity for George Stephanopoulos to finally question Sen. Obama about his connections to former domestic terrorist William Ayers.
This article might be from a few months ago, but this quote is too important to overlook. In not addressing this issue, Sen. Obama ends up concealing something which might be very unpleasant if further explored. Considering the context of this statement – his pro-Hamas advisor, the endorsement by Hamas, his refusal to label the Revolutionary Guards terrorists, etc. – the American public simply must know what Sen. Obama meant when he told David Brooks that Hezbollah and Hamas, mortal terrorist adversaries and theocratic extremists, had “legitimate claims.”
Before I walk into that voting booth, I need to know that. Period. Someone in the media, or in the McCain campaign, or at his rallies, needs to ask him what he means. And they need to ask him now.
Exclusive: Sen. Obama Says Hamas and Hezbollah Have ‘Legitimate Claims’
Nicholas Guariglia
Sen. Obama’s former top foreign affairs advisor, Robert Malley, recently had to resign his role in the Obama campaign due to holding meetings with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Mr. Malley’s favorable views of Hamas have been widely known for years. Malley had written extensively, sometimes co-writing articles with the late Yasser Arafat’s advisor Hussein Agha, blaming Israel, not Arafat, for the failure of the Camp David talks.
Had Malley’s views on (and meetings with) Hamas not been unveiled, who knows where Mr. Malley would have ended up in a potential Obama administration? Perhaps he would have been the Secretary of State. This is a sad and frightening possibility, or probability, because Sen. Obama is the least-vetted man in U.S. political history.
Nobody likes “gotcha!” politics. Both Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama have made serious gaffes during the course of this election, which began earlier and has lasted longer than any other election in American history. Both men are being recorded and watched at all times, and they’re human. Missteps and goof-ups are to be expected. Just ask Joe Biden.
But this issue is different. In a New York Times article, written by David Brooks on May 16th of this year, Sen. Obama made a very revealing admission that has gone overlooked by the mainstream press. The article, entitled “Obama Admires Bush,” focused on Sen. Obama’s views regarding the Middle East. The “Bush” in question was George H.W. Bush, the senior, and throughout the interview Obama displays his affection for old-school James Baker/Brent Scowcroft foreign polic y realism.
About midway through the interview, however, the man who wants to be President of the United States gave a whopper of a quote. In Brooks’ words:
The U.S. needs a foreign policy that “looks at the root causes of problems and dangers.” Obama compared Hezbollah to Hamas. Both need to be compelled to understand that “they’re going down a blind alley with violence that weakens their legitimate claims” (emphasis mine).
Why has no one to date has asked the would-be Commander-in-Chief what he means by “legitimate claims”? Certainly there is a large distinction to be made between Palestinian and Lebanese innocents vs. the terrible Hamas and Hezbollah organizations. The former have aspirations which, if addressed, would help the United States geopolitically. But the latter? To suggest these terrorist groups have legitimate claims? Something does not sit right, there.
To be fair, Mr. Obama acknowledges that the two groups are conducting vicious violence, and previously in the article asserts that Hezbollah is “not a legitimate political party.”
Which is all well and good. So what does he mean when he says Hamas and Hezbollah, specifically, have legitimate claims? They both consider themselves at war with the West, they both want to destroy Israel, and they both want to impose a puritanical version of Islam over their people. Clearly, any grievances they might have – which to the amoral and relativist would seem “legitimate” – should be overlooked and ignored, no?
This is more than a gaffe. It occurred during an interview with a respected journalist. It is in print.
What are the implications of this statement? Is Sen. Obama implying he opposes Hezbollah and Hamas merely due to their actions and not their beliefs? Is he solely against20what these Jihadist groups do, and not what they represent? That’s like hating the gas chambers but excusing the fascism; opposing the gulags but delving into the nuances about the “legitimacy” of Stalinism.
The Third Reich complained about a raw deal at Versailles and a lack of Lebensraum, or “living space,” for the white race. The Bolsheviks harped about the excesses of the bourgeoisie. None of these “claims,” legitimate or not, were even considered by Western statesmen serious about the continuity of the Western way of life – and rightly so. Hamas and Hezbollah could stop the neck-slicing and car bombing tomorrow, and they would still be theocratic and neo-fascistic movements attempting to usurp their citizenry and democratic principalities in Palestine and Lebanon.
In fact, that is the route most Jihadist groups go: they use insurrection and terrorism to achieve governmental power and the apparatus of the state, then they morph into dictatorial regimes which no longer need to rely primarily on asymmetrical violence to brutalize their population and threaten their neighbors.
It is a disgrace that Sen. Obama has not had the chance to clarify himself, and an even further disgrace that nobody has held his feet to the fire on this issue (amongst others). Hezbollah and Hamas have combined to kill hundreds of Americans. Before 9/11, Hezbollah was the one terrorist group which had killed the most Americans throughout the world.
To put this statement by Sen. Obama into further context, consider this: Hamas and Hezbollah are both direct proxies of Iran. The same Iran which is blowing up Americans and Iraqis in Iraq.
The same Iran which Sen. Obama once promised to negotiate with without diplomatic preconditions.
The same Iran which Sen. Obama apparently believes does not, or would not, work with Sunni Jihadists (Iran being a Shi’ite country).
On top of all this, last year Sen. Obama voted against labeling Iran’s elite paramilitary unit, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, a “terrorist organization.” Sen. Obama did not want to des ignate the Revolutionary Guards – who created Hezbollah, and directly train and arm Hezbollah and Hamas to this day – a terrorist group.
The Revolutionary Guards, along with their surrogates, have been involved in some of the most egregious and destructive terrorist activities all across the world since 1979. And since 2003, they’ve killed U.S. forces in Iraq.
Again, Sen. Obama voted against calling them “terrorists” – and just several weeks ago, said Hezbollah and Hamas had “legitimate claims.”
More vetting of Sen. Obama’s views about the Middle East needs to happen before we have another foreign policy debate, let alone hold an election.
More context, still: Hamas actually endorsed Sen. Obama, to which Obama replied:
It’s conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, “This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he’s not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush.”
That’s a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they’re not confused about my unyielding support for Israel’s security.
While Hamas might not be confused about Sen. Obama’s views, I am. The press is supposed to be the watchdog for the American people. It took more than a year after the rantings of Rev. Wright were reported for the pastor’s hateful sermons to break the news nationally. It took prompting from Sean Hannity for George Stephanopoulos to finally question Sen. Obama about his connections to former domestic terrorist William Ayers.
This article might be from a few months ago, but this quote is too important to overlook. In not addressing this issue, Sen. Obama ends up concealing something which might be very unpleasant if further explored. Considering the context of this statement – his pro-Hamas advisor, the endorsement by Hamas, his refusal to label the Revolutionary Guards terrorists, etc. – the American public simply must know what Sen. Obama meant when he told David Brooks that Hezbollah and Hamas, mortal terrorist adversaries and theocratic extremists, had “legitimate claims.”
Before I walk into that voting booth, I need to know that. Period. Someone in the media, or in the McCain campaign, or at his rallies, needs to ask him what he means. And they need to ask him now.
Whose Behind 200 Million in Unidentified Contributions to Obama?
Secret, Foreign Money Floods Into Obama Campaign
Monday, September 29, 2008 9:23 PM
By: Kenneth R. Timmerman
http://www.newsmax.com/timmerman/Obama_fundraising_illegal/2008/09/29/135718.html
More than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign won't disclose.
And questions have arisen about millions more in foreign donations the Obama campaign has received that apparently have not been vetted as legitimate.
Obama has raised nearly twice that of John McCain's campaign, according to new campaign finance report.
But because of Obama's high expenses during the hotly contested Democratic primary season and an early decision to forgo public campaign money and the spending limits it imposes, all that cash has not translated into a financial advantage -- at least, not yet.
The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee began September with $95 million in cash, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
The McCain camp and the Republican National Committee had $94 million, because of an influx of $84 million in public money.
But Obama easily could outpace McCain by $50 million to $100 million or more in new donations before Election Day, thanks to a legion of small contributors whose names and addresses have been kept secret.
Unlike the McCain campaign, which has made its complete donor database available online, the Obama campaign has not identified donors for nearly half the amount he has raised, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).
Federal law does not require the campaigns to identify donors who give less than $200 during the election cycle. However, it does require that campaigns calculate running totals for each donor and report them once they go beyond the $200 mark.
Surprisingly, the great majority of Obama donors never break the $200 threshold.
"Contributions that come under $200 aggregated per person are not listed," said Bob Biersack, a spokesman for the FEC. "They don't appear anywhere, so there's no way of knowing who they are."
The FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign has identified a staggering $222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only $39.6 million of that amount comes from donors the Obama campaign has identified.
It is the largest pool of unidentified money that has ever flooded into the U.S. election system, before or after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms of 2002.
Biersack would not comment on whether the FEC was investigating the huge amount of cash that has come into Obama's coffers with no public reporting.
But Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for CRP, a campaign-finance watchdog group, dismissed the scale of the unreported money.
"We feel comfortable that it isn't the $20 donations that are corrupting a campaign," he told Newsmax.
But those small donations have added up to more than $200 million, all of it from unknown and unreported donors.
Ritsch acknowledges that there is skepticism about all the unreported money, especially in the Obama campaign coffers.
"We and seven other watchdog groups asked both campaigns for more information on small donors," he said. "The Obama campaign never responded," whereas the McCain campaign "makes all its donor information, including the small donors, available online."
The rise of the Internet as a campaign funding tool raises new questions about the adequacy of FEC requirements on disclosure. In pre-Internet fundraising, almost all political donations, even small ones, were made by bank check, leaving a paper trail and limiting the amount of fraud.
But credit cards used to make donations on the Internet have allowed for far more abuse.
"While FEC practice is to do a post-election review of all presidential campaigns, given their sluggish metabolism, results can take three or four years," said Ken Boehm, the chairman of the conservative National Legal and Policy Center.
Already, the FEC has noted unusual patterns in Obama campaign donations among donors who have been disclosed because they have gone beyond the $200 minimum.
(To continue reading this article and the information on foreign donations, click here )
________________________________
Monday, September 29, 2008 9:23 PM
By: Kenneth R. Timmerman
http://www.newsmax.com/timmerman/Obama_fundraising_illegal/2008/09/29/135718.html
More than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign won't disclose.
And questions have arisen about millions more in foreign donations the Obama campaign has received that apparently have not been vetted as legitimate.
Obama has raised nearly twice that of John McCain's campaign, according to new campaign finance report.
But because of Obama's high expenses during the hotly contested Democratic primary season and an early decision to forgo public campaign money and the spending limits it imposes, all that cash has not translated into a financial advantage -- at least, not yet.
The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee began September with $95 million in cash, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
The McCain camp and the Republican National Committee had $94 million, because of an influx of $84 million in public money.
But Obama easily could outpace McCain by $50 million to $100 million or more in new donations before Election Day, thanks to a legion of small contributors whose names and addresses have been kept secret.
Unlike the McCain campaign, which has made its complete donor database available online, the Obama campaign has not identified donors for nearly half the amount he has raised, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).
Federal law does not require the campaigns to identify donors who give less than $200 during the election cycle. However, it does require that campaigns calculate running totals for each donor and report them once they go beyond the $200 mark.
