Back in the mid-1990s, American seniors were mobilized into action to resist a plan to reform the Medicare system - in fairly modest ways - by scare tactics and misrepresentations.  That time, of course, the losers of the exchange were the Republicans, who wanted to look for ways to cut down on fraud and waste, slow the rate of payment increases, and impose some level of cost-benefit analysis into the process of decision-making for Medicare funded procedures (sound familiar?)  At one point, a proposal to slow the rate of increased spending was being publicly presented as a plan to slash Medicare spending.  Some movies are criticized for being derivative - this kind of argument is a second derivative.

The Republicans called it "Mediscare," and no one did it better than Clinton during the 1996 election.  I vividly remember the outrage of a friend of mine, at the time a Republican Party operative in an East Coast state known for its colorful politics.  He was incensed at the dishonesty, the bare primacy of politics over policy, the use of appeals to raw emotion to stifle any serious discussion of a critically important policy issue.  (Side note:  the friend in question later moved from politics to banking, switched to the Democratic Party, and converted to Judaism.  Um, I think I feel good about it.)  Of course, the Republicans got their turn with Hillarycare, and Harry and Louise.  I just saw a really sad story about the actress who played Louise in those commercials; apparently she later couldn't get work because directors would say "I'm not hiring the woman who killed health care reform."

And now we have the Obamacare "debate."  In one sense, this is just another chapter of the bipartisan tradition of demagoguing social policy in the name of party politics.  And Americans in large numbers go for it every time.  On a side note, what is it about us?  I'm not actually sure Americans are capable of meaningful rational collective except in the face of imminent and total disaster.  I think it's part of the anarchic strand of Romantic madness in the American character that comes down to us from Tom Paine and Daniel Shays.  Perfectly sober Bohemian Socialists, well-disciplined Italian Anarchists, long-suffering Slovak peasant farmers, decent, hard-working Irish nationalist - they all came to America, abandoned their Left revolutionary roots, and turned into populist whack jobs.  And then they became Nativists, which is even more miraculous.  I remember a news story about a controversy over a mosque in Hamtramck, Michigan.  One local resident, in particular, complained that the call to prayer being broadcast from the minaret was un-American - "if they're going to live in America, why can't they be more American," she asked?  I saw a video of the interview.  While the video shows, that the newspaper interview does not, is that she made this statement standing in front of a church whose lettering was in Ukrainian.  But I digress.

So there is nothing new about Mediscare-style arguments, rambunctious and easily manipulated populists, or Astroturf-style mobilizations.  But there is something about this debate that feels different, something more intense.  I kept trying to put my finger on it, to find a phrase to capture the elusive qualitative difference between these scare tactics and those of political operatives past.  And then Samantha Bee capture the zeitgeist of the moment in a single pithy phrase:  "universal single-payer shamanistic death panels."

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Dear Abe,

You've been at the forefront of American Jewish criticism of President Obama's renewed push for Israeli-Arab peace.   After a recent meeting with the President along with 15 other Jewish leaders, you confessed that you continue "to feel uncomfortable with the assumptions that underlie President Obama's approach" to Israel and the Middle East. 

You've charged that President Obama's outreach to the Muslim world is being conducted "at Israel's expense."   For Obama, you say, "there is a need for the US to demonstrate that it can be tough with Israel to win back credibility with Muslims. We are seeing it already on the settlement issue..." 

But being tough on Netanyahu about settlements is not at "Israel's expense."  It is a blessing to Israel, given the grave threat which many Israeli military and political leaders have said the settlements pose to Israel's security, to the very possibility of a two-state solution to its conflict with the Palestinians, and to Israel's ability to remain a democratic Jewish state.   For the last eight years, we've had a president who recklessly squandered American prestige.   He had no credibility to broker an Israeli-Arab accommodation.   He made little more than token efforts to do so, when not trumpeting his outright opposition to negotiations with Syria, despite the unanimous advice of Israel's intelligence and military brass, and its political leadership.  An American president who has regained the confidence of the Arab and Muslim worlds is quite simply a strategic asset to Israel.   American pressure over settlements is an investment in Israel's future, a gift to the Zionist project.   

Nor does pressure need to be applied simultaneously and in equal doses to satisfy some artificial notion of even-handedness.   As Larry Derfner points out in the Jerusalem Post, "The Palestinian Authority has been cracking down on Hamas for a long while, it kept the West Bank miraculously quiet during Operation Cast Lead, it's enforcing the law in city after city... If the PA wasn't giving us peace and we were giving it land - we'd be right to demand that Obama put all the pressure on the Palestinians and none on us.  But the fact is that Abbas and the PA are giving us about as much peace as they're capable of, while we aren't planning on giving them an inch; instead, we're thinking only about how much more conquered land Obama will let us build on."

