A Jewish commentator for Commentary Magazine, Jennifer Rubin, wrote that Jews don't like Sarah Palin because we're snobs. Jennifer, a Jew, wrote this in Commentary, a Jewish magazine.
Jonathan Chait, a Jew at TNR, wrote a response at his new blog there taking Jennifer to task, and rightly so IMHO.
I have published comments left at TNR in the past, most notably from williamyard because he cracks me up and is so smart. He's not the only one. jhildner1 seems to have his writing chops too:
I think that I speak for most Jews when I say that one of the things that really caused us to hate Palin as a candidate, and as a person, and not merely view her as utterly lacking any of the substantive qualities one typically seeks in candidates for high office, is that she is what backward Americans refer to as a "straight-shooter." She is without affect or complicated agenda. She is "honest," like a slow Jewish child born prior to the days of genetics counseling. We Jews instinctively react negatively to this quality, as we are inclined toward deceit, unprincipled intellectual argument, and insidiously pragmatic and "values"-free pursuits geared toward enriching our people in the form of cash money and, if possible, destroying the traditional moral fabric of Christian societies such as the United States. Hence our firm grip upon the legal profession and entertainment industry.
Another thing about Palin worried us greatly. That is, the possibility and probability that, with the people's interest at heart, she would recommend taking unfavorable actions in relation to the financial sector of the economy, which we control, and through which we control most of what occurs in the world. Such action might have included refraining from giving us a lot of money -- an unacceptable setback. Although Barack Obama is a Negro Muslim, we knew, based upon secret communications held at our headquarters in the subterranean Gold Vault at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, that he would continue to offer a level of support to the financial industry not justified by what backward Americans refer to as "common sense." (Yes, "common," indeed! Ha ha.) Anyway, Obama wants Malia to go to Juilliard, which we agreed to facilitate. We also taught him how to be a lousy and annoying golfer.
FDL put up this comparison of the Senate bill and the Dutch health care system in response to Jonathan Cohn's TNR post. Don't let anyone tell you the Senate is headed in the right direction.
You liberal-fascist-socialist-Maoist-sadist-somnambulists evidently are so far drunk with ObamaKoolAid that you simply fail to see the reality of the MediGulag that Obamalin is implementing. Get this choice provision: section 308 and 1889 of the House Bill (page 1024) provide for - I am not kidding - the reimbursement, to a patient, of the costs of doctors the patient visits in the course of diagnosing a malady. Even the densest liberal-fascist-anally-poisoned-Obamabot knows that "patient" really means "john", doctor is short hand for "gay prostitute" and "diagnosis" is street slang for meth-and-anal-sex. The Bill is all about - and nothing butt - taking hard-earned tax dollars from God-fearing and taxpaying Christians and subsidizing drug-crazed orgies on Fire Island or in fundamentalist church basements in Arkansas.
Over at The Plank they're talking the economy. These are some smart mofos! Here is the latest bit of brilliance from a commenter in response to this comment:
Is there a name for our form of government in which the forms of democracy are observed while all meaningful power lies with money? If so, I don't know what it is, but there should be one.
And the response:
teplukhin2you said:
roi - that's easy: Oligarchy. This is what prevails in Russia, the middle east, most of Latin America, including the pseudo-socialist states like Chavez's Venezuela and Fidel's Cuba, where the oligarchs wear fatigues.
Oligarchy in the present environment denotes that polity where the commanding heights of the economy are controlled by a few actors who move frictionlessly in and out of the halls of political power.
The main political idea of the oligarchs is of a continuum between the state and private enterprise. Unlike fascism, which seeks to organize and co-opt powerful private groups (labor, industrial sectors, the church, etc) into "corporate" entities existing in uneasy harmony with the reigning political party, the oligarchs have little interest in society as such and are motivated less by power than by the desire for financial gain. They are happy to preserve a two- or multi-party system, so long as each side recognizes that political power is merely a stepping stone to the lucrative, state-affiliated key industries of investment banking and political lobbying.
While the twin oligarchic parties in this country fight bitterly over social issues, on the core issue of access to financial power, the parties share a fundamental belief that the state is subservient to financial interests which themselves are viewed as the the key driver of economic growth and the ultimate arbiter of wise policy.