Surprisingly, the great majority of Obama donors never break the $200 threshold.
"Contributions that come under $200 aggregated per person are not listed," said Bob Biersack, a spokesman for the FEC. "They don't appear anywhere, so there's no way of knowing who they are."
The FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign has identified a staggering $222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only $39.6 million of that amount comes from donors the Obama campaign has identified.
It is the largest pool of unidentified money that has ever flooded into the U.S. election system, before or after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms of 2002.
Biersack would not comment on whether the FEC was investigating the huge amount of cash that has come into Obama's coffers with no public reporting.
But Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for CRP, a campaign-finance watchdog group, dismissed the scale of the unreported money.
"We feel comfortable that it isn't the $20 donations that are corrupting a campaign," he told Newsmax.
But those small donations have added up to more than $200 million, all of it from unknown and unreported donors.
Ritsch acknowledges that there is skepticism about all the unreported money, especially in the Obama campaign coffers.
"We and seven other watchdog groups asked both campaigns for more information on small donors," he said. "The Obama campaign never responded," whereas the McCain campaign "makes all its donor information, including the small donors, available online."
The rise of the Internet as a campaign funding tool raises new questions about the adequacy of FEC requirements on disclosure. In pre-Internet fundraising, almost all political donations, even small ones, were made by bank check, leaving a paper trail and limiting the amount of fraud.
But credit cards used to make donations on the Internet have allowed for far more abuse.
"While FEC practice is to do a post-election review of all presidential campaigns, given their sluggish metabolism, results can take three or four years," said Ken Boehm, the chairman of the conservative National Legal and Policy Center.
Already, the FEC has noted unusual patterns in Obama campaign donations among donors who have been disclosed because they have gone beyond the $200 minimum.
(To continue reading this article and the information on foreign donations, click here
________________________________
Saturday, September 27, 2008
My Readers Respond: Pro and Con
Obama and Palin: A Match Made(Almost) Made in Heaven
By
Leslie Sacks
Barack Obama is perfectly suited in the running for president. He has the ability to both energize and grow the grassroots base, to motivate voters with his superb eloquence and confidence. As a result, he has broken for all time the racial glass ceiling on viable presidential candidates, an accomplishment for which America should be grateful. He will, based on many current polls, quite likely succeed in his quest for the presidency.
On the other hand, Obama, according to a good portion of the country, is not yet experienced enough, and does not yet have the depth of judgment, to be president. Either way, perhaps the best argument for a McCain presidency is the (consummately American) end of divided government. Given the Democrats' control of both houses of Congress, a Republican president will provide a semblance of proportional representation and help ensure the checks and balances that are so central to our vigorous democracy.
Interestingly, Sarah Palin--the focus of much of Obama's current defensive attention--is an unusual case for America's feminists. Ms. Palin has singlehandedly, in a matter of weeks, made the feminist movement largely defunct. Before then, much of the feminist movement was rooted in the left-wing: pro-abortion and anti-Republican, often animated by an anti-male, anti-religious fervor.
Palin is the opposite: simple, patriotic, both gun-toting and feminine (horrors!). She is from a small town, an outdoorswoman, with a union-card holding husband. She is committed to religion, family values and independence. She is certainly not the Dolce Gabbana-pants wearing, urbane intellectual from Greenwich Village or San Francisco, steeped in all-is-relative Harvard political correctness.
And yet, she has captured the media's imagination and broken the (other) glass ceiling more effectively than any other woman to date. She has done so from primitive Alaska, small town Wasilla, with a family of five, happily married with conservative values - in short, she is an anathema to traditional feminists. That is why they hate and despise her. She stands for everything they are not and yet she has achieved everything they could not. And they will never forgive her for making them irrelevant, passé, an odd historical footnote.
Women have arrived - they are equal, they can and may indeed be Vice-President, lipstick and all. And who knows, maybe one day (God willing!) even president.
Sincerely,
Mr. Leslie J. Sacks
Los Angeles, California 90049
Leslie@LeslieSacks.com
LESLIE'S BLOG: http://LeslieSacks.Blogspot.com
======================================================================
Israelis have a right to criticize and comment concerning the American political scene. Surely, I have heard enough
Americans commenting over the years about Israel in both a good and a bad context to allow me to ask the question, "Why not the other way?"
Today's American Jewish liberal cares no more for the Israelis than did the Jews, sunning
themselves on Miami Beach, give a hoot for the passengers on the SS St. Louis. The
average liberal American Jew still worships Roosevelt; yet, has no concept of this president's contempt
for the Jewish people and how complacent he was in allowing the Holocaust to reach its
ultimate conclusion.
Most Jewish Americans--certainly the ones one the left--do not have a concept of history and have not learned a thing from what
little they have heard in passing. Sure, there are exceptions and some extraordinary ones at that--for example, National
Review's Yonah Goldberg; but as a people, we are living a scenario taken right out of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy. In it there is a creature that is so dumb, if it doesn't see you, it thinks that you do not see it!
In my opinion, the American Evangelicals--regardless of their motives--have shown much more interest and serious concern
over the future of the Jewish State than the average Jewish American. And the interesting thing is that this has been
the case with them since the founding of the American Restoration Movement in the early part of the Nineteenth-Century.
Israel to the average liberal Jewish American is a nice place to visit for a whirlwind 10 day tour sponsored by B'nai Brith. It's nice to come
back to the USA and to say to your bridge club that you picked oranges on some kibbutz; or to say that you went on a special
"fact finding tour" with members from your super liberal Reform Synagogue.
Israel is a special source of Jewish pride and the American Jewish Left does not deserve to share in the benefits of this feeling. They are thieves.
Michael Hyman
San Diego, California
=================================================================
Yes, Naomi, this is the attitude of American Jews who "care about Israel", yet cannot differentiate between sending postcards and sending a son, husband, father, brother, friend off to fight yet another war OR being targets for another Jew hating maniac.
Fortunately for me, most of my relatives understand this. But we are mostly first generation Americans. I avoid situations where discussions about "abortions and lives" might occur, because my blood boils.
New York is full of Liberal Jews who have not observed or understood that most things have changed during their lifetimes. Even my late father who was a "verbrente Labor Zionist" understood the reality of the USSR and abandonned the idealism of his youth. I of course lived in Israel. My attitudes have surely been shaped by all the years I spent there. You have no idea how deeply embedded liberal politics and cultural relativism are in Jews here.
Yesterday, I went to the anti Ahmadinejad rally. It saddened me to notice that most of the crowd was orthodox, with very few secular NY Jews. I am not orthodox, but I think that the modern orthodox community is the only thing that stands between Jews and our demise both in the Golah and in Israel.
Not very pleasant thoughts erev Rosh Hashana. Still best wishes to you and your family for peace and health.
Sylvia Navon, NYC
==============================================================================
Dear Naomi:
I am not Jewish but I read with concern all your articles. I have a different perspective. I do not look at the "crisis" in the middle east as a purely "Jewish" calamity. This is something I think that you have being trying to make everyone, Jew and non-Jew alike realize.
I forward all your articles to my friends. Their response has been the same as mine. An outcry to our government representatives. Although we live in Canada, and the American Elections would not seem to concern us, we are in fact concerned, as should all of North America, and anyone who declares themselves allies of the U.S.A, or anyone who values freedom. Freedom of rights, freedom to live.
You are doing a wonderful job. There should be more people like you who are willing to suffer the barbs and criticism of their world and people, in order to bring to light the atrocities occuring on a daily basis in both Israel and the Middle East and the significance it has to the whole world.
Never let anyone forget the "Holocaust". Relate every action taken by the Muslim countries against Israel and the Jews to it. Remind them of how they vowed "Never again"! Point out the significance of the number of Jews now living in Israel (6 million) to number exterminated by Hitler.
Keep up the good work. I will keep forwarding your articles to everyone that I know, as they forward them to everyone that they know. From such small sparks great conflagrations can occur.
Sincerely,
Angella O'Hanlon
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Naomi,
You have my permission to write my response to the lady who objected to your politics.
I am a son of a German born Jew, who narrowly escaped Europe's inferno, and emigrated to the United States in 1940.Most of the Zinner family, relatives I would never know were murdered in concentration camps during the inferno that the free world allowed the Nazis to perpetrate.
My father was so grateful to America that, the moment the US entered the war, he enlisted.
When my Mother, who was expecting her first child asked him, "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?YOU ARE AN IMMIGRANT WHO ONLY JUST ARRIVED.YOU DO NOT HAVE TO GO.", he replied, WHAT WILL I SAY TO MY CHILDREN WHEN THEY ASK ME WHAT DID I DO WHEN MILLIONS OF OUR PEOPLE WERE BEING MURDERED BY THE GERMANS?
My father was inducted, trained as an officer to interrogate German prisoners, shipped overseas and fought his way across Europe over 4 long years. He was highly decorated with a bronze star medallion for bravery in action. After the war he was offered military commissions that attested to his leadership and talents as an officer. He refused and quietly returned to his family and civilian life in America.
Please ask this lady to explain what she plans to say to her children when they ask what she did when Iran announced to the world, as Hitler did before him, that he would destroy the State of Israel and every Jew within it.
Thank you for sounding the bell. It is 1938 and America is sleeping.
Respectfully,
Bob Zinner.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hmmm. Don't know why you sent this, as the comment from the "American" doesn't say much...
Like you, I would never vote for a "a pro-Islamic, soft on terror, ultra peace-now liberal to head the free world." Barack Obama is none of those things. I think you must be reading only anti-Obama false propaganda. I am excited to vote for Obama, and believe he'll be a good president (how did you feel about Bill Clinton? Most of us American Jews liked and voted for him, too.)
McCain, unfortunately, frequently lies and misleads, despite billing his campaign as the "straight talk" express. For example, McCain has repeated over and over that Obama supported "comprehensive sex education for kindergarteners." Well, yeah... the curriculum teaches them to not go with strangers, and other things to try to protect them from being molested by sexual predators... exactly what I do teach my own kindergartener. Yes, you can call that "sex education," but McCain intentionally misleads people into thinking Obama supported teaching them about sexual intercourse, or condoms... completely a lie! If Obama is so scary, you'd think the McCain campaign would find true things to scare us with, instead of having to resort to grossly misleading accusations.
Obama, on the other hand, does not lie about McCain.
I hope you will read Obama's two books, or his website, to get a better picture. I'm sure the sig. majority of American Jews will vote for him, as we have always voted Democratic by at least 60%, usually more, and it's not because we are ignorant! We vote in ways we consider consistent with Jewish values, and in our own best interests, including the safety of Israel.
-Rabbi Janice Garfunkel
Springfield, OH
PS - I do enjoy getting your emails.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Naomi,
I have great respect for you as an author and have enjoyed being enlightened by many of your emails but you have been a citizen of Israel for many years and really don’t know the politics of the US. I am a liberal Jewish democrat who attends every rally, including yesterday’s, against the UN, against Jew bashing, in support of Israel and on and on. I am beginning to resent much of what you have to say about who I should vote for if I love Israel. My love for Israel can be questioned by no one. However, I believe strongly in woman’s choice, the right of women to work and be paid like men, the preservation of animals so that the endangered species don’t die off (wolves for example). I am not crazy about Obama but there is no way I can vote for another 4 years of the Bush agenda and that is what McCain represents. You seem to base much of your characterizations of Obama on blog myths. No one who is elected president of the US is going to abandon support of Israel. If you think the Bush government has been good for Israel and for the US you are really mistaken. He sent Condoleezza to Israel to work on divisions between Jews and Palestians including the division of Jerusalem. He has sent our economy into the gutter and that affects Israel and the world. McCain will be more of the same. Plus he is an older man (I myself am 71) who has not got a good health history and the thought of Sarah Palin heading the government of my country sends chills up and down my spine. She is ignorant of the world around her. Any speech she makes is written very carefully by the neo-cons and she is a quick study so she presents the words as if they were her own. They aren’t.