You've said that President Obama's "notion that we have to pressure Israel to show our bona fides to the Arabs is to buy into their distorted version of history."   You've accused the president of ignoring the history of Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.   But such criticisms stand reality on its head.   Obama understands all too well why past peace efforts have failed.  His new way is designed to overcome the errors and missteps of the past.  By adopting a regional approach, he is more likely to gain wide Arab backing for historic Palestinian compromises on Jerusalem and refugees, issues which resonate throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.   By enlisting the help of Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, he stands a better chance of bringing about a unified Fatah-Hamas Palestinian government that will hew to the international and Arab consensus:  a government that will have both the will and the wherewithal to honor its commitments under a peace accord with Israel. 

Obama recognizes that the US cannot help forge peace between Israelis and Palestinians while allowing Syria and Iran to continue to stoke Hezbollah and Hamas extremism. While Bush added fuel to the fires of Arab and Muslim radicalism, Obama is cutting off their oxygen supply, sapping Hezbollah's political power and reinforcing the impetus towards pragmatism in Hamas.  Obama is finally ending the practice, perfected under Bush, of saying one thing--whether about settlements or the president's commitment to help negotiate an accord--and then doing something else. 

You hold up President Bush's "enunciation of the need for a Palestinian state, the road map, Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005, and the Annapolis process in 2007" as having "provided opportunities for progress toward peace if the Palestinians were truly interested."  You highlight what "Israel has done in recent years to advance peace:  Israel's offer of a Palestinian state at Camp David in 2000, its unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, also in 2000, and its disengagement from Gaza were all steps upon which there could have been building toward peace."  Instead, you conclude, "the Palestinians responded with rejection, suicide bombs and kidnappings, extremist politics and rockets."

But this Manichean narrative of righteous Israelis and evil Palestinians - the stock-in-trade of right-wing hasbarah - is a cartoon version of what went wrong, ignoring true causes and effects.  Annapolis did not fail because the Palestinians refused to accept another "generous Israeli offer," but because President Bush did nothing to help the parties bridge the gaps, failing to apply diplomatic tools to encourage their agreement to a US-proposed compromise, as President Carter successfully did with Egypt and Israel.   Similarly, Bush did nothing to hold either party accountable for their commitments under the Road Map, even after promising to "ride herd" on both as he left the company of Sharon and Abbas at Aqaba. 

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As published in the Jerusalem Report, May 18, 2009

With the maiden visit of newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington set for May 18, signs of an immanent clash between U.S. President Barack Obama and the hardline Israeli leader abound.

While both leaders will look to find common ground, papering over differences with diplomatic formulas, the rift may be unavoidable. The impending tension recalls previous encounters between Likud leaders and U.S. presidents from both parties.  This time the tremors will center not only on the Palestinian fault line, but also on Iran.

Netanyahu views the development of an Iranian uranium enrichment capacity as an existential threat to Israel that must be squelched. He is certain that Obama's "dialogue" with Iran is bound to fail, rendering inevitable an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear sites. An Israeli attack will be preceded by more punishing economic penalties on Iran of the kind mooted lately on Capitol Hill, and backed by AIPAC, the hawkish pro-Israel lobby. But sanctions-on-steroids are unlikely to blunt Iran's quest to join the nuclear club, serving only to clear away the final hurdles blocking a final push for preemptive Israeli military action.

Obama's way represents nothing less than a revolution in the Middle East: not the stillborn new Middle East the Bush Administration imagined could be midwifed by the force of American and Israeli arms, but a new order that will arise from the centripetal forces unleashed by a political earthquake. How does Obama hope to set in motion this tectonic realignment? Reading the tea leaves, one can divine an unfolding pattern whose contours will only be more fully revealed when Obama delivers a major speech to the Arab and Muslim worlds in Egypt on June 4, following meetings with Netanyahu, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.  

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[cross-posted at The Huffington Post]

There is a lot of talk these days about the idea that Bush, Cheney, and members of their administration should be prosecuted for violations of American criminal and international law.  The arguments in favor of prosecution are straightforward:  laws were broken, and the rule of law requires that lawbreakers be held accountable.  Some of the arguments against prosecutions are singularly unpersuasive:  I have recently heard arguments to the effect that "prosecutions would make us look weak," "we should focus on the economy and jobs," or "they didn't do anything different from what every other administration has done."  These are terrible arguments.  Having principles is not a sign of weakness, especially when your main international project is to persuade the world that you have rediscovered the principle of having principles.  As for the economy - I am not of the belief that the combined resources of the national government are insufficient to do two things at once.  And the allegations against the Bush administration and its leaders go very far indeed beyond the usual recriminations or questions.

