View 647 November 1 - 7, 2010 (original) (raw)
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Thursday, November 4, 2010
A matter that was delayed by the election news, but a matter of real importance.
A long time reader asked for comments on this:
Obama's Not So Hidden Agenda
http://townhall.com/columnists/FrankGaffney/
2010/10/29/obamas_not_so_hidden_agenda/page/full/Frank Gaffney <http://townhall.com/columnists/FrankGaffney/>
... ties between the United States and Israel - far and away America's most important and loyal friend in the Middle East - have improved lately from the nadir to which Mr. Obama plunged them since he took office. That has nothing to do, however, with a change of heart or agenda on the part of the President and his administration.
Rather, it is a reflection of a cynical calculation forced upon the Obama White House by its panicked congressional allies. Already laboring under the backbreaking burden of their association with a president and his agenda that have become huge liabilities, Democrats on Capitol Hill faced wholesale defections of their Jewish constituents and funders if their party's leader persisted in his assault on Israel.
Worse yet, he will be able to take advantage of a vehicle for effecting the so-called "two state solution," no matter how strenuously Israel and its friends in Washington object: The Palestinians will simply unilaterally declare themselves a state and ask for international recognition - and Mr. Obama will accede to that request.
Such a "two-state solution" will make another regional war vastly more likely, not prevent it. Yet, the Obama administration is committed to pursuing that goal as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made excruciatingly clear in a pandering speech to the American Task Force on Palestine last week.
For a long time I have been critical of Israel's handling of the Palestine situation, particularly of their treatment of Christian Palestinians, and at one time my "advice" such as it was, was for Israel to decide what territories it wanted, build a wall around that, and leave the rest to the people who lived there: let them establish a state if that was their will, but hold that state accountable to the usual obligations of a state, and face the consequences of acts of war against its neighbors. The Israelis tried that in Gaza. The result was thousands of rockets aimed in the general direction of inhabited areas of Israel. Imagine the consequences if Cuba began firing rockets at Florida, of if San Diego were daily subjected to unguided rockets and mortar fire from Tijuana. Now what?
I look at Middle East policy from an American viewpoint. One unchangeable factor in American policy decisions is the emotional attachment of a large segment of the American population to Israel. That is thoroughly understandable, and a view shared by many Christians in America. The United States and Israel are two countries, and while they have a number of common interests, their national interests are not identical. This would not matter if Israel were just another nation, or were Israel located in a less strategic area, but then if wishes were jobs there would be little unemployment. The world is as it is.
As I often do I have asked for Joel Rosenberg's comments on the above:
Hi, Jerry -- thanks for asking my opinion.
I wish I thought Gaffney was right; but it's much, much worse than he says.
Barrack Hussein Obama, when it comes to the Middle East, is basically James Baker, with a backflip and a suntan. Where Baker didn't care -- privately; he made other noises in public -- about the Jewish community, because he knew that they'd all vote for the other side, Obama doesn't care -- privately; he makes other noises in public -- about the Jewish community, because he knows that the mainstream Jewish community is, basically, Obamagirl with yarmulkes.
The relationship between the mainstream American Jewish community and the Democratic party is basically that of a battered wife and the battering husband. He keeps saying that he loves her, but keeps beating her, every time he loses his temper, and then promises never to do it again.
Not that it matters much; she's emotionally dependent on him, and on some level thinks she deserves it.
I think it's fair to say that mainstream liberal Jews are pro-Israel, to the extent that they are, out of tribal concerns and fantasy. It's not out of a hardheaded conclusion that the interests of the US and Israel are inevitably tied. (Yes, I know; this is an area where you and I disagree, to some small extent -- I think the US national interest is more closely aligned with Israel's than you do. That's okay; I obviously disagree with you, but I respect your position. Our disagreements on this are, if I may flatter myself, a dispute among patriots.)
Which is why so much of the American Jewish community has, for all of my life and longer, treated the hardheaded realists in Israel -- Begin, back in the day; Sharon, up until he lost his nerve; Bibi, right now -- as an embarrassment.
Israel is, to most of them, a fantasy playland, where Jews don't have to listen in the middle of the night for cries of Raus, Juden! and can -- and often do, and only should -- defend themselves without any brutal necessities coming into play.
Both of which are lies, as Gaffney points out -- Israelis in Judea and Samaria are hearing just those cries, and if some of those beyond the Green Line don't, it's because they're just too battle-shocked to listen.