Some oligarchs extend this belief further to the idea that the nation = the state, and that those who control the state-- the permanent political class, which rotates in and out of power into lobbying firms and corporate suites closely aligned to the state-- have sole authority for the state's direction, scope and resources. In this political model, the public is redirected away from fundamental economic and financial discussions toward socio-cultural battles via feigned outrage, "dog whistles", phony controversies.
in sum, the animating principles of Oligarchy are:
-- lack of transparency
-- redirecting the public gaze to non-economic issues
-- the blurring of the state and the private financial sector
-- sweetheart $$$ deals for the permanent political class
Meanwhile, our government-as-Davos model proceeds apace, with each party ensuring that it can land safely in a seven- or eight-figure salaried position for an investment or lobbying firm, as Rahm Emanuel, the Bojangles of the Banking Business, did in 1998 when he schlepped his DNC donor Rolodex to an investment fund for $18m in three years, or Tom Daschle did in 2006, on his way to $5m in quick money, or Donna Shalala and Walter Mondale did, as directors of that poster child for corporate misgovernance and theft, United Health, or the new ass't HHS sec'y, Ms DeParle did when she left the public sector to run an fund investing in, you guessed it, health care companies, or....
TNR's Damon Linker has a post up regaling the Warren pick to give the invocation at the inauguration:
Nicely Done
I completely understand why Andrew is upset by Obama's choice to have Rick Warren deliver the inaugural invocation. As Andrew points out, Warren sides with Christian orthodoxy in opposing gay marriage, and he has refrained from condemning the Bush administration's policy on torture. Both of those are major issues for Andrew.
But Obama's a politician, and the Warren pick is just the latest sign that he's an exceedingly shrewd one (as Andrew concedes). Warren is beloved by mainstream evangelicals, who have helped him to sell millions of books extolling a fairly anodyne form of American Protestantism. (Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell he is not.) It is in Obama's interest (and the Democrats') to peel as many moderate evangelicals away from the GOP as he can. Giving Warren such a prominent (but purely symbolic) place in the inauguration is a politically cost-free way of furthering this partisan agenda. (As for whether having Warren deliver the invocation is an example of "Christianism," I'd only note that Obama didn't start the tradition of including prayers in these civic occasions. And his own speech is guaranteed to be more restrained in this regard than others have been.)
Now, Andrew might be right that Obama will not prove to be a champion of gay civil rights (at least when it comes to the issue of marriage). But we can be absolutely sure that no presidential candidate of the current Republican Party would be anything other than a rabid opponent of these rights. And that means: What benefits Obama and the Democrats -- and what harms the Republicans -- contributes (if perhaps only negatively) to Andrew's cause. And that should be what counts.
Lot's of pissed off progressives are leaving comments. Wandrycer1, another of my favorite commenters, left this in response:
I hate having this reduced down to that tired left/right media packaging. It's not that simple - there's an excellent libertarian and even Republican case against bigotry - government has no business in the marriage business for ANY reason, no business making policy based on religious doctrines, let alone those based on bigotry (see, Bill of Rights, Constitution, equal protection, etc). The left certainly doesn't have the market cornered on right and wrong.
But they do have the right idea in this case on Constitutionality, civil liberties and moral authority. It's not just "left" that thinks this, it's human beings across all political spectrums.
Everyone, especially women - is getting their piece of the Obama as Savior pie it seems. Everyone except gays and liberals of course - and Obama owes them so much. They started the Obama fire, built it when no one else was, No one worked harder for Obama that LGBT folks.
Now with this loathsome, bigoted man speaking for Obama at a sacred time, LGBT folk aren't just getting kicked to the curb. They are getting kicked in the teeth. Why, so Obama can boot lick to the crazies? Change we can believe in my arse! He's just like all the other Dem spineless boobs in the Senate.
Pardon my french but *uck the "good politics" idea, I challenge that concept. Having the first black President - a former civil rights attorney no less - insult a feverishly devoted constituency (although not anymore), he just shows he stands for nothing in the end and will betray and slap a friend across the face without a second thought. Perhaps Obama never really did stand for anything, fine. Just take your yes we can and put it where the sun don't shine.
I canceled my trip to DC for his swearing in, its not much, but I will not be a place celebrating a historic achievement over bigotry while a bigot blesses him. Its too much.[I fixed a couple typos]
Damon Linker is a putz. Wandrycer1 speaks for me, and many of my friends. We worked hard to get Obama elected, and now he kicks us in the teeth. Rick Warren is useless politically--or was, until he became the guy giving the invocation (let's not talk about how stoopid it is to even have an invocation). Now, if Obama were to do the right thing and uninvite Warren, he will feel the pain. We're stuck with it now. Well, Barack, so are you!
Update:Obama's Response:
He almost convinced me; but, alas, he didn't. You?