And yet my own conclusion is that prosecutions are a very bad idea.  There are two reasons why, one that has to do with the nature of the alleged crimes and the other that has to do with the consequences for the country of conducting prosecutions.  

On the first score, it is critical to distinguish between the exercise of legitimate political authority in ways that lead to violations of law from conspiracies formed for the specific purpose of violating American or international law for the sake of the illegal action itself.  Let's take two sets of cases.  The first category would include Rwandan government officials coordinating genocidal violence, Serbian commanders ordering ethnic cleansing or mass killings in Srebrenica, and Sudanese officials arranging the arming of Janjaweed gangs.  It would include government officials who tortured dissidents and political opponents, or used torture routinely.  And it would also include cases of officials whose crimes had nothing to do with governing, those who loot their country's treasuries or engage in straightforward corruption.

But the key element here is not the severity of the conduct, it is the nature of the intent that is involved.  Cases that deserve prosecution are cases in which government officials set out to engage in a pattern of illegal conduct for the sake of that illegal conduct.  It would also include officials in the Reagan administration who conspired to violate the Boland Amendment, and obviously this category of cases includes the various criminal conspiracies involved in Watergate.  Those were not conspiracies to commit acts in the belief that under the particular circumstances of the specific cases involved they were not crimes, nor did they involve actions that were judged to be necessary in the context of the legitimate exercise of political authority. The Iran Contra scandal and Watergate were simple conspiracies to commit crimes because the participants wanted to see those crimes committed.  These were - and remain - appropriate and proper cases for prosecution.

The second category comprises cases that are not appropriate subjects for prosecution.  These are cases that involve government officials who pursue legitimate goals through means that others consider criminal.  In international law this category includes the decision to bomb German and Japanese cities during World War II, and the Clinton administration's targeting of Yugoslavia's power grid.  By extension of the logic, the decisions by Israeli officials and military commanders to target civilian infrastructure in Lebanon 2006 and Gaza this year also fall into this second category.  For examples involving domestic law, this would be the category in which to place Lincoln's imposition of an embargo prior to a congressional declaration of war.  In principle, this second category of cases include those of every government official who has ever enforced a law that was later to be found to be unconstitutional; unless these officials enforced these laws in order to undermine the Constitution -- which is not an unknown occurrence - their actions should not result in criminal penalties.   Lawyers talk about these questions in terms of categories of a mental state that is specified as an elements of a crime, or the technical requirements of conspiracy.  Those arguments are relevant in all cases, but I am proposing that they take on special salience when the targets of a prosecution are elected officials.  

I would argue that the actions of Bush, Cheney, and others fall into the second category.  Bush and Cheney sought legal counsel.  Okay, they sought legal cover, but they got it from legal professionals (whether those professionals should be allowed to retain their professional status is another question).  The goal of their efforts was the pursuit of legitimate governmental purposes, and there is at least room for honest and serious people to disagree about whether and to what extent their actions were in violation of the law.  These characterizations are debatable, to be sure, and if someone wants to argue that the actions of Bush and Cheney properly fall into the first rather than the second category, I am open to persuasion.  But the claim that any and all actions by government officials that are in violation of laws warrant criminal prosecutions by subsequent administrations distorts the meaning and purpose of those laws.  

The first argument against prosecutions, then, is legal; not a technical legal argument, but an argument about the nature and purpose of laws and their use in the prosecution of government officials.  The second reason for opposing prosecution is political.  I am not worried about the nation might appear weak if prosecutions were to go forward, I am worried about the possibility that the nation truly has been  profoundly weakened by the divisive and viciously punitive form of political partisanship that the GOP introduced in the 1990s and brought to a sick apotheosis with the impeachment of President Clinton.   In some meaningful and important sense, I'm not sure the nation as we understand it would survive the experience.  Certainly the idea of an orderly transition of power would be put at risk if the assumption were that incoming administrations should be expected to examine the record of their predecessors with an eye toward prosecution.   At a minimum, the likely enormous expansion in the use of the President's power of granting power would denigrate that process.  Alternatively, the effective transformation of criminal and international law into weapons to be employed against political opponents would threaten to deprive those sanctions of all meaning.  And the hope of dissolving the lines of tribe is hard to maintain if one is faced by the prospect that if the other side wins an election the leaders whom you supported will be sent to prison.

