So goes the news tonight:
Chaos, Anarchy To Reign If [Governor] Paterson Shuts Down NY
Monday Could Be Doomsday If Budget Deal Can’t Be Reached
Shutdown Would Mean Closing Of State Parks, DMV, Courts, N.Y. Lottery
Wow! Well, I’m ready. I’ve been ready for anarchy and chaos in New York City for a long time; I have the necessary resources stored away, and I fully expect to be one of the few survivors in Manhattan. Continue reading “Chaos, Anarchy To Reign in New York”
Charles Krauthammer’s column today is as concise and powerful as his best.
The world is outraged at Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Turkey denounces its illegality, inhumanity, barbarity, etc. The usual U.N. suspects, Third World and European, join in. The Obama administration dithers.
But as Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, the blockade is not just perfectly rational, it is perfectly legal. Gaza under Hamas is a self-declared enemy of Israel — a declaration backed up by more than 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilian territory. Yet having pledged itself to unceasing belligerency, Hamas claims victimhood when Israel imposes a blockade to prevent Hamas from arming itself with still more rockets.
He goes on to assert, correctly, that this entire escapade has nothing to do with helping the people of Gaza, and everything to do with depriving Israel of any means of self-defense, even such passive means as a blockade. He also outlines the result of every recent “land for peace” gesture by Israel: only more attacks, from enemies who are now nearer. He finishes:
The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, six million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized, and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.
But read it all.
And courtesy of the Canada-Israel Committee, here are some figures on how much aid is regularly delivered to the people of Gaza.
Despite the fact that Israel publicly offered to inspect and then transfer the flotilla’s aid to Gaza several days prior to the incident, many opponents of Israel are now making wild accusations that humanitarian supplies are being blocked from entering Gaza.
The facts put these charges to rest – just take a look at how much aid Israel regularly delivers to Gaza, and what it means in real terms for Gazans:
- Over one million tons of humanitarian supplies were delivered by Israel to the people of Gaza in the past 18 months – that’s equal to nearly one ton of aid for every man, woman and child in Gaza.
- In the first quarter of 2010 alone (January-March), Israel delivered 94,500 tons of supplies to Gaza. It’s very easy to miss what that actually means for the people of Gaza. The breakdown includes:
- 40,000 tons of wheat – which is equal to 53 million loaves of bread;
- 2,760 tons of rice – which equals 69 million servings;
- 1,987 tons of clothes and footwear – the equivalent weight of 3.6 million pairs of jeans; and
- 553 tons of milk powder and baby food – equivalent to over 3.1 million days of formula for an average six-month-old baby.
- This reflects a long-term effort on the part of Israel to deliver a massive and comprehensive supply of aid to Gaza’s civilians, while restricting the ability of Hamas to import missiles that have been launched at the cities of southern Israel. In 2009 alone:
- During the Muslim holy days of Ramadan and Eid al-Adha, Israel shipped some 11,000 head of cattle into Gaza – enough to provide 8.8 million meals of beef;
- More than 3,000 tons of hypochlorite were delivered by Israel to Gaza for water purification purposes – that’s 60 billion gallons of purified water; and
- Israel brought some 4,883 tons of medical equipment and medicine into Gaza – a weight equivalent to over 360,000 260-piece mobile trauma first aid kits.
Read the full statistics and judge for yourself. Humanitarian crisis in Gaza? Not according to the facts.