I think Palin was at her best when she stared into the camera earnestly, dropped the snark, and tied key words, objects, subjects, and predicates together as she adressed the public as adults. But this only came out in the glinting of very few moments. The majority of her split narrative smacked of snark, a character that comes off sounding like a waitress at a neo-Wymoing suburban steakhouse. Perhaps Longhorn's. This downhome folksiness, of course, is Bushian, and belies any attempts she made to distinguish McCain/Palin from Bush/Cheney. That Steve Schmidt thinks it is adventageous to have Palin employ such snark when the subject is about something as grave as say, the Iraq War or the illiquidity of "toxic" assets, it is more than cliche and disingenuous; it is macabre. Perhaps addressing the public as a winking trophy-wife curries favor among evangelical types, but it probably pisses off everyone else they were hoping to influence.
This is all fine with me, though. I am losing five bucks in watching her stay in the race, which is a small price to pay (knocks on wood) in exchange for a Democrat landslide.
The New Republic has 2 worthy posters (well, one is a commenter):
Why Palin Scares Me
Before I get to that, let me explain what I'm not scared of, which is that Palin has somehow altered the demographics of the race. I have a hard time believing that female Hillary supporters, or Rust Belt men, are suddenly racing to support McCain because of Palin. For one thing, vice presidential nominees almost never attract demographic groups that the nominee can't attract on his own. People vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. More importantly, if that historical pattern somehow broke down this year, it would probably hurt the GOP ticket more than it would help. People may love Sarah Palin, but they don't think she's ready to be president.
The reason Palin scares me has more to do with mechanics than demographics: Palin is such a sensation, and draws such large crowds, that anything she says--particularly attacks on Obama--immediately become part of the campaign conversation. On the other hand, both because she has a knack for delivering barbs with a smile, and because voters don't quite see her as presidential material, McCain suffers less blowback than he would if a more traditional running mate were saying the same things. Simply put, Palin has a much bigger megaphone than traditional running mates, but gets held to a lower standard.
That's a huge problem for the Obama campaign. Among other things, it really complicates the question of how to respond. You'd normally want to ignore your opponent's running mate in these situations, but it's hard to because of her reach. And when you do respond--say, when Obama points out that she's been making stuff up--there's very little impact, because no one's conditioning their support for McCain on Palin. Call her the phantom menace.
Obama's best hope is that Palin's novelty wears off soon, at which point we can go back to ignoring running mates the way we've been ignoring Joe Biden the last week or so. I'm honestly not sure what he does in the meantime.
Palin doesn't scare me; rather, she confirms what I believe about democracies.
Democracies are doomed to self-destruct because the people who run them (the electorate) eventually find themselves, collectively, on the defensive. When that happens, they'll hire (i.e. vote for) the person who best ignore the rising waters while promising to order the Titanic's band to keep playing. Voters do not want to know what is really going on. That's the scary part. Otherwise the messenger gets killed.
Thus we have a nation (the United States of America) that is shipping over $1.5 billion a day in oil money alone overseas, mostly to people who loathe us and our way of life. To give one example: we enrich Venezuela, which now gives five times what the United States does in foreign aid to Latin America, with plenty of anti-American propaganda to go along with the aid. In other words, we are paying people to tell other people we're assholes. Just like we fund the madrassas in Pakistan and elsewhere, like we recently paid for the Cossacks to plunder Georgia.
We will not stop doing this, no matter what any candidate says. We can't, because we lack the will.
We live on a planet whose biosphere we are seriously fucking with. We will not stop doing this, either. We don't want to. It's not in our character to do so. Any candidate who will tell us, straight up, what we have to do to fix things (i.e. sacrifice) will get slaughtered at the polls.
Health care? Entitlements? Balanced budget? Hahahahaha, oh, y'all crack me up!
Nice piece in Bloomberg the other day about the fact that our taxes will be going up, big time, over the next decade or so, regardless of who's elected. And yet both Obama and McCain are promising tax cuts. Give me a fucking break.
Like any great nation in steep decline, we seek those who will sing us their lullabies--hush little babies don't you cry, Sarah's gonna sing you a lullabye. Why the hell should Palin tell us the truth about anything? We can't handle the truth, like the man said.
Barack Obama has got to realize he won't win the Lying Game or the Blaming Game. He has to go on the offensive by attacking the one group he's been afraid to attack before: the people whose votes he wants. He needs to say, straight up, "Get what, folks? We're fucked. It's either gonna be bad or it's gonna be worse. With me it's gonna be bad, and here's how: I'm gonna raise your taxes and you'll get little in return. You're gonna continue to shoot up millions of barrels of oil before I can get you into detox. Iran, Russia, Venezuela et al. are gonna yank your chains and there's not a God damned thing you or me or anybody else can do about it. In fact, the only thing I'll promise you under an Obama Administration is that a hell of a lot of America's families will get sober, truly sober, for the first time since the late 1800s when we started getting high on cheap energy."
"Any questions? Okay, line up in alpha order, drop your pants, bend over and wait for the body cavity search. And shut the fuck up."