Please keep writing about Israel, you are one of the sources among many who keep me up to date. But at the same time, please don’t make generalizations about the US political scene. In one of your recent emails you said that there wouldn’t be any “liberal democrats” at the rally. I was there and I am one of those dreaded liberals.
Ethel Schwartz Bock
New York City
By
Leslie Sacks
Barack Obama is perfectly suited in the running for president. He has the ability to both energize and grow the grassroots base, to motivate voters with his superb eloquence and confidence. As a result, he has broken for all time the racial glass ceiling on viable presidential candidates, an accomplishment for which America should be grateful. He will, based on many current polls, quite likely succeed in his quest for the presidency.
On the other hand, Obama, according to a good portion of the country, is not yet experienced enough, and does not yet have the depth of judgment, to be president. Either way, perhaps the best argument for a McCain presidency is the (consummately American) end of divided government. Given the Democrats' control of both houses of Congress, a Republican president will provide a semblance of proportional representation and help ensure the checks and balances that are so central to our vigorous democracy.
Interestingly, Sarah Palin--the focus of much of Obama's current defensive attention--is an unusual case for America's feminists. Ms. Palin has singlehandedly, in a matter of weeks, made the feminist movement largely defunct. Before then, much of the feminist movement was rooted in the left-wing: pro-abortion and anti-Republican, often animated by an anti-male, anti-religious fervor.
Palin is the opposite: simple, patriotic, both gun-toting and feminine (horrors!). She is from a small town, an outdoorswoman, with a union-card holding husband. She is committed to religion, family values and independence. She is certainly not the Dolce Gabbana-pants wearing, urbane intellectual from Greenwich Village or San Francisco, steeped in all-is-relative Harvard political correctness.
And yet, she has captured the media's imagination and broken the (other) glass ceiling more effectively than any other woman to date. She has done so from primitive Alaska, small town Wasilla, with a family of five, happily married with conservative values - in short, she is an anathema to traditional feminists. That is why they hate and despise her. She stands for everything they are not and yet she has achieved everything they could not. And they will never forgive her for making them irrelevant, passé, an odd historical footnote.
Women have arrived - they are equal, they can and may indeed be Vice-President, lipstick and all. And who knows, maybe one day (God willing!) even president.
Sincerely,
Mr. Leslie J. Sacks
Los Angeles, California 90049
Leslie@LeslieSacks.com
LESLIE'S BLOG: http://LeslieSacks.Blogspot.com
======================================================================
Israelis have a right to criticize and comment concerning the American political scene. Surely, I have heard enough
Americans commenting over the years about Israel in both a good and a bad context to allow me to ask the question, "Why not the other way?"
Today's American Jewish liberal cares no more for the Israelis than did the Jews, sunning
themselves on Miami Beach, give a hoot for the passengers on the SS St. Louis. The
average liberal American Jew still worships Roosevelt; yet, has no concept of this president's contempt
for the Jewish people and how complacent he was in allowing the Holocaust to reach its
ultimate conclusion.
Most Jewish Americans--certainly the ones one the left--do not have a concept of history and have not learned a thing from what
little they have heard in passing. Sure, there are exceptions and some extraordinary ones at that--for example, National
Review's Yonah Goldberg; but as a people, we are living a scenario taken right out of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy. In it there is a creature that is so dumb, if it doesn't see you, it thinks that you do not see it!
In my opinion, the American Evangelicals--regardless of their motives--have shown much more interest and serious concern
over the future of the Jewish State than the average Jewish American. And the interesting thing is that this has been
the case with them since the founding of the American Restoration Movement in the early part of the Nineteenth-Century.
Israel to the average liberal Jewish American is a nice place to visit for a whirlwind 10 day tour sponsored by B'nai Brith. It's nice to come
back to the USA and to say to your bridge club that you picked oranges on some kibbutz; or to say that you went on a special
"fact finding tour" with members from your super liberal Reform Synagogue.
Israel is a special source of Jewish pride and the American Jewish Left does not deserve to share in the benefits of this feeling. They are thieves.
Michael Hyman
San Diego, California
=================================================================
Yes, Naomi, this is the attitude of American Jews who "care about Israel", yet cannot differentiate between sending postcards and sending a son, husband, father, brother, friend off to fight yet another war OR being targets for another Jew hating maniac.
Fortunately for me, most of my relatives understand this. But we are mostly first generation Americans. I avoid situations where discussions about "abortions and lives" might occur, because my blood boils.
New York is full of Liberal Jews who have not observed or understood that most things have changed during their lifetimes. Even my late father who was a "verbrente Labor Zionist" understood the reality of the USSR and abandonned the idealism of his youth. I of course lived in Israel. My attitudes have surely been shaped by all the years I spent there. You have no idea how deeply embedded liberal politics and cultural relativism are in Jews here.
Yesterday, I went to the anti Ahmadinejad rally. It saddened me to notice that most of the crowd was orthodox, with very few secular NY Jews. I am not orthodox, but I think that the modern orthodox community is the only thing that stands between Jews and our demise both in the Golah and in Israel.
Not very pleasant thoughts erev Rosh Hashana. Still best wishes to you and your family for peace and health.
Sylvia Navon, NYC
==============================================================================
Dear Naomi:
I am not Jewish but I read with concern all your articles. I have a different perspective. I do not look at the "crisis" in the middle east as a purely "Jewish" calamity. This is something I think that you have being trying to make everyone, Jew and non-Jew alike realize.
I forward all your articles to my friends. Their response has been the same as mine. An outcry to our government representatives. Although we live in Canada, and the American Elections would not seem to concern us, we are in fact concerned, as should all of North America, and anyone who declares themselves allies of the U.S.A, or anyone who values freedom. Freedom of rights, freedom to live.
You are doing a wonderful job. There should be more people like you who are willing to suffer the barbs and criticism of their world and people, in order to bring to light the atrocities occuring on a daily basis in both Israel and the Middle East and the significance it has to the whole world.
Never let anyone forget the "Holocaust". Relate every action taken by the Muslim countries against Israel and the Jews to it. Remind them of how they vowed "Never again"! Point out the significance of the number of Jews now living in Israel (6 million) to number exterminated by Hitler.
Keep up the good work. I will keep forwarding your articles to everyone that I know, as they forward them to everyone that they know. From such small sparks great conflagrations can occur.
Sincerely,
Angella O'Hanlon
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Naomi,
You have my permission to write my response to the lady who objected to your politics.
I am a son of a German born Jew, who narrowly escaped Europe's inferno, and emigrated to the United States in 1940.Most of the Zinner family, relatives I would never know were murdered in concentration camps during the inferno that the free world allowed the Nazis to perpetrate.
My father was so grateful to America that, the moment the US entered the war, he enlisted.
When my Mother, who was expecting her first child asked him, "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?YOU ARE AN IMMIGRANT WHO ONLY JUST ARRIVED.YOU DO NOT HAVE TO GO.", he replied, WHAT WILL I SAY TO MY CHILDREN WHEN THEY ASK ME WHAT DID I DO WHEN MILLIONS OF OUR PEOPLE WERE BEING MURDERED BY THE GERMANS?
My father was inducted, trained as an officer to interrogate German prisoners, shipped overseas and fought his way across Europe over 4 long years. He was highly decorated with a bronze star medallion for bravery in action. After the war he was offered military commissions that attested to his leadership and talents as an officer. He refused and quietly returned to his family and civilian life in America.
Please ask this lady to explain what she plans to say to her children when they ask what she did when Iran announced to the world, as Hitler did before him, that he would destroy the State of Israel and every Jew within it.
Thank you for sounding the bell. It is 1938 and America is sleeping.
Respectfully,
Bob Zinner.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hmmm. Don't know why you sent this, as the comment from the "American" doesn't say much...
Like you, I would never vote for a "a pro-Islamic, soft on terror, ultra peace-now liberal to head the free world." Barack Obama is none of those things. I think you must be reading only anti-Obama false propaganda. I am excited to vote for Obama, and believe he'll be a good president (how did you feel about Bill Clinton? Most of us American Jews liked and voted for him, too.)
McCain, unfortunately, frequently lies and misleads, despite billing his campaign as the "straight talk" express. For example, McCain has repeated over and over that Obama supported "comprehensive sex education for kindergarteners." Well, yeah... the curriculum teaches them to not go with strangers, and other things to try to protect them from being molested by sexual predators... exactly what I do teach my own kindergartener. Yes, you can call that "sex education," but McCain intentionally misleads people into thinking Obama supported teaching them about sexual intercourse, or condoms... completely a lie! If Obama is so scary, you'd think the McCain campaign would find true things to scare us with, instead of having to resort to grossly misleading accusations.
Obama, on the other hand, does not lie about McCain.
I hope you will read Obama's two books, or his website, to get a better picture. I'm sure the sig. majority of American Jews will vote for him, as we have always voted Democratic by at least 60%, usually more, and it's not because we are ignorant! We vote in ways we consider consistent with Jewish values, and in our own best interests, including the safety of Israel.
-Rabbi Janice Garfunkel
Springfield, OH
PS - I do enjoy getting your emails.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Naomi,
I have great respect for you as an author and have enjoyed being enlightened by many of your emails but you have been a citizen of Israel for many years and really don’t know the politics of the US. I am a liberal Jewish democrat who attends every rally, including yesterday’s, against the UN, against Jew bashing, in support of Israel and on and on. I am beginning to resent much of what you have to say about who I should vote for if I love Israel. My love for Israel can be questioned by no one. However, I believe strongly in woman’s choice, the right of women to work and be paid like men, the preservation of animals so that the endangered species don’t die off (wolves for example). I am not crazy about Obama but there is no way I can vote for another 4 years of the Bush agenda and that is what McCain represents. You seem to base much of your characterizations of Obama on blog myths. No one who is elected president of the US is going to abandon support of Israel. If you think the Bush government has been good for Israel and for the US you are really mistaken. He sent Condoleezza to Israel to work on divisions between Jews and Palestians including the division of Jerusalem. He has sent our economy into the gutter and that affects Israel and the world. McCain will be more of the same. Plus he is an older man (I myself am 71) who has not got a good health history and the thought of Sarah Palin heading the government of my country sends chills up and down my spine. She is ignorant of the world around her. Any speech she makes is written very carefully by the neo-cons and she is a quick study so she presents the words as if they were her own. They aren’t.
Please keep writing about Israel, you are one of the sources among many who keep me up to date. But at the same time, please don’t make generalizations about the US political scene. In one of your recent emails you said that there wouldn’t be any “liberal democrats” at the rally. I was there and I am one of those dreaded liberals.