The false narrative of the supposedly innocent “aid flotilla” attacked by Israel (when in reality the only violence which took place occurred when IHH terrorists attacked Israeli commandos with the goal of creating this story) is lending fuel to an already-burgeoning global movement of boycotts and divestment that poses a very real risk to Israel’s survival. From the Wall Street Journal:
Israeli officials point to a significant toughening by many allies on important Israeli strategic issues, such as peace efforts with the Palestinians and the country’s nuclear program. But the fallout has ricocheted beyond diplomacy as well, they say. It is reflected in incidents including British grocery chains dropping products produced in Israeli settlements; Scandinavian pension funds divesting from an Israeli defense company; and the spread of an annual “Israel Apartheid Week,” backed by mostly left-leaning Western organizations, to 50 cities world-wide. Continue reading “The War of Isolation Against Israel”
Hamas fired two Kassam rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip earlier today, but that’s far from the most serious attack being made on the Jewish state. Unable to defeat Israel in a direct military assault, her enemies have become well practiced at tactics that seek to damage her in the court of world opinion, to strip her of support (or even tolerance) and to encourage the kind of opposition that could ultimately break the nation’s spirit.
The inhabitants of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank receive more international aid per capita than any Continue reading “Israel Under Attack”
A local TV station in Santa Barbara, California is reporting that a dog named Sydnee has been taught to count (up to ten and numbers in-between) by her owner, Maxine Davis. The dog barks the requested number of times and then receives a raisin as a reward. Hmmm. You can watch the video from KCOY-TV below. Continue reading “Dog can count to ten?”
As much as I might look askance on the styles and practices of other dog owners at the local park, the very idea of the government testing and regulating and taxing dog ownership to this extent is utterly horrifying. Yet it is at least under consideration in Britain, according to Continue reading “Competence tests for dog owners”
Just another tale of a dedicated pooch staying beside a lost child and keeping her warm through a cold night. The story is from Arizona and features a a Queensland Heeler (or “Australian Cattle dog”) named Blue, and a three year-old girl named Victoria. The girl apparently wandered away from her home in a place called Cordes Lakes at about 5 p.m. last Thursday. The area being rugged and abutting state park land, finding her constituted a challenge that immediately demanded rescue teams, volunteers, ATVs, night-vision goggles, and a concerted attempt by local law enforcement to interrogate registered sex offenders in that locale. The night would get cold, falling to the mid-30s Fahrenheit, and the girl had been dressed in a t-shirt when she disappeared.
Despite the best efforts of all the people and resources that could be summoned, the night passed without the little girl being located. With sun-up, a rescue helicopter took off. Around 7:30, after being in the air only about five minutes, the rescuers saw the dog in a dry creek bed roughly a half a mile from the girl’s home, and then saw the girl too. Continue reading “And a dog named Blue”
This story is a double winner for Yours Truly, highlighting as it does both the best and noblest aspects of man’s best friend and the importance of the right of Americans to bear arms under the Second Amendment.
The events happened early in the morning of last Monday, February 15th, in Ashtabula County, Ohio. Continue reading “Dog takes three bullets, saves Ohio family; survives“
In Los Banos, California, last Saturday, a hunter waded into the water to retrieve his decoy ducks and almost found himself in Davy Jones’ Locker. (Well, alright: the bottom of a pond hardly qualifies as Davy Jones’ Locker, but I just love the expression and would like to see it return to common usage — or enter it for the first time — whether used appropriately or not.) The hunter had left his loaded shotgun on the ground, apparently, and his female Labrador stepped on it. The story (which I suppose only the hunter and the dog can fully vouch for) is that her stepping on it caused the safety to disengage and the shotgun to fire, hitting the man, who was about 45 feet away. Continue reading “Labrador Retriever insists, “I didn’t know it was loaded””
A snake has (allegedly) befriended a hamster that was put in its enclosure for it to eat, according to reports from a Tokyo zoo. [Update: I just noticed that this story is from 2006; somehow I came across it today and took it to be new. No matter!]
Their relationship began in October last year, when zookeepers presented the hamster to the snake as a meal.
The rat snake, however, refused to eat the rodent. The two now share a cage, and the hamster sometimes falls asleep sitting on top of his natural foe.
[…]The hamster was initially offered to Aochan, the two-year-old rat snake, because it was refusing to eat frozen mice.
[…]The apparent friendship between the snake and hamster is one of many reported bonds spanning the divide between predator and prey.