For most American Jews, the intimate involvement of the US and Israel isn't out of a deep sense of shared common interests and the ability of each partner to protect the others, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts as long as each party actually does its job . . .
It's a favor to be curried from an administration.
Gaffney "Democrats on Capitol Hill faced wholesale defections of their Jewish constituents and funders if their party's leader persisted in his assault on Israel."
Nah. What they faced is louder protests, while the same people still tamely write the same checks, and then still herd themselves to the polls to vote for the same Democrats...
It's disheartening to me that so many American Jews spat on the outstretched hand of GWB -- the most hard-headedly pro-Israel US politician since Harry S Truman -- to support Gore and Kerry, and then turned away from the (admittedly much less so) John McCain to embrace Obama. The notion that Obama's treachery against Israel -- which Gaffney very clearly demonstrates -- should be answered with quiet protests and smaller checks is, well, different. I dunno; maybe in the 2012 campaign, Obama will promise to reduce his bowing to Saudi "royalty" by 20% -- and the Jewish community (with a very few exceptions) will swoon.
The hopes of the nation don't, alas, have a lot to do with the common sense of the American Jewish community on matters political, with the willingness of what Ezra Levant calls the "Official Jews" to take a hard-headed look at their politicians. There isn't any such willingness, just a simulation of it.
And that's about where it is, alas: in my view, Gaffney's an optimist.
Best to the family,
jr
I am not sure I have much to add to that. I do believe that Republicans have a more emotional attachment to Israel than the American Left including the President. It was not always so.
I do note that a great deal of innovation now comes from American corporation laboratories and think tanks in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Given the American school system this is likely to gain importance.
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The Country Club Republicans are blaming the Tea Party for not taking the Senate and defeating Harry Reid. I find that astonishing although I suppose I ought not be surprised. There is no evidence I know of that the results in Delaware, a deeply blue state where the race was for Joe Biden's seat, would have been different had there been an establishment Republican. It would still have been a key race subject to a great deal of Democratic attention and funding. It would have taken resources away from the rest of the country as the establishment felt obligated to pour in more in support of one of their own. As it happened, the result was interesting: the Tea Party supported O'Donnell and allowed her to run so effective a campaign that for a while there looked to be a real chance that the Democrats would lose that seat. The Democrats had to use their big guns in Delaware "just in case."
It was similar in Nevada, where it was predictable that Nevada would draw national resources from both the Unions and the Democratic establishment. It was thrilling to think that the Senate President Pro Tem might actually be defeated. It was also inevitable that this would be an expensive election decided in large part by the ground game.
I would be a lot happier had these two senate races gone the other way. It would make reform -- actually, transformation -- of the Republican leadership a great deal more certain and a lot easier to accomplish. That didn't happen.
What did happen was a repudiation of the radical transformation of the United States into European style socialism, sixty House seats, and a transformation of the legislative majorities in many states. There are two factors at work here: the rejection of the Democrat agenda, and the vital energy of the Tea Party which turned Delaware and Nevada into actual contests, and even, for a few glorious moments, gave California Republicans some hope.
Now it is time to make sure the Republican leadership understands that this landslide wasn't a vote of confidence in them: It was a last chance opportunity.
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The Fed is printing more money. I still have, somewhere, a Weimar Republic stamp, originally 3 pfennig (first class letter) overprinted several times with a final value of 3 million marks. It was still a first class letter stamp. Three million marks. One wonders when our stamps will have the same value -- and will "forever" stamps still work when the overprinting begins here? I recall once having a stamp overprinted to mird millionen (presumably an abbreviation for milliard) but that seems to have vanished with my teen-age (not very valuable) stamp collection which I gave up sometime in high school. I still wonder if today's "forever" stamps will be honored when, after the government keeps printing money to finance pension plans, we find that running the printing presses has inevitable consequences.
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Regarding the Delaware election: Delaware has one member of the House, and thus both the Senate and the House are statewide races. In both the Senate and the House elections, the Democrat candidate got 57% of the vote. In 2006 the Democratic candidate got 70% of the vote. In 2002 Biden got 58%. In 2008 Joe Biden, running for Senate (as well as for VP of the US) won by 65% against -- Christine O'Donnell, who was considered a sacrificial lamb in a race that no one believed would be any kind of contest. We can all wish that the country has become so fed up that deep blue states like Delaware would go Republican or at least Tea Party, but the likelihood always was that Delaware would go Democrat in 2010 as it did in 2002, 2006, and 2008.