Ethel Schwartz Bock
New York City
Thursday, September 25, 2008
The Secret to His Success
The Secret to His Success
Naomi Ragen
I got a ton of responses to my short e-mail “exchange with a reader.” Since then, I have been pondering long and hard what the reason could be for the enthusiastic, nay, evangelistic Jewish cheerleaders for Barack Hussein Obama, despite the many, many red flags that have gone up ever since he decided to run for President of the United States of America. One e-mail, in particular, opened my eyes to what could be the underlying reason. He wrote:
“You may think you are right but if McCain and Palin get elected, the U.S. will continue to go down hill, and if this country gets in worse shape financially this country will eventually blame the Jews …..”
Hmm. I never considered that. Could it be that the Jews of America are really not as comfortable there as they pretend to be? Could it be that the Reverend Wright, that home-grown anti-Semite who went to Libya to meet terrorist Qaddafi, and who gave an award to Louis Farrakhan for “leadership, ” being a heartbeat away from the Democratic nominee for President has scared the Jews of America out of their wits?
Could it be that these Jews are so incredibly grateful to Barack Obama for disassociating himself after 20 years with this anti-Semitic message and so terrified of losing his support, pushing him and his golden oratory back into the arms of people like Wright, that they are hell-bent on currying his favor and showing they are “good Jews?” (Caveat: it Obama’s throwing Wright under the bus is clearly a blatant attempt to improve his chances at gaining the Jewish vote --Farrakhan himself said on Nightline that he “admired“ Obama and understood if he needed to disassociate himself temporarily in order to win the Presidency).
Are Jews now beginning to feel the solid ground of the American haven that has sheltered them shaking beneath their feet? Is that the reason that they have listened to the golden-voiced Obama, who is really nothing more than an evangelical preacher, saying: “ Who are you going to believe, your eyes or me?” and dismissed their own vision? Are they truly so enraptured that they are willing to place all their hopes in this unknown with a very hazy past, to protect them from the Ahmadinejads, to “negotiate” for them their way out of the hellhole being dug out for them by the Muslims, and the European Union, and the U.N. and homegrown Black Antisemitism, and anti-Zionist Peace-Nowers-J-Streeters- let’s-blame-Israel-for-daring-to-existers, the Israel- should- give- up -and -give in-ers? Can it be that some American Jews are ashamed to be Israel supporters, and feel they will be safer if they side against their own people and by supporting a clearly, blatantly anti-Israel candidate they are fulfilling that need? Or is it that Obama is not so much a mesmerizing speaker, as he is a person with a message that is music to Jewish American ears; the foolish idea that they don’t have to take sides in this election. That they can be pro-Israel and elect a candidate that says his is also pro-Israel, despite so much evidence to the contrary, including a belief in “diplomacy” i.e. pushing Israel into suicidal concessions to placate enemies like Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah, and Hamas? He represents a way out of ancient Jew-hatred, a way thousands of generations of Jews hadn’t thought of? Is that the secret to his success among Jews in America?
Who are you going to believe? Your eyes, or Barack Hussein Obama?
Naomi Ragen
I got a ton of responses to my short e-mail “exchange with a reader.” Since then, I have been pondering long and hard what the reason could be for the enthusiastic, nay, evangelistic Jewish cheerleaders for Barack Hussein Obama, despite the many, many red flags that have gone up ever since he decided to run for President of the United States of America. One e-mail, in particular, opened my eyes to what could be the underlying reason. He wrote:
“You may think you are right but if McCain and Palin get elected, the U.S. will continue to go down hill, and if this country gets in worse shape financially this country will eventually blame the Jews …..”
Hmm. I never considered that. Could it be that the Jews of America are really not as comfortable there as they pretend to be? Could it be that the Reverend Wright, that home-grown anti-Semite who went to Libya to meet terrorist Qaddafi, and who gave an award to Louis Farrakhan for “leadership, ” being a heartbeat away from the Democratic nominee for President has scared the Jews of America out of their wits?
Could it be that these Jews are so incredibly grateful to Barack Obama for disassociating himself after 20 years with this anti-Semitic message and so terrified of losing his support, pushing him and his golden oratory back into the arms of people like Wright, that they are hell-bent on currying his favor and showing they are “good Jews?” (Caveat: it Obama’s throwing Wright under the bus is clearly a blatant attempt to improve his chances at gaining the Jewish vote --Farrakhan himself said on Nightline that he “admired“ Obama and understood if he needed to disassociate himself temporarily in order to win the Presidency).
Are Jews now beginning to feel the solid ground of the American haven that has sheltered them shaking beneath their feet? Is that the reason that they have listened to the golden-voiced Obama, who is really nothing more than an evangelical preacher, saying: “ Who are you going to believe, your eyes or me?” and dismissed their own vision? Are they truly so enraptured that they are willing to place all their hopes in this unknown with a very hazy past, to protect them from the Ahmadinejads, to “negotiate” for them their way out of the hellhole being dug out for them by the Muslims, and the European Union, and the U.N. and homegrown Black Antisemitism, and anti-Zionist Peace-Nowers-J-Streeters- let’s-blame-Israel-for-daring-to-existers, the Israel- should- give- up -and -give in-ers? Can it be that some American Jews are ashamed to be Israel supporters, and feel they will be safer if they side against their own people and by supporting a clearly, blatantly anti-Israel candidate they are fulfilling that need? Or is it that Obama is not so much a mesmerizing speaker, as he is a person with a message that is music to Jewish American ears; the foolish idea that they don’t have to take sides in this election. That they can be pro-Israel and elect a candidate that says his is also pro-Israel, despite so much evidence to the contrary, including a belief in “diplomacy” i.e. pushing Israel into suicidal concessions to placate enemies like Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah, and Hamas? He represents a way out of ancient Jew-hatred, a way thousands of generations of Jews hadn’t thought of? Is that the secret to his success among Jews in America?
Who are you going to believe? Your eyes, or Barack Hussein Obama?
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Millions for Radicalizing Kids: The Real Obama
From the Wall Street Journal.opinion
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122212856075765367.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
* SEPTEMBER 23, 2008
Obama and Ayers
Pushed Radicalism
On Schools
By STANLEY KURTZ
Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.
[Obama and Ayers] AP
Bill Ayers.
The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.
The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.
The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.
In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).
Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.
CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections.
The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.
The Obama campaign notes that Mr. Ayers attended only six board meetings, and stresses that the Collaborative lost its "operational role" at CAC after the first year. Yet the Collaborative was demoted to a strictly advisory role largely because of ethical concerns, since the projects of Collaborative members were receiving grants. CAC's own evaluators noted that project accountability was hampered by the board's reluctance to break away from grant decisions made in 1995. So even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered to the grant program he had put in place.
Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.
Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.
Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122212856075765367.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
* SEPTEMBER 23, 2008
Obama and Ayers
Pushed Radicalism
On Schools
By STANLEY KURTZ
Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.
[Obama and Ayers] AP
Bill Ayers.
The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.
The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.
The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.
In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).
Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.
CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections.
The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.
The Obama campaign notes that Mr. Ayers attended only six board meetings, and stresses that the Collaborative lost its "operational role" at CAC after the first year. Yet the Collaborative was demoted to a strictly advisory role largely because of ethical concerns, since the projects of Collaborative members were receiving grants. CAC's own evaluators noted that project accountability was hampered by the board's reluctance to break away from grant decisions made in 1995. So even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered to the grant program he had put in place.
Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.
Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.
Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Your Abortion or Your Life
Friends,
Just a word of reason: I also don't want the U.S. to go back to the bad old days of backroom abortions. But even if Roe vs. Wade could be overturned by the Supreme Court, that would not stop individual states from allowing abortions. There is no way a woman won't be able to get an abortion in New York or California. So I don't think this is a real campaign issue, or fear. Nuclear Iran is. Please keep things in perspective, as Caroline Glick points out in her well-written article which follows.
The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition
Our World: Your abortions or your lives!
Sep. 22, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST
American Jews have good reason to be ashamed and angry today. As Iran moves into the final stages of its nuclear weapons development program - nuclear weapons which it will use to destroy the State of Israel, endanger Jews around the world and cow the United States of America - Democratic American Jewish leaders decided that putting Sen. Barack Obama in the White House is more important than protecting the lives of the Jewish people in Israel and around the world.
On Monday, the New York Sun published the speech that Republican vice presidential nominee and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would have delivered at that day's rally outside UN headquarters in New York against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and against Iran's plan to destroy Israel. She would have delivered it, if she hadn't been disinvited.
The rally was co-sponsored by the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the National Coalition to Stop Iran Now, The Israel Project, United Jewish Communities, the UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Its purpose was to present a united American Jewish front against Iran's genocidal leader and against its genocidal regime which is developing nuclear weapons with the stated intention of committing the second Holocaust in 80 years.
Palin's speech is an extraordinary document. In its opening paragraph she made clear that Iran presents a danger not just to Israel, but to the US.
And not just to some Americans, but to all Americans. Her speech was a warning to Iran - and anyone else who was listening - that Americans are not indifferent to its behavior, its genocidal ideology and the barbarity of its regime. Rather, they are outraged.
After that opening, Palin's speech set out clearly how Iran is advancing its nuclear project, why it must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons and why and how the regime itself must be opposed by all right thinking people - not just Israelis and Americans - but by all people who value human freedom.
PALIN'S SPEECH was a message of national - rather than simply Republican - resolve against Iran's nuclear weapons program and its active involvement in global and regional terrorism. She made this point by quoting statements that Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton has made against the Iranian regime.
The speech detailed Iran's past and current attacks against the US, beginning with its bombing of US servicemen in Lebanon in 1983 and continuing with Iran's proxy war against US forces in Iraq and against Iraqis who oppose its intention of taking control of their country.
By discussing Iran's role in Iraq she not only made a convincing case for why an American victory there is essential for defeating Iran. She also made clear that Iran is actively making war against the US, not just Israel.
From Iran's war against Israel, the US, and freedom loving peoples worldwide, Palin's speech turned to the regime's war against its own people.
She attacked the regime for its systematic repression of Iranian women. She applauded the extraordinary bravery of women like Delaram Ali who risked their lives and their families to demand basic rights for Iranian women.
Ali, she noted, was sentenced to 10 lashes and three years in prison for having the courage to speak out. An international outcry has temporarily suspended her sentence.
Then Palin returned to Iran's nuclear weapons program and its support for terrorist groups pledged to Israel's destruction and to the destruction of the US. She returned to Ahmadinejad's calls for Israel's annihilation. She reiterated Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's solemn promise to work with Israel to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and she joined her name to his promise to stand side by side with Israel to prevent another Holocaust.
IF PALIN had been allowed to deliver this speech at Monday's rally, she would done just what the organizers of the rally, and what the Jewish people in Israel, America and worldwide need to have done. She would have elevated the imperative of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and the implicit moral and strategic imperative of overthrowing the regime in Teheran to the top of America's national security agenda. Given the massive media attention she garners at all of her public appearances, Palin's participation in the rally would have done more to steel Americans - across the political spectrum - to the cause of opposing Iran than 10 UN Security Council sanctions resolutions could do.