I do not say any of this in any particular spirit of bipartisanship.  For all the myriad faults of past and present Democratic leaderships, the Republican Party has a great deal to answer for with respect to the degradation of the American democratic system that it unleashed over the past fifteen years.  The GOP model of politics as total war, the search for permanent majorities, "pay to play," and the K Street Project, and all the rest were not merely unseemly, they were strategies that called the basic premises of democratic governance into question.  Nor are these attitudes unrelated to the actions by Bush, Cheney, et. al., that would be subject to prosecution.  The mentality of "with us or against us" absolutism and the belief in the absolute moral necessity of victory that were so evident in domestic politics had everything to do with what was done elsewhere.  But prosecutions of past administration members does not lead us out of that mire, it only reinforces the validity of the mindset among those whose candidate and party lost the most recent electoral contest.  

The basic principle of a democracy is that even if we lost today, we might win tomorrow, and our political opponents do not thereby become our enemies.  It has not always been clear to me that the Bush administration and its supporters understand that distinction.  President Obama seems to get it, and he seems to understand that prosecutions would be a step in the wrong direction.  The use of criminal prosecutions against members of prior administration for actions committed in the course of governing is a step in the wrong direction.  I respect and admire many people who are calling for prosecutions.  But I respectfully disagree.

Lia Romeo, co-author of 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy.  She shared all sorts of misery with us, including the miserable beginning to her book deal, the misery of being at the inauguration ceremonies, the misery we come into contact with every day, the misery in history, and, last but by all means not least, the misery of New York.  Not quite on Xanax yet?  Buy the book!

In this historic year, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day uncannily falls on the day before we inaugurate America's first African-American president.  On August 28, 1963, Dr. King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.  In another interesting twist of fate, on the same exact day 45 years later, the Democratic Party officially became the first major American political party to nominate an African-American (or anyone with a minority background, for that matter) candidate for President. And on November 4, 2008, in what many called a realization of Dr. King's dream, Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States.

Below are videos to show how America had its dream, and arrived at "Yes We Can."

 

 

 

 

Lia Romeo, co-author of 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, is guest blogging this week as one of Jewcy's Lit Klatsch bloggers. The book, which Lia wrote with her brother, Nick, is a list of 11,002 reasons to be unhappy, a spoof on 14,000 Things to Be Happy About.

It was 1998, and I was feeling depressed.  I was a senior in high school, I had small breasts and big glasses, and boys didn't like me.  A friend, thinking I needed some cheering up, gifted me with a copy of a little white book with a bright, crayoned smiley face on the spine: 14,000 Things to Be Happy About.

14,000 Things to Be Happy About, which has sold over a million copies, is a stream-of-consciousness list of life's small joys.  "Baseball."  "Beef brisket."  "Believing in one great love."  And 13,997 more in the same vein. 

It failed to resonate. 

My only experience with baseball was being last-picked in elementary school, I knew too much about industrial meat processing to enjoy eating beef anything, and if there was only one great love, I was fairly sure I'd never find it.

My brother Nick suggested that it would be funny to write a parody: 14,000 Things to Be Miserable About.  I thought that was a fantastic idea.

And so we did nothing about it.  For the next ten years.

Then, about a year ago, Nick and I were sitting around drinking wine, and we decided to look up literary agents that specialized in humor books.  By this time, the ubiquity of the internet had made it easy to do so without investing $27.99 in a Writer's Market directory, which would have meant relying on the roaches under my sink as my primary protein source for the next week.  

So we put together a query letter, and, shortly thereafter, we had a book deal.  That was when we realized that the downside of getting a book deal is that we'd actually have to write a book. 

Specifically, we'd have to make a list of 11,002 things to be miserable about.  (Our publisher, Abrams Image, cut the number down from the original 14,000 so the book could be sold at a lower price point.)  We'd each have to come up with 5,501 things that sucked - more, actually, because inevitably there were some duplicates.  ("Mad Cow Disease."  "Machiavelli."  "The Mongol invasion.")

We started by passing a legal pad back and forth across my kitchen table.  Nick wrote: "Death."  I wrote: "Life."  Nick wrote: "Hitler."  I wrote: "Erectile dysfunction."   And we went from there.

Of course, spending six months working on the book - and then the past three months writing and maintaining a blog (a collection of the most depressing facts, figures, news, photos, and video from around the globe) - may not have been the healthiest thing for my state of mind.  The other night I went to a friend's party, and while everyone else was singing "Happy Birthday," I was thinking about the artificial flavorings in the cake. 

And so tomorrow, in honor of a historic and exciting day in our country's history, I'll present a list of Things About the Inauguration to Be Miserable About.  I'm a huge Obama fan, and I'm as excited about the new administration as anybody... but I've become an expert at seeing the misery in just about anything.

Lia Romeo, co-author of 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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Preview 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, visit the book's website, or see book trailers and videos on YouTube.