Really? Continue reading “And the snake shall lie down with the hamster …”
At this point, we have the following narrative on the events of last July 16th in Cambridge, Massachusetts — one which appears to have won majority acceptance by the public (and I think rightly so): A neighbor called the police on seeing two men forcing their way into a house on her street; a house which had been broken into just weeks earlier. (Obviously she failed to recognize Professor Gates as the legitimate resident — but this is hardly a huge surprise these days, in an urban environment, when so few people really know their neighbors.)
Sgt. Jim Crowley, who happened to be very nearby, attended to the scene. Professor Gates, seeing a white police officer in his doorway and hearing a request to step outside of his home to talk, took deep umbrage on an immediate basis. The encounter progressed with Gates yelling accusations and demands, and Sgt. Crowley attempting to ascertain the facts of the situation. It ended with Gates pursuing Sgt. Crowley out of the house, still yelling and carrying-on, in the presence of other police officers and the general public, and with the arrest of Gates for disorderly conduct.
In the days following, competing narratives attempted to hold sway Continue reading “What if it hadn’t been Sgt. Crowley (who met Professor Gates that fateful day)?”
The headline from Haaretz describes the results of a survey conducted in Israel: ‘1 in 4 Israelis would consider leaving country if Iran gets nukes’.
Some 23 percent of Israelis would consider leaving the country if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, according to a poll conducted on behalf of the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University.
Some 85 percent of respondents said they feared the Islamic Republic would obtain an atomic bomb, 57 percent believed the new U.S. initiative to engage in dialogue with Tehran would fail and 41 percent believed Israel should strike Iran’s nuclear installations without waiting to see whether or how the talks develop.
“The findings are worrying because they reflect an exaggerated and unnecessary fear,” Prof. David Menashri, the head of the Center, said.
It’s nice that the professor thinks it to be an exaggerated fear, and it’s also completely irrelevant, of-course. Put a fear of imminent annihilation over people, and over their children, and they will react. Many will be stoic, of-course. But many will vote with their feet. It’s just human nature.
Back in December, when rockets were flying from Gaza into southern Israel, and the world was condemning the Israelis for finally taking tough military action against Hamas, I wrote the following in this space:
Hamas’s strategy of firing missiles into southern Israel cannot be understood in isolation. Although in isolation it is bad enough. No country on earth can tolerate these kinds of open attacks against its citizens and long remain a nation at all. But Hamas in the south is acting with a strategy similar to Hezbollah in the north. Both receive support from the Iranians, who are themselves pursuing a nuclear weapon and talking publicly of wiping Israel off the map. Theirs can be seen as a three-pronged strategy for the destruction of Israel without ever having to fight the Israeli Defense Forces in one enormous battle. It is a war of attrition, of threat and of fear. Israeli residents in the south of that tiny country must evacuate their homes under threat of Hamas missiles, just as residents of the north had to in 2006 as Hezbollah’s rockets were launched over the border (and just as they might have to again at any time). The mere fact that Iran is pursuing an atomic bomb and talking about the destruction of Israel puts a threat of doom over the heads of all Israelis. Imagine how magnified that will be once Iran actually achieves the bomb, or announces that it has achieved it. Imagine trying to raise a family when enemy missiles, with ever-increasing range and lethality, are closing in from the south and from the north, and when a nation that openly wishes your family’s death achieves the practical capability to cause it. Imagine trying to carry on a business — trying to carry on anything at all. The Iranian strategy, with the enthusiastic support of Hamas and Hezbollah, is to simply make life in Israel untenable for a critical mass of Jews, who will then either go somewhere else (those that have somewhere else to go) or give up the fight. A conventional war of nations and of armies, of the kind that Israel has won repeatedly in its history since 1948, is therefore avoided. Or, at the least, postponed until Israel is much more weakened and demoralized.
It is not an outlandish strategy. It is a very practical one, and it is one that is being pursued with some effect.