It was a remarkable speech, prepared by a remarkable woman. But it was not heard. It was not heard because the Democratic Party and Jewish Democrats believe that their partisan interest in demonizing Palin and making Americans generally and American Jews in particular hate and fear her to secure their votes for Obama and his running-mate Sen. Joseph Biden in the November election is more important than allowing Palin to elevate the necessity of preventing a second Holocaust to the top of the US's national security agenda.
The rally's organizers invited both Clinton and Palin to speak. It was a wise move. In light of Iran's monstrous oppression of Iranian women, had the two most powerful women in American politics joined forces in opposing the regime and its war against human freedom, their appearance would have sent a message of American unity and resolve that would have reverberated not just throughout the US and in the US presidential race, but throughout the world and into Iran itself. But it was not to be.
The moment that Clinton found out that she was to share a stage with Palin, she cancelled her appearance. By cancelling, she signaled to Jewish Democrats - and Democrats in general - that opposing Palin and the Republican Party is more important than opposing Ahmadinejad and the genocidal regime he represents.
THE JEWISH Democrats on the rally's organizing committee got the message loud and clear. Two of the rally's co-sponsors - the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the UJA Federation of New York demanded that the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations disinvite Palin.
The JCPA is led by Steven Gutow. Before joining the JCPA, he served as the founding executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, which is the Jewish support arm of the Democratic Party. The UJA Federation of New York is led by John Ruskay, who began his Jewish communal career as an anti-Israel "peace" activist in the radical CONAME and Breira organizations.
Among their other endeavors, CONAME and Breira opposed US military assistance to Israel during the Yom Kippur War and called for US recognition of the PLO after the group massacred 26 children in Ma'alot in 1974.
Gutow and Ruskay were supported in their demand to disinvite Palin by the National Jewish Democratic Council and by the new Jewish pro-Palestinian lobbying group J-Street.
In an attempt to assuage Gutow and Ruskay, the rally organizers invited Biden to speak. But he had a scheduling conflict. So the organizers contacted the Obama campaign and asked it to send a representative. The campaign offered Congressman Robert Wexler.
But the Democrats knew that Wexler would be no match for Palin. So they continued on the warpath, absurdly claiming that by inviting Palin (and Clinton, Biden and Wexler), the organizers were endangering the sponsoring organizations' tax-exempt status. That is, through Ruskay and Gutow, in their bid to prevent Palin from appearing at the rally, the Democrats threatened to bring down the organized Jewish community.
Never mind that the threat is absurd. The likelihood that the Internal Revenue Service would open an investigation against every major American Jewish organization for daring to invite Palin to a rally opposing Ahmadinejad's appearance at the UN and Iran's stated intention of annihilating Israel is just slightly smaller than the prospect of Ahmadinejad wrapping himself in an Israeli flag and singing "Hatikva" on the UN rostrum.
But no matter. The fear that these Democratic Jews would openly split the Jewish community on the need to confront Iran frightened the organizers. The notion that the Democratic Party, and its Jewish supporters would openly turn their backs on the need to confront Iran to advance the political fortunes of their party and their party's presidential slate was too much to take. Palin was disinvited.
LIBERAL AMERICAN Jews, like liberal Americans in general, and indeed like their fellow leftists in Israel and throughout the West, uphold themselves as champions of human rights. They claim that they care about the underdog, the wretched of the earth. They care about the environment. They care about securing American women's unfettered access to abortions. They care about keeping Christianity and God out of the public sphere. They care about offering peace to those who are actively seeking their destruction so that they can applaud themselves for their open-mindedness and tell themselves how much better they are than savage conservatives.
Those horrible, war-mongering, Bambi killing, unborn baby defending, God-believing conservatives, who think that there are things worth going to war to protect, must be defeated at all costs. They must intimidate, attack, demonize and defeat those conservatives who think that the free women of the West should be standing shoulder to shoulder not with Planned Parenthood, but with the women of the Islamic world who are enslaved by a misogynist Shari'a legal code that treats them as slaves and deprives them of control not simply of their wombs, but of their faces, their hair, their arms, their legs, their minds and their hearts.
The lives of 6 million Jews in Israel are today tied to the fortunes of those women, to the fortunes of American forces in Iraq, to the willingness of Americans across the political and ideological spectrum to recognize that there is more that unifies them than divides them and to act on that knowledge to defeat the forces of genocide, oppression, hatred and destruction that are led today by the Iranian regime and personified in the brutal personality of Ahmadinejad. But Jewish Democrats chose to ignore this basic truth in order to silence Palin.
They should be ashamed. The Democratic Party should be ashamed. And Jewish American voters should consider carefully whether opposing a woman who opposes the abortion of fetuses is really more important than standing up for the right of already born Jews to continue to live and for the Jewish state to continue to exist. Because this week it came to that.
caroline@carolineglick.com
Just a word of reason: I also don't want the U.S. to go back to the bad old days of backroom abortions. But even if Roe vs. Wade could be overturned by the Supreme Court, that would not stop individual states from allowing abortions. There is no way a woman won't be able to get an abortion in New York or California. So I don't think this is a real campaign issue, or fear. Nuclear Iran is. Please keep things in perspective, as Caroline Glick points out in her well-written article which follows.
The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition
Our World: Your abortions or your lives!
Sep. 22, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST
American Jews have good reason to be ashamed and angry today. As Iran moves into the final stages of its nuclear weapons development program - nuclear weapons which it will use to destroy the State of Israel, endanger Jews around the world and cow the United States of America - Democratic American Jewish leaders decided that putting Sen. Barack Obama in the White House is more important than protecting the lives of the Jewish people in Israel and around the world.
On Monday, the New York Sun published the speech that Republican vice presidential nominee and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would have delivered at that day's rally outside UN headquarters in New York against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and against Iran's plan to destroy Israel. She would have delivered it, if she hadn't been disinvited.
The rally was co-sponsored by the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the National Coalition to Stop Iran Now, The Israel Project, United Jewish Communities, the UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Its purpose was to present a united American Jewish front against Iran's genocidal leader and against its genocidal regime which is developing nuclear weapons with the stated intention of committing the second Holocaust in 80 years.
Palin's speech is an extraordinary document. In its opening paragraph she made clear that Iran presents a danger not just to Israel, but to the US.
And not just to some Americans, but to all Americans. Her speech was a warning to Iran - and anyone else who was listening - that Americans are not indifferent to its behavior, its genocidal ideology and the barbarity of its regime. Rather, they are outraged.
After that opening, Palin's speech set out clearly how Iran is advancing its nuclear project, why it must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons and why and how the regime itself must be opposed by all right thinking people - not just Israelis and Americans - but by all people who value human freedom.
PALIN'S SPEECH was a message of national - rather than simply Republican - resolve against Iran's nuclear weapons program and its active involvement in global and regional terrorism. She made this point by quoting statements that Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton has made against the Iranian regime.
The speech detailed Iran's past and current attacks against the US, beginning with its bombing of US servicemen in Lebanon in 1983 and continuing with Iran's proxy war against US forces in Iraq and against Iraqis who oppose its intention of taking control of their country.
By discussing Iran's role in Iraq she not only made a convincing case for why an American victory there is essential for defeating Iran. She also made clear that Iran is actively making war against the US, not just Israel.
From Iran's war against Israel, the US, and freedom loving peoples worldwide, Palin's speech turned to the regime's war against its own people.
She attacked the regime for its systematic repression of Iranian women. She applauded the extraordinary bravery of women like Delaram Ali who risked their lives and their families to demand basic rights for Iranian women.
Ali, she noted, was sentenced to 10 lashes and three years in prison for having the courage to speak out. An international outcry has temporarily suspended her sentence.
Then Palin returned to Iran's nuclear weapons program and its support for terrorist groups pledged to Israel's destruction and to the destruction of the US. She returned to Ahmadinejad's calls for Israel's annihilation. She reiterated Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's solemn promise to work with Israel to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and she joined her name to his promise to stand side by side with Israel to prevent another Holocaust.
IF PALIN had been allowed to deliver this speech at Monday's rally, she would done just what the organizers of the rally, and what the Jewish people in Israel, America and worldwide need to have done. She would have elevated the imperative of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and the implicit moral and strategic imperative of overthrowing the regime in Teheran to the top of America's national security agenda. Given the massive media attention she garners at all of her public appearances, Palin's participation in the rally would have done more to steel Americans - across the political spectrum - to the cause of opposing Iran than 10 UN Security Council sanctions resolutions could do.
It was a remarkable speech, prepared by a remarkable woman. But it was not heard. It was not heard because the Democratic Party and Jewish Democrats believe that their partisan interest in demonizing Palin and making Americans generally and American Jews in particular hate and fear her to secure their votes for Obama and his running-mate Sen. Joseph Biden in the November election is more important than allowing Palin to elevate the necessity of preventing a second Holocaust to the top of the US's national security agenda.
The rally's organizers invited both Clinton and Palin to speak. It was a wise move. In light of Iran's monstrous oppression of Iranian women, had the two most powerful women in American politics joined forces in opposing the regime and its war against human freedom, their appearance would have sent a message of American unity and resolve that would have reverberated not just throughout the US and in the US presidential race, but throughout the world and into Iran itself. But it was not to be.
The moment that Clinton found out that she was to share a stage with Palin, she cancelled her appearance. By cancelling, she signaled to Jewish Democrats - and Democrats in general - that opposing Palin and the Republican Party is more important than opposing Ahmadinejad and the genocidal regime he represents.
THE JEWISH Democrats on the rally's organizing committee got the message loud and clear. Two of the rally's co-sponsors - the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the UJA Federation of New York demanded that the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations disinvite Palin.
The JCPA is led by Steven Gutow. Before joining the JCPA, he served as the founding executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, which is the Jewish support arm of the Democratic Party. The UJA Federation of New York is led by John Ruskay, who began his Jewish communal career as an anti-Israel "peace" activist in the radical CONAME and Breira organizations.
Among their other endeavors, CONAME and Breira opposed US military assistance to Israel during the Yom Kippur War and called for US recognition of the PLO after the group massacred 26 children in Ma'alot in 1974.
Gutow and Ruskay were supported in their demand to disinvite Palin by the National Jewish Democratic Council and by the new Jewish pro-Palestinian lobbying group J-Street.
In an attempt to assuage Gutow and Ruskay, the rally organizers invited Biden to speak. But he had a scheduling conflict. So the organizers contacted the Obama campaign and asked it to send a representative. The campaign offered Congressman Robert Wexler.
But the Democrats knew that Wexler would be no match for Palin. So they continued on the warpath, absurdly claiming that by inviting Palin (and Clinton, Biden and Wexler), the organizers were endangering the sponsoring organizations' tax-exempt status. That is, through Ruskay and Gutow, in their bid to prevent Palin from appearing at the rally, the Democrats threatened to bring down the organized Jewish community.
Never mind that the threat is absurd. The likelihood that the Internal Revenue Service would open an investigation against every major American Jewish organization for daring to invite Palin to a rally opposing Ahmadinejad's appearance at the UN and Iran's stated intention of annihilating Israel is just slightly smaller than the prospect of Ahmadinejad wrapping himself in an Israeli flag and singing "Hatikva" on the UN rostrum.
But no matter. The fear that these Democratic Jews would openly split the Jewish community on the need to confront Iran frightened the organizers. The notion that the Democratic Party, and its Jewish supporters would openly turn their backs on the need to confront Iran to advance the political fortunes of their party and their party's presidential slate was too much to take. Palin was disinvited.