An article in today's House and Home section of the New York Times made me squeamish and guilty.  It was about families that not only allow, but enjoy having senior mothers in the house.  Inspired by the fact that Michelle Obama's 71-year-old mom will be moving into the White House, the article suggests that it is only this new crop of middle aged boomers who are beyond the hangups of the hippie-era parents who invented the generation gap.  Without much of a fuss, adult children are accepting parents into their homes these days, in some ways not unlike African tribal societies, where elders are made to feel useful and respected. 

It pains me to admit it, but the idea of having either of my parents living with me when they were still alive seemed like a fate worse than death. 

In my book, Assisted Loving, which is about me helping my father find love after my mother died, there's a scene in which he proposes we move in together.  He suggests buying us a house in the Hamptons, an area I've always loved and not all that far from our Long Island home of 50 years.  Idealistic as it might have been as a proposal for bringing together a bachelor son and newly single, octogenarian Dad, I could not imagine it.  He would talk my ear off.  He would want to control my life as a writer, pounding me with suggestions for what I should and shouldn't write.  He was a slob who left trails of bank statements across any surface he touched, along with free newspapers, half eaten sandwiches, dirty clothes and bridge contract sheets.  How could I stomach waking up in the morning to find him at my breakfast table pouring orange juice and Splenda into his tea?  It would be impossible, in my mind, to see him before the first cup of coffee in that ski parka he liked to wear over his pajamas until noon.  And what if he were to pick up my phone calls or intercept my mail?  He was a terribly friendly man who wanted to be heard, and wanted to feel useful.  There was no way I was going to live under the same roof with him.  I could never even consider the notion of letting him get that close to me and shanghai my autonomous bachelor life.  

President son-in-lawYet, my parents had done such a thing years before for my mother's father.  Grandpa Moe, a craggy, old-school, tough little retired salesman was there, across the hall from my childhood bedroom when I moved home after college.  Grandpa Moe wasn't much of a presence my whole childhood.  He lived far away in upstate New York with a second wife, with whom my mother and her sisters were not close.  When his second wife died,  he needed company and care.  So he moved in with my parents.  

At first, I was peeved.  Why did I have to share my bathroom with this old man?  Worse, why did I let him push me into getting up several days a week at 7 am to take him to Minyan?  In the course of our year under my parents roof, I had to force myself to pretend to like him - a conservative Jewish man at the end of his life who read the National Enquirer for his news, and drummed his fingers on our formica kitchen table because he had nothing else to do.  By pretending to like him, and forcing myself to converse with him, I became interested and amused by his humor, and I did come to like him in the five years or so he was in the house.  I also came to like the minyans I drove him too, seeing, at his shaky side, a hidden world of little old Long Island men reveling in their devotion to Judaism.

Seeing my parents reamain so patient and welcoming to an old chauvinist who they had plenty of reasons to find disagreeable, gave me new respect for them as people.  Their careful upbringing of my brother and me was one thing.  Now they were doing it again, this time for the older generation.  My father, who had every reason to silence Grandpa Moe as he talked through the news on TV, was terribly patient with him, never raising his voice.  

So of course, it plagued me when my father suggested he and I live together when he was 80, and alone and in need of companionship.  Never, I told him.  Instead, I went into full gear in helping him in his search for new love, thinking if he wasn't so lonely then I wouldn't have to worry.  Of course, it turned out that the more I concerned myself about helping him find love, the more I came to love him myself.  Pimping for my father was the best way for me to learn about his charms.  Just not while we were living under the same roof.    

Today's New York Times article about mothers living with their children.

Bob Morris, author of Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating with My Dad, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

 

With just one week to go until the Inauguration (you know, the historic one, Barack Obama, first African-American president, blah blah blah) everyone is still trying to get in on the action.  I was even considering making a pilgrimage to America's political holy land until I realized I'd have to sleep in a cold car.  But I may be in luck! That is, if I have the patience to room with a brooding Republican on the eve of a Democratic high holiday.  One ad on Cragislist just goes to show that profilt has no prejudice:

In a search of a room in DC so that you can spend Jan. 20 standing in the bitter winter cold with thousands of like-minded souls watching the historic transfer of power from one Harvard grad to another? Look no further.

Me: Heartless, greedy right-wing oppressive type looking to make a buck.

You: Obama's election was Christmas/your first kiss/May Day all wrapped into one. You dutifully wore his button -- which you have yet to remove -- contributed money to his campaign from your non-profit job and chanted "yes we can" as if it were the 11th commandment. A strange void now exists in your life and -- like an old hippie looking to recapture the spirit of Woodstock -- you are undertaking a pilgramage to Washington for one last gulp of the Kool-Aid.