Israel simply cannot afford the kind of crisis in confidence over her future that the fact of an Iranian nuclear bomb would create, most of all among her own citizens. That is why Israel will act against Iran before the day that Ahmadinejad can stand up and credibly say, “Our glorious Islamic Republic now has the ultimate weapon and we cannot be touched.” The consequences of Israeli military action against Iran may well include difficulties for everyone else, but the circumstances permit Netanyahu — or any Israeli leader — no other choice.
That is, unless President Obama’s sweet overtures achieve their purpose of getting the Iranian regime to reverse course and demonstrably renounce its pursuit of nuclear energy and weapons. The hour is getting late.
Yesterday, it was reported that another victim of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center by Islamic jihadists was positively identified, seven and a half years after his death:
The city medical examiner’s office says 54-year-old Manuel Emilio Mejia has been identified from remains found at the World Trade Center site in the months after the 2001 terrorist attack.
Mejia was a kitchen worker at Windows on the World, the restaurant on top of the trade center’s north tower.
Manuel Emilio Mejia was the 1,624th victim to be identified. More than 1,100 others still have not been positively identified.
It’s not easy to find information on Mr. Mejia, other than that he was a 54 year-old man, an immigrant from — I believe — Ecuador [correction: he was Dominican, according to the comment left below], and he worked in the kitchen at that Windows on the World restaurant, in the north tower of the World Trade Center. (A little bit about Windows on the World is at this link.) Although tributes to many of the victims are easy enough to find online, I can’t find anything personalized to Mr. Mejia: no photographs, no written remembrances. I wouldn’t assume from this that no one misses him. I can’t say. It seems very plausible that his loved ones are not the kind of people who spend a lot of time doing things on the internet.
My wife and I had a drink a couple of times at Windows on the World. It wasn’t really our bag; too expensive, basically. We assumed the food was priced at a big premium due to the unique location. But having a drink there, at the top of the world, was a kick, as I’m sure it was for countless other people. The Twin Towers were not what I’d call grand architecture, but they certainly filled their space, and gave work to Manuel Emilio Mejia and so many others. They were never so present in my consciousness as in the days after the attack, when the smell of the smoldering ruins, the grave of thousands of innocent people, swept up through Manhattan.
Also yesterday, it was reported that a jury had found that Ward Churchill was wrongfully terminated from his position as a professor at the University of Colorado.
The Denver jury awarded him just $1 in damages. A judge will decide later whether he gets his job back, reports the AP. […] The professor had claimed he was fired for exercising his free speech rights; the university had claimed that it was not about his views on Sept. 11 victims but that he had engaged in faulty and dishonest research. The jury today decided his firing was indeed about the contents of his essay.
In the essay, published one day after the attacks but widely disseminated years later, Churchill called those killed in WTC “little Eichmanns,” referring to the Nazi bureaucrat who ran the Holocaust machinery.
Adolf Eichmann has been described as the “architect of the Holocaust.” From this online biography:
Eichmann took a keen interest in Auschwitz from its founding and visited there on numerous occasions. He helped Höss select the site for the gas chambers, approved the use of Zyklon-B, and witnessed the extermination process.
At the death camps, all belongings were taken from Jews and processed. Wedding rings, eye glasses, shoes, gold fillings, clothing and even hair shaven from women served to enrich the SS, with the proceeds funneled into secret Reichsbank accounts.
With boundless enthusiasm for his task and fanatical efficiency, Eichmann travelled throughout the Reich coordinating the Final Solution, insuring a steady supply of trainloads of Jews to the killing centers of occupied Poland where the numbers tallied into the millions as the war in Europe dragged on.
As little as I know about Mr. Manuel Emilio Mejia, I am at least confident that he was not any kind of Adolf Eichmann. May he rest in peace and may the Good Lord have mercy on his soul.
Ward Churchill — for me at least — deserves no further comment.