LIBERAL AMERICAN Jews, like liberal Americans in general, and indeed like their fellow leftists in Israel and throughout the West, uphold themselves as champions of human rights. They claim that they care about the underdog, the wretched of the earth. They care about the environment. They care about securing American women's unfettered access to abortions. They care about keeping Christianity and God out of the public sphere. They care about offering peace to those who are actively seeking their destruction so that they can applaud themselves for their open-mindedness and tell themselves how much better they are than savage conservatives.
Those horrible, war-mongering, Bambi killing, unborn baby defending, God-believing conservatives, who think that there are things worth going to war to protect, must be defeated at all costs. They must intimidate, attack, demonize and defeat those conservatives who think that the free women of the West should be standing shoulder to shoulder not with Planned Parenthood, but with the women of the Islamic world who are enslaved by a misogynist Shari'a legal code that treats them as slaves and deprives them of control not simply of their wombs, but of their faces, their hair, their arms, their legs, their minds and their hearts.
The lives of 6 million Jews in Israel are today tied to the fortunes of those women, to the fortunes of American forces in Iraq, to the willingness of Americans across the political and ideological spectrum to recognize that there is more that unifies them than divides them and to act on that knowledge to defeat the forces of genocide, oppression, hatred and destruction that are led today by the Iranian regime and personified in the brutal personality of Ahmadinejad. But Jewish Democrats chose to ignore this basic truth in order to silence Palin.
They should be ashamed. The Democratic Party should be ashamed. And Jewish American voters should consider carefully whether opposing a woman who opposes the abortion of fetuses is really more important than standing up for the right of already born Jews to continue to live and for the Jewish state to continue to exist. Because this week it came to that.
caroline@carolineglick.com
Obama: What Do You Really Know About Him?
From http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/the_man_who_never_was.html
September 24, 2008
The Man Who Never Was
By Tony Blankley
The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.
While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Völkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.)
And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs -- the press. The image of Obama that the press has presented to the public is not a fair approximation of the real man. They consciously have ignored whole years of his life and have shown a lack of curiosity about such gaps, which bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct.
Thus, the public image of Obama is of a "man who never was."
I take that phrase from a 1956 movie about a real-life World War II British intelligence operation to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies were going to invade Greece rather than Sicily in 1943. Operation Mincemeat involved the acquisition of a human corpse dressed as "Major William Martin, R.M.," which was put into the sea near Spain. Attached to the corpse was a briefcase containing fake letters suggesting that the Allied attack would be against Sardinia and Greece.
To make the operation credible, British intelligence concocted a fictional life for the corpse, creating a letter from a lover and tickets to a London theater -- all the details of a life, but not the actual life of the dead young man whose corpse was being used. So, too, the man the media have presented to the nation as Obama is not the real man.
The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeat any McCain gaffes while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Web sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventually clear sentence from Obama. You don't see Obama's ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the U.N. Nor his whining and puerile "come on" when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels' disciples, not Cronkite's.
More appalling, a skit on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" last weekend suggested that Gov. Palin's husband had sex with his own daughters. That show was written with the assistance of Al Franken, Democratic Party candidate in Minnesota for the U.S. Senate. Talk about incest.
But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting are the shocking gaps in Obama's life that are not reported at all. The major media simply have not reported on Obama's two years at New York's Columbia University, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter-mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers. Later, they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Ayers. Should the media be curious? In only two weeks, the media have focused on all the colleges Gov. Palin has attended, her husband's driving habits 20 years ago, and the close criticism of the political opponents Gov. Palin had when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.
But in two years, they haven't bothered to see how close Obama was with the terrorist Ayers.
Nor have the media paid any serious attention to Obama's rise in Chicago politics. How did honest Obama rise in the famously sordid Chicago political machine with the full support of Boss Daley? Despite the great -- and unflattering -- details on Obama's Chicago years presented in David Freddoso's new book on Obama, the mainstream media continue to ignore both the facts and the book. It took a British publication, The Economist, to give Freddoso's book a review with fair comment.
The public image of Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Obama, his publicist (David Axelrod) and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media.
Perhaps that is why the National Journal's respected correspondent Stuart Taylor wrote, "The media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis."
That conspiracy not only has Photoshopped out all of Obama's imperfections (and dirtied up his opponent McCain's image) but also has put most of his questionable history down the memory hole.
The public will be voting based on the idealized image of the man who never was. If he wins, however, we will be governed by the sunken, cynical man Obama really is. One can only hope that the senior journalists will be judged as harshly for their professional misconduct as Wall Street's leaders currently are for their failings.
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/the_man_who_never_was.html at September 24, 2008 - 12:56:30 AM PDT
September 24, 2008
The Man Who Never Was
By Tony Blankley
The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.
While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Völkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.)
And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs -- the press. The image of Obama that the press has presented to the public is not a fair approximation of the real man. They consciously have ignored whole years of his life and have shown a lack of curiosity about such gaps, which bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct.
Thus, the public image of Obama is of a "man who never was."
I take that phrase from a 1956 movie about a real-life World War II British intelligence operation to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies were going to invade Greece rather than Sicily in 1943. Operation Mincemeat involved the acquisition of a human corpse dressed as "Major William Martin, R.M.," which was put into the sea near Spain. Attached to the corpse was a briefcase containing fake letters suggesting that the Allied attack would be against Sardinia and Greece.
To make the operation credible, British intelligence concocted a fictional life for the corpse, creating a letter from a lover and tickets to a London theater -- all the details of a life, but not the actual life of the dead young man whose corpse was being used. So, too, the man the media have presented to the nation as Obama is not the real man.
The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeat any McCain gaffes while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Web sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventually clear sentence from Obama. You don't see Obama's ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the U.N. Nor his whining and puerile "come on" when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels' disciples, not Cronkite's.
More appalling, a skit on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" last weekend suggested that Gov. Palin's husband had sex with his own daughters. That show was written with the assistance of Al Franken, Democratic Party candidate in Minnesota for the U.S. Senate. Talk about incest.
But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting are the shocking gaps in Obama's life that are not reported at all. The major media simply have not reported on Obama's two years at New York's Columbia University, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter-mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers. Later, they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Ayers. Should the media be curious? In only two weeks, the media have focused on all the colleges Gov. Palin has attended, her husband's driving habits 20 years ago, and the close criticism of the political opponents Gov. Palin had when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.
But in two years, they haven't bothered to see how close Obama was with the terrorist Ayers.
Nor have the media paid any serious attention to Obama's rise in Chicago politics. How did honest Obama rise in the famously sordid Chicago political machine with the full support of Boss Daley? Despite the great -- and unflattering -- details on Obama's Chicago years presented in David Freddoso's new book on Obama, the mainstream media continue to ignore both the facts and the book. It took a British publication, The Economist, to give Freddoso's book a review with fair comment.
The public image of Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Obama, his publicist (David Axelrod) and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media.
Perhaps that is why the National Journal's respected correspondent Stuart Taylor wrote, "The media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis."
That conspiracy not only has Photoshopped out all of Obama's imperfections (and dirtied up his opponent McCain's image) but also has put most of his questionable history down the memory hole.
The public will be voting based on the idealized image of the man who never was. If he wins, however, we will be governed by the sunken, cynical man Obama really is. One can only hope that the senior journalists will be judged as harshly for their professional misconduct as Wall Street's leaders currently are for their failings.
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/the_man_who_never_was.html at September 24, 2008 - 12:56:30 AM PDT
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Obama and Harvard
Why Obama is mum about Harvard
Exclusive: Jack Cashill offers reason Barack, Michelle don't talk about editor post
Posted: September 11, 2008
1:00 am Eastern
By Jack Cashill
On the surface, at least, Barack Obama's single most impressive accomplishment has been his 1990 election to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review.
This position also provided Obama his only real executive experience as he supervised the law review's staff of 80 editors.
One has to wonder, then, why neither he nor wife Michelle emphasized this singular honor during the up-by-the-bootstraps biographical sections of their respective speeches in Denver.
In fact, neither of them so much as mentioned Obama's time at Harvard, this despite his vulnerability on the executive experience charge.
Their silence likely derives from one verifiable fact: Obama's record at Harvard was no more authentic than John Kerry's record in Vietnam.
Kerry was justifiably swift-boated because he fraudulently positioned himself as a war hero. Obama seems to have learned from Kerry.
In the age of the Internet, the less said about a dubious credential the better, and Obama's law presidency credential is dubious on any number of levels.
(Column continues below)
For starters, Obama did not do nearly well enough at his previous stop, Columbia University, to justify admission to Harvard Law.
According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that Obama graduated in 1983 with a major in political science but without honors.
In the age of affirmative action and grade inflation, a minority in a relatively easy major like political science had to under-perform dramatically to avoid minimal honors. Obama apparently did just that.
The specifics we may never know. As the New York Times concedes, Obama "declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."
Would that Bristol Palin could get off so easily!
There are any number of possible reasons for Obama's reticence about Columbia: his grades, the courses he took, his writing samples and, of course, his associations.
At that time, for instance, both Bill Ayers and Obama fell within the orbit of left-wing Columbia superstar Edward Said. Just recently out of hiding, Ayers was attending the Bank Street College of Education, which adjoins the Columbia campus.
Five years after leaving Columbia, Obama decided on law school. His lack of resources did not deter him from thinking big. Nor did his B-minus effort at his Hawaii prep school or his equally indifferent grades at Columbia.
As Obama relates in "Dreams From My Father," he limited his choices to only three law schools – "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." (It must be nice to be Obama.) He does not mention his connections.
Harvard Law School is notoriously difficult to get into. Annually, some 7,000 applications apply for some 500 seats. Applicant LSAT scores generally chart in the 98 to 99 percentile range, and GPAs average between 3.80 and 3.95.
If Obama's LSAT scores merited admission, we would know about them. We don't. The Obama camp guards those scores, like his SAT scores, more tightly that Iran does its nuclear secrets.
We know enough about Obama's Columbia grades to know how far they fall below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted black norm at Harvard.
As far back as 1988, however, Obama had serious pull. He would need it. As previously reported, Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, lobbied friends like Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton to intervene at Harvard on Obama's behalf.
An orthodox Muslim, al-Mansour has not met the crackpot anti-Semitic theory he could not embrace. As for bin Talal, in October 2001, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent his $10 million relief check back un-cashed after the Saudi billionaire blamed 9/11 on America.
For an insight into the Khalid al-Mansour connection, see see this video.
These are not connections that Obama would like to see broadcast, which further explains his shyness about the Harvard experience.
There is more. Obama did not make the Harvard Law Review (HLR) the old-fashioned way, the way HLR's first black editor, Charles Houston, did 70 years prior.
To Obama's good fortune, the HLR had replaced a meritocracy in which editors were elected based on grades – the president being the student with the highest academic rank – with one in which half the editors were chosen through a writing competition.
This competition, the New York Times reported in 1990, was "meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review."
It did just that. At the end of his first year, Obama was named, along with 40 or so of his classmates, an editor of the HLR.
Unlike most editors, and likely all its presidents, Obama was not a writer. During his tenure at Harvard, he wrote only one heavily edited, unsigned note.