Along with my bedroom you will have access to the house's many amenities including cable television (not that you watch much TV) for viewing Keith Olberman's latest unhinged rants and CNN in high-def. Wireless internet means that the Huffington Post and DailyKos are only a click away on your MacBook. American flags and other patriotic paraphernalia in the room can be removed upon request.

The house is located in the diverse neighborhood of Adams Morgan with people of many different skin pigmentations that will allow you to revel in your tolerance. Rest assured, however, that this diversity does not extend to ideology and that you are sure to march lock-step with the prevailing sentiment ensuring that your most strongly held beliefs remain unchallenged.

Easily accessible subway and bus stops will help ensure a minimal carbon footprint while fair trade coffee is never more than a few steps away at any number of independently-owned establishments. Nearby non-chain bookstores similarly mean that tomes such as Mao's Little Red Book, Chomsky's latest masterpiece or additional copies of The Audacity of Hope can be easily purchased either for yourself or as early holiday shopping.

Rather than state a price I am requesting that you bid on this fabulous opportunity to ensure profit maximization on my part so that I can better weather the Bush Recession.

 

Among early Zionist writers, Ze'ev Jabotinsky stood out for the cruelty and compete amorality of his arguments.  His position was simple:  we want territory in Palestine, there is an indigenous Palestinian people living in that territory, we must crush them by violence until they surrender to our will. "As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups."  Jabotinsky was forthright about the nature of Zionism:  it was "colonialism," a program to be carried out behind "a wall of bayonets."  

There was almost something bracing about his brutal honesty:  that Zionism was an essentially imperialist enterprise, that Jews simply should not care about non-Jews, that "right" is determined by reasoning backwards from what we want to what is required to achieve it.  "We hold that Zionism is moral and just," he wrote.  "And since it is moral and just, justice must be done . . . There is no other morality."  Jews should make no other kinds of claims (Jabotinsky was particularly contemptuous of the Jewish religion, which he described as "a preserved corpse" in the Diaspora:  it is interesting that today it is in Israel that Judaism most obviously fits his description.)  Israel was not to be a center of Jewish culture or learning or the inculcation of virtue, it needed no justification beyond "we want it and we have bayonets."

To bolster his arguments later, however, Jabotinsky also made an argument based on "justice":  "The soil does not belong to those who possess land in excess but to those who do not possess any.  It is an act of simple justice to alienate part of their land from those nations who are numbered among the great landowners of the world, in order to provide a place of refuge for a homeless, wandering people."  The weird perversity of this notion of justice becomes apparent (if it isn't already) as soon as one tries to apply it in any other context.  Catholics have a country in Southern Ireland - therefore Northern Irish Protestants should be entitled to drive out all Catholics from the area?  There is no Romany state, nor a Breton state nor a Druze state nor a Kurdish nor a Basque state; therefore it would be justifiable to drive Americans, Frenchmen, or Spaniards, Turks, Lebanese or Israelis out of their homes in order to create a new state for each of these peoples?  There is no Bahai state nore a Wiccan state nor a Sufi state.  Therefore it would be justifiable to drive Christians, Muslims and Jews out of their homes to create space for these new states?  Jabotinsky's answer was, effectively, a shrug.

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To continue our discussion of different kinds of power, I am thrilled Obama has brought Samantha Power, who was forced to resign from Team Obama during the campaign for calling Hillary Clinton "a monster," back on board as part of the transition team--for the office of the Secretary of State.

If you don't know about Samantha Power, here is an excerpt from Esquire:

Power, a journalist and now a professor at Harvard, who won a Pulitzer prize for her 2003 book on America's response to genocide, A Problem from Hell, and who helped kick-start the Save Darfur movement, has a vision that will help shape 21st-century American foreign policy. What Norman Podhoretz is to the neocon movement Power is to this as-yet-unnamed force. (Neo-internationalism? Moral interventionism? Machiavellian idealism?) She espouses talks--firm talks--with rogue states, a respect for international law, and a moral and pragmatic duty to intervene--with troops if necessary--in cases of genocide.

I'm happy she's back for a number of reasons: she's passionate about human dignity and has a complex and pragmatic view of how to secure it. In other words, she's tough and smart. Heart and head. Has a plan. A view. And her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, is endlessly relevant, and gives her unique insight into seemingly intractable hostilities, like the one between Israel and Palestine.

Though she's been lambasted by Zionist groups who say she wants to do everything from fund Islamic terrorists to invade Israel, her official position is that the US should engage in an immediate and intensified involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In her view, the situation "has to be resolved first of all for the benefit of the parties involved, but also to prevent 'cynical Arab leaders' from exploiting the conflict as a tool for justifying their policies."

This seems to be a rational approach.