Rabbi Leon Klenicki died this past January 25th, and may he rest in peace. By all accounts he was a giant for the last several decades in the field of Jewish/Christian dialogue.
In 1989, a book was published called “Believing Today: Jew & Christian in Conversation.” It was in effect a conversation between Rabbi Klenicki and Richard John Neuhaus (then a Lutheran pastor). I’ve found this little book to be endlessly fascinating, and I get some fresh illumination every time I pick it up again. Neither Klenicki nor Neuhaus are pretending to represent every practitioner of their respective faiths; it is just what it is: a conversation between two intelligent and knowledgeable believers who value being faithful to their respective traditions. There is no subject from which the two men shy away, be it the history of Christian anti-Semitism, the holocaust, the Messiah, the secularizing impulses of American Jewry, etc, etc. The book is not about holding hands and pretending that everyone believes the same things, but rather about understanding differences, and probing for genuine and firmly-based common ground. Which seem like good goals for Jewish/Christian relations in general. Continue reading “Rabbi Leon Klenicki”
Three days after the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, massive crowds converge on Washington DC, on the anniversary of Roe v Wade, in the name of the most fundamental civil and human right of all, i.e, life itself. Continue reading “March for Life”
From Norway to Greece to Ireland and places in-between, the protests against Israel’s right to defend its citizens are ubiquitous and quite ugly.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in cities across Europe and the Middle East on Saturday to protest against Israel’s offensive in Gaza, clashing with police when some rallies turned violent.
Police in riot gear confronted around 20,000 protesters brandishing banners and Palestinian flags outside the Israeli embassy in central London, while Oslo police used tear gas against rock-throwing activists in the Norwegian capital.
About 30,000 took to the streets of Paris, many demonstrators wearing Palestinian keffiyah headscarves and chanting “we are all Palestinians”, “Israel murderer” and “peace”. Some threw stones at police and burnt Israeli flags.
[…]More than 40,000 people protested against the Gaza assault in towns across Germany, while demonstrators at the Israeli embassy in Dublin threw shoes and carried a mock coffin, covered with pictures of wounded or dead Palestinian children.
“The haunting images of homes wrecked, of terrified families existing among rubble in shock and despair, and of endless funerals, has rightly outraged people across the world,” said Gerry Adams, president of nationalist party Sinn Fein.
In Rome, Italy, a trade union has promoted the idea of boycotting Jewish owned shops.
The all too obvious Bob Dylan lyric applies all too well.
Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace,
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease.
Now, they wouldn’t hurt a fly.
To hurt one they would weep.
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep.
He’s the neighborhood bully
…
Addendum: For a strikingly hard-eyed and incisive look at the war that Hamas has demanded Israel wage against it, read Spengler’s latest: Suicide by Israel. Excerpt:
To insist that Israel desist entirely from military activities that have a high probability of causing civilian casualties is doubly hypocritical. That would demand, in effect, that Israel value the lives of Palestinian civilians more than those of its own civilians, who are subject to rocket bombardment. That is something no state in the world can do, and it is silly to ask it. Israel has less reason than any other on Earth to heed such a demand. Never has the state of Israel been offered mercy by its enemies, nor has it any reason to expect it. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain by following the almost-golden rule: “Do unto others before they do unto you.”
Israel is in the unenviable position of mopping up a problem created by the inertia of the international community. Fourth-generation “refugees” living in towns officially designated as “camps” never have existed under international law until the world community found it expedient to defer the “Palestinian problem” into the indefinite future. The Gazans cannot be economically viable on their 139 square miles of sand, and the humiliation of perpetual dependency and poverty makes a political solution unattainable.
Without any of the irony of Bob Dylan’s song from 1983, a writer named Gideon Levy in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz characterizes Israel as a “neighborhood bully” for its military action against Hamas in Gaza.
Once again, Israel’s violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom.