In this note for the third volume of the 1990 HLR, he argued against any limits on abortion, citing the government's interest in "preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair."
Obama's timing, however, was better than his writing. In the same spring 1990 term that he would stand for the presidency of the HLR, the Harvard Law School found itself embroiled in an explosive racial brouhaha.
Black firebrand law professor Derrick Bell was demanding that the Harvard Law School appoint a black woman to the law faculty.
This protest would culminate in vigils and protests by the racially sensitive student body, in the course of which Obama would compare the increasingly absurd Bell to Rosa Parks.
Feeling the pressure, HLR editors wanted to elect their first African-American president. Obama had an advantage. Spared the legacy of slavery and segregation, and having grown up in a white household, he lacked the hard edge of many of his black colleagues.
"Obama cast himself as an eager listener," the New York Times reported, "sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once."
In February 1990, after an ideologically charged all-day affair, Obama's fellow editors elected him president from among 19 candidates. As it happened, Obama prevailed only after the HLR's small conservative faction threw him its support.
Curiously, once elected, Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."
One more thing: The 1990 Times article about Obama's election notes that the president of the HLR usually goes on to serve as a clerk for a Supreme Court justice.
Not the Mansourian Candidate. Here, oddly, his ambition deserted him. He told the Times that he planned "to spend two or three years in private law practice and then return to Chicago to re-enter community work, either in politics or in local organizing."
In this unlikely surrender to Chicago politics, the realist sees insecurity at best and, at worst, the quid for al-Mansour's quo.
Exclusive: Jack Cashill offers reason Barack, Michelle don't talk about editor post
Posted: September 11, 2008
1:00 am Eastern
By Jack Cashill
On the surface, at least, Barack Obama's single most impressive accomplishment has been his 1990 election to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review.
This position also provided Obama his only real executive experience as he supervised the law review's staff of 80 editors.
One has to wonder, then, why neither he nor wife Michelle emphasized this singular honor during the up-by-the-bootstraps biographical sections of their respective speeches in Denver.
In fact, neither of them so much as mentioned Obama's time at Harvard, this despite his vulnerability on the executive experience charge.
Their silence likely derives from one verifiable fact: Obama's record at Harvard was no more authentic than John Kerry's record in Vietnam.
Kerry was justifiably swift-boated because he fraudulently positioned himself as a war hero. Obama seems to have learned from Kerry.
In the age of the Internet, the less said about a dubious credential the better, and Obama's law presidency credential is dubious on any number of levels.
(Column continues below)
For starters, Obama did not do nearly well enough at his previous stop, Columbia University, to justify admission to Harvard Law.
According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that Obama graduated in 1983 with a major in political science but without honors.
In the age of affirmative action and grade inflation, a minority in a relatively easy major like political science had to under-perform dramatically to avoid minimal honors. Obama apparently did just that.
The specifics we may never know. As the New York Times concedes, Obama "declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."
Would that Bristol Palin could get off so easily!
There are any number of possible reasons for Obama's reticence about Columbia: his grades, the courses he took, his writing samples and, of course, his associations.
At that time, for instance, both Bill Ayers and Obama fell within the orbit of left-wing Columbia superstar Edward Said. Just recently out of hiding, Ayers was attending the Bank Street College of Education, which adjoins the Columbia campus.
Five years after leaving Columbia, Obama decided on law school. His lack of resources did not deter him from thinking big. Nor did his B-minus effort at his Hawaii prep school or his equally indifferent grades at Columbia.
As Obama relates in "Dreams From My Father," he limited his choices to only three law schools – "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." (It must be nice to be Obama.) He does not mention his connections.
Harvard Law School is notoriously difficult to get into. Annually, some 7,000 applications apply for some 500 seats. Applicant LSAT scores generally chart in the 98 to 99 percentile range, and GPAs average between 3.80 and 3.95.
If Obama's LSAT scores merited admission, we would know about them. We don't. The Obama camp guards those scores, like his SAT scores, more tightly that Iran does its nuclear secrets.
We know enough about Obama's Columbia grades to know how far they fall below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted black norm at Harvard.
As far back as 1988, however, Obama had serious pull. He would need it. As previously reported, Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, lobbied friends like Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton to intervene at Harvard on Obama's behalf.
An orthodox Muslim, al-Mansour has not met the crackpot anti-Semitic theory he could not embrace. As for bin Talal, in October 2001, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent his $10 million relief check back un-cashed after the Saudi billionaire blamed 9/11 on America.
For an insight into the Khalid al-Mansour connection, see see this video.
These are not connections that Obama would like to see broadcast, which further explains his shyness about the Harvard experience.
There is more. Obama did not make the Harvard Law Review (HLR) the old-fashioned way, the way HLR's first black editor, Charles Houston, did 70 years prior.
To Obama's good fortune, the HLR had replaced a meritocracy in which editors were elected based on grades – the president being the student with the highest academic rank – with one in which half the editors were chosen through a writing competition.
This competition, the New York Times reported in 1990, was "meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review."
It did just that. At the end of his first year, Obama was named, along with 40 or so of his classmates, an editor of the HLR.
Unlike most editors, and likely all its presidents, Obama was not a writer. During his tenure at Harvard, he wrote only one heavily edited, unsigned note.
In this note for the third volume of the 1990 HLR, he argued against any limits on abortion, citing the government's interest in "preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair."
Obama's timing, however, was better than his writing. In the same spring 1990 term that he would stand for the presidency of the HLR, the Harvard Law School found itself embroiled in an explosive racial brouhaha.
Black firebrand law professor Derrick Bell was demanding that the Harvard Law School appoint a black woman to the law faculty.
This protest would culminate in vigils and protests by the racially sensitive student body, in the course of which Obama would compare the increasingly absurd Bell to Rosa Parks.
Feeling the pressure, HLR editors wanted to elect their first African-American president. Obama had an advantage. Spared the legacy of slavery and segregation, and having grown up in a white household, he lacked the hard edge of many of his black colleagues.
"Obama cast himself as an eager listener," the New York Times reported, "sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once."
In February 1990, after an ideologically charged all-day affair, Obama's fellow editors elected him president from among 19 candidates. As it happened, Obama prevailed only after the HLR's small conservative faction threw him its support.
Curiously, once elected, Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."
One more thing: The 1990 Times article about Obama's election notes that the president of the HLR usually goes on to serve as a clerk for a Supreme Court justice.
Not the Mansourian Candidate. Here, oddly, his ambition deserted him. He told the Times that he planned "to spend two or three years in private law practice and then return to Chicago to re-enter community work, either in politics or in local organizing."
In this unlikely surrender to Chicago politics, the realist sees insecurity at best and, at worst, the quid for al-Mansour's quo.
Jews: The Democratic Party is not Your Religion
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2008/09/21/open-letter-to-my-fellow-jews-the-democratic-party-is-not-your-religion-or-anybodys/
- Roger L. Simon - http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon -
Open Letter to My Fellow Jews: The Democratic Party is not your religion (or anybody’s)
September 21, 2008 - by Roger L Simon
From the days of FDR, the vast majority of American Jews have identified with the Democratic Party almost if it were their religion. This included most especially secular Jews like me whose blasé attitude toward their faith and toward religious observance in general made such a replacement all the more important emotionally. This same Jewish majority also identified with the cause of social justice and, as Barack Obama among many others has noted, were some of the most active participants in the civil rights movement of the Fifties and Sixties. That was all how it should have been and was a perfectly logical and praiseworthy epoch in the development of our country.
Hello – those days are over! The events leading up to Monday’s anti-Ahmadinejad demonstration by Jewish organizations at the UN put the final nail in an already long-moldering coffin. Jews should no longer align themselves with the Democratic Party any more than they should align with the Republicans. They should act and think for themselves, devoid of ideological or partisan bias. They should first be Americans, not Democratic Party Americans.
The reasons for this are many, but paramount among them is that being hostage to one political party is tantamount to giving up your freedom and relinquishing your ability to confront reality and act in your own interest, not to mention the interest of others. Many Jewish Americans still do this for reasons that are at best sentimental and nostalgic, and at worst self-destructive. But a tipping point may be approaching. The virtual night of the long knives played out between the Democratic Party and various Jewish organizations surrounding the Iran demonstration, including allegations that party operatives were threatening the loss of tax exempt status over Sarah Palin’s appearance, with more unpleasant revelations undoubtedly to come, is obviously causing people to reconsider this allegiance to the Democratic Party that approaches fealty.
I urge my fellow Jews to keep thinking about this and not to retreat into the cocoon-like safety of an outmoded tradition. Change is difficult. But remember that Hillary Clinton – that paragon of the Democratic Party, a woman who calls herself a “progressive” (oh, desecration of the English language!) – was willing to forego the protest of the man who is arguably the most significant enemy of the Jews since Hitler for partisan and (most likely) personal pique reasons. How morally repellent is that!
And then Joseph Biden told us he was busy–too busy to protest a nuclear-armed madman who fervently believes that his mysterious Twelfth Imam (Mahdi) is destined to unite a chaotic globe under Allah. (And don’t tell me that evangelicals believe similar things. If you think there is an equation between evangelicals and Khomeinist Islamists, you need a cold bath.)
No, those Democrats thought of themselves and their party first, the citizens of this country and the world later. When Republicans behave in a similar reprehensible manner, we should condemn them with all ferocity. But fellow Jews, stop being slaves to the Democratic Party. End this illicit love affair – not just for your own good, but for the good of humanity.
________________________________________
Article printed from Roger L. Simon: http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2008/09/21/open-letter-to-my-fellow-jews-the-democratic-party-is-not-your-religion-or-anybodys/
Click here to print.
Copyright © 2008 Roger L. Simon. All rights reserved.
________________________________________
Looking for simple solutions to your real-life fin
- Roger L. Simon - http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon -
Open Letter to My Fellow Jews: The Democratic Party is not your religion (or anybody’s)
September 21, 2008 - by Roger L Simon
From the days of FDR, the vast majority of American Jews have identified with the Democratic Party almost if it were their religion. This included most especially secular Jews like me whose blasé attitude toward their faith and toward religious observance in general made such a replacement all the more important emotionally. This same Jewish majority also identified with the cause of social justice and, as Barack Obama among many others has noted, were some of the most active participants in the civil rights movement of the Fifties and Sixties. That was all how it should have been and was a perfectly logical and praiseworthy epoch in the development of our country.
Hello – those days are over! The events leading up to Monday’s anti-Ahmadinejad demonstration by Jewish organizations at the UN put the final nail in an already long-moldering coffin. Jews should no longer align themselves with the Democratic Party any more than they should align with the Republicans. They should act and think for themselves, devoid of ideological or partisan bias. They should first be Americans, not Democratic Party Americans.
The reasons for this are many, but paramount among them is that being hostage to one political party is tantamount to giving up your freedom and relinquishing your ability to confront reality and act in your own interest, not to mention the interest of others. Many Jewish Americans still do this for reasons that are at best sentimental and nostalgic, and at worst self-destructive. But a tipping point may be approaching. The virtual night of the long knives played out between the Democratic Party and various Jewish organizations surrounding the Iran demonstration, including allegations that party operatives were threatening the loss of tax exempt status over Sarah Palin’s appearance, with more unpleasant revelations undoubtedly to come, is obviously causing people to reconsider this allegiance to the Democratic Party that approaches fealty.