But mostly I feel good about Power's return because Obama's ability to bring her back in a leadership role in HRC's realm says he feels free as POTUS to make controversial decisions and continue to mix up ideological perspectives in the hopes of reaching different conclusions. He appears to be using the power vested in him to follow his agenda of change, rather than kowtow to personal gripes, party lines, or general consensus.

Obama appears to believe the two women, though different in their approach, are stronger together than apart.

Do you agree?

Given the persistence of wars around the globe and the bewildering, destructive, unravelling of our economy, we're clearly living in an age of anxiety. And at the same time, we share a newly ignited sense of awe. Never would I, for one, have imagined that only thirty-five years after we sang "We Shall Overcome" at the Washington Mall and that Martin Luther King, Jr., shared his dream with the thousands of us there that day, that America would overwhelmingly choose a black President. Today, a photo of the young, thoughtful President-elect glowed from the newspaper's front page, arguably the most intelligent, emotionally mature, menschlik man to occupy the White House in way too long a time.

Into the midst of our stormy fusion of anxiety and elation, worry and joy, the harvest festival of Thanksgiving arrives. It seems fitting that the recently much-referenced Abraham Lincoln is the one who formalized this national expression of gratitude. Exactly a century before the March on Washington, Lincoln declared that, despite the anguish of the still-raging Civil War, abundant blessings were nevertheless evident in the land; we should acknowledge them, said Lincoln, express our gratitude for them, remembering at the very same time the "widows, orphans, mourners and sufferers" of the war. As we celebrate the richness of our harvest, we should also pray, he said, that our nation's wounds be healed.

Coming in the midst of a tumult of feeling, this Thanksgiving, too, seems a profoundly apt time to acknowledge the emotional complexity that Lincoln articulated with such unadorned eloquence 145 years ago. But we need words, we need a shared language, that enables us to do so, a way in that also has depth, resonance, history.  

I believe we can find those words within the too often neglected psalms of our own liturgy.

Why the psalms? Because the psalms offer a language for giving voice to the longings within us - whether for love, faith, wholeness, peace, understanding, justice or joy - and for our victories and our failures. They give us a way to express the sheer intensity of life itself, promising a world of ultimate justice and stability upon which, despite the vagaries of life, we can rely. And, if we pay careful attention, a psalm that at first glance psalm seems so unassuming can articulate the whole at once troubling and exhilarating terrain of this particular moment.

Psalm 126, traditionally recited as a prelude to the "Blessing after Meals" on the Sabbath and on festivals, seems to me a truly powerful one to recite, as well, before our Thanksgiving meal this year. It's a psalm that evokes the gamut of emotion: remembrance of loss and the joy of return; the struggle to survive, but also the sheer plenitude and simplicity of life at its best. It conjures up the hard realities and possible sorrows of labor, as we work hard so that our land will flourish -- but also the ecstasy of reward, when a generous earth offers us streams even in the desert, and fields richly golden and alive with the glory of ripened grain. Above all, Psalm 126 suggests that the spiritual and earthly are not separate realms; that every crust of bread is a miracle, most of all those crusts of bread which have been hard won. It seems to me that's a message we are needing to hear again right now.

Set in the new context of American Thanksgiving, moreover, Psalm 126 reverberates with new meanings. "Zion" now can be experienced as an emblem of all of our ideals, a way of being or state of mind in which we are spiritually, psychologically, and emotionally most at home - a letting go of the "low dishonest decade" we've just been through, dominated by "mismanagement and grief," to borrow the words of W.H. Auden. To be out of exile, to be home, in this context now suggests a renewed sense of faith in the future - a sense of great gratitude, and at the same time an expression of hope. Notice, too, that the sorrow that the psalm describes is far from existential despair: it is not a paralyzed sorrow, preventing any positive action. For even as there is sorrow, there is also sowing - a sense of future promise.

Though in general Jews are not a praying people, reciting Psalm 126 together this year as we begin our Thanksgiving meal can remind us again of the miracle of everyday life, of how the everyday is infused with the holy, and the most mundane with the sacred. Most of all, it can remind us of the never-to-be-taken-for-granted blessedness of laughter filling our mouths, and tongues singing with joy. It reminds us that, though times may be difficult, our labors will bear fruit again.  

Psalm 126

A song of ascent.

When Adonai restored Zion, we were like dreamers.

Laughter filled our mouths and our tongues sang with joy.

Then the nations of the world said, "Adonai has done great things for them!"

Adonai did so great things for us-and we were glad.

O Adonai, restore our well-being now, like streams like that flow in the Negev.

So those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy -

And those who walk along weeping, bearing a bag of seeds,

Will surely come home singing with joy, bearing sheaves.