What began yesterday in Gaza is a war crime and the foolishness of a country. History’s bitter irony: A government that went to a futile war two months after its establishment – today nearly everyone acknowledges as much – embarks on another doomed war two months before the end of its term.
[…]Blood will now flow like water. Besieged and impoverished Gaza, the city of refugees, will pay the main price. But blood will also be unnecessarily spilled on our side. In its foolishness, Hamas brought this on itself and on its people, but this does not excuse Israel’s overreaction.
The history of the Middle East is repeating itself with despairing precision. Just the frequency is increasing. If we enjoyed nine years of quiet between the Yom Kippur War and the First Lebanon War, now we launch wars every two years.
Blood will flow like water, the writer tells his readers, and “the history of the Middle East repeats itself.” These things are inarguable, but merely stating them does nothing other than provide a kind of sanctimonious pedestal from which the observer can criticize those taking action.
Does Israel’s response to the persistent rain of rockets and mortars over its southern border “exceed all proportion”? This is the now-familiar theme being pursued by Israel’s critics across the capitals of the world — with the noteworthy and crucial exception, so far, of Washington D.C..
Hamas’s strategy of firing missiles into southern Israel cannot be understood in isolation. Although in isolation it is bad enough. No country on earth can tolerate these kinds of open attacks against its citizens and long remain a nation at all. But Hamas in the south is acting with a strategy similar to Hezbollah in the north. Both receive support from the Iranians, who are themselves pursuing a nuclear weapon and talking publicly of wiping Israel off the map. Theirs can be seen as a three-pronged strategy for the destruction of Israel without ever having to fight the Israeli Defense Forces in one enormous battle. It is a war of attrition, of threat and of fear. Israeli residents in the south of that tiny country must evacuate their homes under threat of Hamas missiles, just as residents of the north had to in 2006 as Hezbollah’s rockets were launched over the border (and just as they might have to again at any time). The mere fact that Iran is pursuing an atomic bomb and talking about the destruction of Israel puts a threat of doom over the heads of all Israelis. Imagine how magnified that will be once Iran actually achieves the bomb, or announces that it has achieved it. Imagine trying to raise a family when enemy missiles, with ever-increasing range and lethality, are closing in from the south and from the north, and when a nation that openly wishes your family’s death achieves the practical capability to cause it. Imagine trying to carry on a business — trying to carry on anything at all. The Iranian strategy, with the enthusiastic support of Hamas and Hezbollah, is to simply make life in Israel untenable for a critical mass of Jews, who will then either go somewhere else (those that have somewhere else to go) or give up the fight. A conventional war of nations and of armies, of the kind that Israel has won repeatedly in its history since 1948, is therefore avoided. Or, at the least, postponed until Israel is much more weakened and demoralized.
It is not an outlandish strategy. It is a very practical one, and it is one that is being pursued with some effect. If you wonder how a people’s confidence and will to fight can be broken down by literally interminable threats and violence, just read Mr. Levy’s column again.
Now, considering that Hamas’s missiles are part of an overall strategy for the total destruction of Israel, one has to ask the question: What is a “proportional response” to those who are attempting to destroy your country?
A response reflecting a natural will to live and to fight would be a response which defeats that enemy. The Israelis in the south need to be assured that their nation has the capability of defending them from these attacks, or else they simply have no reason to stay. The Israelis in the north are surely watching, and all Israelis are watching — even those who, like Mr. Levy, seem to have already given up the will to fight.
Though his use of the term “neighborhood bully” in his column seems to echo Bob Dylan’s song (from his album Infidels), I myself would guess that Mr. Levy has never heard Dylan’s Neighborhood Bully. In reality, it is Dylan’s song that is actually a response — albeit 25 years ahead of schedule — to Mr. Levy’s column, and to similar sentiments with which Israelis (uniquely among nations of the earth) need to contend day after day and year after year. Running out the clock, time standing still. It sure is a funny thing.