I urge my fellow Jews to keep thinking about this and not to retreat into the cocoon-like safety of an outmoded tradition. Change is difficult. But remember that Hillary Clinton – that paragon of the Democratic Party, a woman who calls herself a “progressive” (oh, desecration of the English language!) – was willing to forego the protest of the man who is arguably the most significant enemy of the Jews since Hitler for partisan and (most likely) personal pique reasons. How morally repellent is that!
And then Joseph Biden told us he was busy–too busy to protest a nuclear-armed madman who fervently believes that his mysterious Twelfth Imam (Mahdi) is destined to unite a chaotic globe under Allah. (And don’t tell me that evangelicals believe similar things. If you think there is an equation between evangelicals and Khomeinist Islamists, you need a cold bath.)
No, those Democrats thought of themselves and their party first, the citizens of this country and the world later. When Republicans behave in a similar reprehensible manner, we should condemn them with all ferocity. But fellow Jews, stop being slaves to the Democratic Party. End this illicit love affair – not just for your own good, but for the good of humanity.
________________________________________
Article printed from Roger L. Simon: http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2008/09/21/open-letter-to-my-fellow-jews-the-democratic-party-is-not-your-religion-or-anybodys/
Click here to print.
Copyright © 2008 Roger L. Simon. All rights reserved.
________________________________________
Looking for simple solutions to your real-life fin
Obama send grandkids to convince grandparents to vote for him
Friends,
I'd appreciate hearing from my many readers in Florida about this. Note the condescending tone of the grandchild sent to
talk his doddering old grandmother into voting for Obama.
________________________________________
Off on the Great Schlep
Jewish grandkids get an earful in Florida as they try to woo relatives toward Obama. Joel Stein/Opinion/ Los Angeles Times
September 19, 2008
FORT LAUDERDALE , FLA. ˜ If you need proof that this is the most important election in a generation, get this: Jewish grandkids are flying to Florida to visit their grandparents -- without being guilted into it - without being guilted into it -- to talk their elders out of voting for John McCain.
The Jewish Council for Education and Research -- a new pro-Obama political action committee -- is organizing "The Great Schlep," in which hundreds of Jews will make the Southern exodus on Columbus Day weekend, Oct. 10-13. They will travel to the Fort Lauderdale area, where they will visit their grandparents, organize political salons in their condos and eat incredibly bad food. The grandkids also will meet up at a bar one night, which -- if the psychological impact of spending a few days with frail, elderly, widowed relatives is taken fully into account -- may do more to repopulate the world's Jews than the creation of Israel.
More than hockey moms or gun-toting God lovers, old Floridian Jews are the most important demographic in this election. They make up about 5% of the voters in a swing state with 27 electoral college votes. They never miss so much as a condo board vote and are normally reliable Democrats.
Barack Obama's trouble winning over older Jewish voters has been difficult for pollsters to explain, so I came here this week to visit my grandmother, Mama Ann, and find out what the hang-up is. After a long discussion about policy, I asked her if the reason she was leaning toward voting for McCain was because Obama is black. She assured me that it was not. Though during dinner, she did casually mention that her grandfather used to express a superstition that if you ate marrow, you'd date a black man. I had no idea that for so many generations, Jews have hated marrow.
Mama Ann thought the three days of the Great Schlep would be very effective. "Oh boy, the grandparents will start cooking three days ahead," she said, making me worry that many Schleppers won't last through three days of canned pineapple and dry chicken. "If they see their grandchildren, they'll go along. They just need more assurance on Israel ." Israel , Mama Ann explained, is the key issue her condo friends vote on. When McCain sings about bombing Iran , he is singing a sweet serenade to Florida 's elec toral collegians.
To persuade Mama Ann to vote for Obama, I used many of the talking points suggested to me by Great Schlep organizer Mik Moore. These included the fact that Obama went to Columbia and Harvard, and McCain got bad grades in college; that Obama has been criticized by the Rev. Jesse Jackson; and that Obama ran the business side of his campaign better than any other candidate. I did not know that I could be so racially offended by my own people.
After convincing Mama Ann not to vote for McCain, I then had to persuade her not to write in Hillary Clinton, who the old Jews here love for her feisty, scrappy Estelle Getty-ness.
Feeling confident, I headed down to the condo Hadassah meeting, where I asked some people who they were voting for. A few had Obama buttons in Hebrew. One wanted to tell me how Lyndon Johnson helped the Jews more than people know. Seven wanted to set me up wit h their granddaughters despite the fact that I was wearing my wedding ring.
But many more were sure Obama was Muslim and that extremist Arabs "had his ear." I strongly urge Obama to take one day off campaigning and go to a courthouse to legally change his middle name from "Hussein" to "Seriously, People, I'm Not a Muslim."
Having tackled the Hadassah meeting, I drove over to Palm Beach with Mama Ann to talk to her first cousin, Rochelle Bramsen. When Rochelle's daughter and son-in-law, whom she lives with, argued for Obama, she bristled. I joined in, and asked -- as suggested by the talking points -- if she inaccurately thought Obama was a Muslim. Both Aunt Rochelle and Mama Ann said yes, they thought he was. When we all tired of arguing about that, I asked if it would be such a big deal if Obama were a Muslim. This was, I quickly realized, not on the list of recommended talking points for good reason.
"For me, personally, that would be an issue," said Rochelle. Thinking we'd trapped her in a rhetorical corner, her kids and I asked why Muslims in office would be worse than Christians. To which Rochelle deftly responded, "Who says I'm OK with Christians?"
Rochelle was also upset that Obama didn't wear an American flag lapel pin at first. I asked Rochelle if she wore a flag pin. "No, but I expect more from our leaders," she said. I am pretty sure Rochelle just doesn't trust anyone who doesn't wear at least some jewelry.
Still, by the end of our discussion, Rochelle seemed to have joined Mama Ann as an Obama supporter. But there's a fair chance that by Columbus Day, both Mama Ann and Aunt Rochelle will have forgotten that.
So it's important that other grandchildren -- hopefully some who are vaguely my age and shape -- fly down here for the Great Schlep salons. Ev en if they fail, they won't be sorry: I saw a movie for $3.50, had dinner for $10 and was treated like whatever the Jewish equivalent of a saint is by everyone in the condo complex just for stopping by. I say we do this every Columbus Day. Next year, hopefully, we'll be hanging poolside with retiree John McCain.
Jerry Balash
I'd appreciate hearing from my many readers in Florida about this. Note the condescending tone of the grandchild sent to
talk his doddering old grandmother into voting for Obama.
________________________________________
Off on the Great Schlep
Jewish grandkids get an earful in Florida as they try to woo relatives toward Obama. Joel Stein/Opinion/ Los Angeles Times
September 19, 2008
FORT LAUDERDALE , FLA. ˜ If you need proof that this is the most important election in a generation, get this: Jewish grandkids are flying to Florida to visit their grandparents -- without being guilted into it - without being guilted into it -- to talk their elders out of voting for John McCain.
The Jewish Council for Education and Research -- a new pro-Obama political action committee -- is organizing "The Great Schlep," in which hundreds of Jews will make the Southern exodus on Columbus Day weekend, Oct. 10-13. They will travel to the Fort Lauderdale area, where they will visit their grandparents, organize political salons in their condos and eat incredibly bad food. The grandkids also will meet up at a bar one night, which -- if the psychological impact of spending a few days with frail, elderly, widowed relatives is taken fully into account -- may do more to repopulate the world's Jews than the creation of Israel.
More than hockey moms or gun-toting God lovers, old Floridian Jews are the most important demographic in this election. They make up about 5% of the voters in a swing state with 27 electoral college votes. They never miss so much as a condo board vote and are normally reliable Democrats.
Barack Obama's trouble winning over older Jewish voters has been difficult for pollsters to explain, so I came here this week to visit my grandmother, Mama Ann, and find out what the hang-up is. After a long discussion about policy, I asked her if the reason she was leaning toward voting for McCain was because Obama is black. She assured me that it was not. Though during dinner, she did casually mention that her grandfather used to express a superstition that if you ate marrow, you'd date a black man. I had no idea that for so many generations, Jews have hated marrow.
Mama Ann thought the three days of the Great Schlep would be very effective. "Oh boy, the grandparents will start cooking three days ahead," she said, making me worry that many Schleppers won't last through three days of canned pineapple and dry chicken. "If they see their grandchildren, they'll go along. They just need more assurance on Israel ." Israel , Mama Ann explained, is the key issue her condo friends vote on. When McCain sings about bombing Iran , he is singing a sweet serenade to Florida 's elec toral collegians.
To persuade Mama Ann to vote for Obama, I used many of the talking points suggested to me by Great Schlep organizer Mik Moore. These included the fact that Obama went to Columbia and Harvard, and McCain got bad grades in college; that Obama has been criticized by the Rev. Jesse Jackson; and that Obama ran the business side of his campaign better than any other candidate. I did not know that I could be so racially offended by my own people.
After convincing Mama Ann not to vote for McCain, I then had to persuade her not to write in Hillary Clinton, who the old Jews here love for her feisty, scrappy Estelle Getty-ness.
Feeling confident, I headed down to the condo Hadassah meeting, where I asked some people who they were voting for. A few had Obama buttons in Hebrew. One wanted to tell me how Lyndon Johnson helped the Jews more than people know. Seven wanted to set me up wit h their granddaughters despite the fact that I was wearing my wedding ring.
But many more were sure Obama was Muslim and that extremist Arabs "had his ear." I strongly urge Obama to take one day off campaigning and go to a courthouse to legally change his middle name from "Hussein" to "Seriously, People, I'm Not a Muslim."
Having tackled the Hadassah meeting, I drove over to Palm Beach with Mama Ann to talk to her first cousin, Rochelle Bramsen. When Rochelle's daughter and son-in-law, whom she lives with, argued for Obama, she bristled. I joined in, and asked -- as suggested by the talking points -- if she inaccurately thought Obama was a Muslim. Both Aunt Rochelle and Mama Ann said yes, they thought he was. When we all tired of arguing about that, I asked if it would be such a big deal if Obama were a Muslim. This was, I quickly realized, not on the list of recommended talking points for good reason.
"For me, personally, that would be an issue," said Rochelle. Thinking we'd trapped her in a rhetorical corner, her kids and I asked why Muslims in office would be worse than Christians. To which Rochelle deftly responded, "Who says I'm OK with Christians?"
Rochelle was also upset that Obama didn't wear an American flag lapel pin at first. I asked Rochelle if she wore a flag pin. "No, but I expect more from our leaders," she said. I am pretty sure Rochelle just doesn't trust anyone who doesn't wear at least some jewelry.
Still, by the end of our discussion, Rochelle seemed to have joined Mama Ann as an Obama supporter. But there's a fair chance that by Columbus Day, both Mama Ann and Aunt Rochelle will have forgotten that.
So it's important that other grandchildren -- hopefully some who are vaguely my age and shape -- fly down here for the Great Schlep salons. Ev en if they fail, they won't be sorry: I saw a movie for $3.50, had dinner for $10 and was treated like whatever the Jewish equivalent of a saint is by everyone in the condo complex just for stopping by. I say we do this every Columbus Day. Next year, hopefully, we'll be hanging poolside with retiree John McCain.
Jerry Balash
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