…
The neighborhood bully just lives to survive,
He’s criticized and condemned for being alive.
He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin,
He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.
He’s the neighborhood bully.
…
Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace,
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease.
Now, they wouldn’t hurt a fly.
To hurt one they would weep.
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep.
He’s the neighborhood bully.
Not to pick on Greil Marcus (we almost never do that here), but Expecting Rain linked to something he just wrote for Salon about the current election.
My whole life, my upbringing, education, travel and talk, from working in Congress as an intern at the height of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s to every election in which I’ve ever voted, makes it all but impossible for me to believe that, on Tuesday, a single state will turn its face toward the face of a black man and name him president of the United States.
I disagree with Marcus about that. I’ve long believed that America could elect a black president. However, I did always think that the first black president was more likely to be a conservative. The results of today’s election will have something to say about all this, obviously.
What I find difficult to believe is that America will elect someone as extremely liberal and as lacking in true accomplishment as Senator Barack Obama. The truth about the race issue is this: Were it not for Barack Obama being of mixed race, he would not be the Democratic nominee at this point in time. He would be just another young liberal white politician from Chicago, and his odds of getting on a national ticket would be remote. It is his mixed race that has made people see him as a “transformational figure.” Certainly, his ability to give a good speech has helped him too, but without the powerful symbolism of his racial background, I do not believe he would have overcome the barriers presented by his political background. As it is, his political identity — based on his record — has been a secondary story.
Greil Marcus’s article provides another reason for McCain supporters to have hope, beyond Marcus’s apparent belief that Americans are irredeemably racist. It is in lines like this one: “The more likely an Obama victory seems, the more monstrous the alternative has become.” To Marcus and many others, it is simply unacceptable, it is morally wrong, for anyone to vote for John McCain. Obama must be elected. It is what we as Americans owe to history, apparently. This kind of attitude has not been lost on many ordinary Americans when they have been polled and asked for whom they intend to vote: that there is a right answer and a wrong answer. I’ve seen it reported that 80% of those first reached by some pollsters have refused to respond.
It is the very intolerance of the alternative reflected in this article by Greil Marcus (and in the behavior of academics who tear up McCain/Palin signs) that can give us hope that many quiet, ordinary Americans — the kind who don’t like picking fights or getting into yelling matches with wild-eyed liberals and rock critics — will come out today and peacefully but decisively express themselves in the polling booth.
There’s been some bad press for former President Jimmy Carter lately, in reaction to his book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” Alan Dershowitz has notably eviscerated in him in columns here and here. Fourteen of the advisors on the board of Jimmy’s Carter Center have just resigned in protest at what they call his “malicious advocacy” and his “strident” positions as expressed in the book.
Putting aside Carter’s visceral antipathy towards Israel, which to me is beyond debate at this point in time, there was recently a stunning example of just how spectacularly ungracious and self-serving this former president is. I’d seen him before in the kinds of public settings where graciousness is de rigeur, displaying very little of it (e.g. the opening of someone else’s presidential library). It has long seemed to me that he never got over being defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980, and that his bitterness has only festered and grown through the years, as much as he tries to hide it behind that trademarked smile. Still, despite my extremely low expectations, even I was taken aback when I turned on C-Span recently and saw him attempting to use his eulogy for President Gerald Ford to score what can only be called political and self-aggrandizing points.
His eulogy for Ford followed that of Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld, as you would expect, spoke movingly in tribute to Ford (that’s generally the idea with eulogies). Carter took a somewhat different tack. His eulogy was far more about himself than it was about Gerald Ford. The general thrust of his references to Ford seemed designed to illustrate all the many ways in which old Jerry agreed with Jimmy Carter. Gerald Ford, although only a few feet away, was ill-situated to correct the record in any respect. Continue reading “Jimmy Carter: Let’s have a moment of silence in memory of ME”
You might think the above is the obvious headline, as Israel faces invasions Continue reading “Israel Under Attack”