 

Blessed be your basket and your kneading bowl (Deut 28:5).

 

All images by artist Barbara Nesin

The intellectual and political bankruptcy of the Bushadministration just keeps getting worse; for the next two months, that may be the most dangerous bankruptcy crisis of all.

Secretary Paulson announced on Wednesday, November 11th thatthe $700 billion that Congress authorized under the Troubled Asset Reclamation Program for the purchase of asset-based securities will not be used to purchaseany asset-based securities. Instead, the Treasury will continue to pump money into banks.  This follows on the announcement of arenegotiation of the loan to AIG on terms much more favorable to the company -- and much less favorable to the taxpayer -- than had been negotiatedearlier.  That announcement followson the gift of $125 billion to nine large banks and another $125 to publicly traded regional banks.  At this point it seems salient to ask, what the hell is going on? 

The Bush administration is sticking to its story even as thestory itself changes literally by the day.  The TARP program was sold to Congress as an absolute andimmediate necessity to avert total and immediate calamity:  at the meeting of 20 nations to discuss global finance on Saturday President Bush declared that but for hisadministrations "decisive measures" there was a danger of a depression worse than the Great Depression.  Thiswas the hard sell that Paulson brought to Congress.  We had to immediately purchase toxic assets or a Depressionwould ensue, there would be riots in the streets, cephalopods would fall from the sky.  "Really, seriously," said Paulson at the time, "this is absolutely the only thing we can do and there'sno time for discussion."  Now he issaying "actually, we have a better idea."  In response to this urgency, we remember (it was all so long ago) Congress provide $350 billion,with a fast track procedure by which Paulson can ask for $350 billionmore.  Now Paulson has told us thatthe entire plan to buy distressed assets is scrapped. 

Then there's the the AIG loan, a single company bailout that is a third the size of the entire TARP funding to date.  Originally, AIG received an $85 billion 2-year bridge loan, of which $61 billion has been drawn.  The rate on the loan was Libor + 8.5%-- currently around 10.6% -- plus fees. In addition, AIG has drawn approximately $20 billion from a securitieslending facility created by the Fed of New York called the Commercial Paper Funding Facility.  Timothy Geithner, the president and CEO of the New York Federal Reserve, is on Obama's short list for a potential Treasury Secretary (I support him rather than his one-time mentor Lawrence Summers.) The new plan, in addition to a new infusion of $40 billion, involves renegotiating the loan to a 5 year term at lower interest.  Good for AIG, not so good for the taxpayers.

The revised AIG loan also involves creating two new facilities by the New York Fed. One is designed to purchase asset-based securities, using $1 billion supplied by AIG and $22.5 billion supplied by the New York Fed.  With that program in place, as AIG executives put it in a conference call, "AIG's remaining exposure to losses from its U.S. securities lending program will be limited to declines in market value prior to the closing of this entity and our $1 billion of funding."  In other words: no worries, the taxpayers will eat the losses.  The second new facility will provide $30 billion to purchase up to $70 billion in credit default swaps at discounted prices, to accompany $5 billion in subordinated funding to come from AIG.  (I have discussed thebackground issues involved in earlier posts.)  The way these programs are written, they can extend beyond AIG in the future, or at least provide a model.

Critics of the revised AIG plan were outraged, and with good reason.  But what we learned fromWednesday's announcements was that the renegotiation of AIG's loan was part of a larger reconsideration of economic strategery. Paulson said that the administration will not, after all, use any of the $700 billion that was provided under the TARP program to purchase asset-based securities:  instead, the Treasury will continue to use $250 billion of the program to purchase stock in banks and is looking tomake $50 billion of the TARP funds to help lenders who issue credit cards,student loans and car loans. Paulson said that the consumer credit market urgently needs support.  "This market, which is vital for lending and growth, has for all practical purposesground to a halt." Of the $2.6 trillion in consumer credit outstanding in September, finance companies were the third largest holders with $600 billionafter banks ($845bn) and ABS ($678b). Paulson explained that the administration has decided that using billions of dollars to buy troubled assets is not, after all, "not the most effective way" to use the $700 billion bailout package.

The manner in which this extraordinary announcement was made was striking.  I have to assume that members of Congress are going to be absolutely enraged when they come back for their lame duck session.  Andthe bait-and-switch aspects of the deal are not restricted to the original hardsell.  Among the objections to the TARP plan from the outset was the argument that it was funneling money to thevery entities that had created the problems.  That objection is only made stronger by the declaration that buying assets is not, after all, as important as funneling money to banks.  In the face of a certain political firestorm, did Paulson first present this to congressional leaders and secure their support, or attempt to secure support from the incoming Obama team?  Don't be ridiculous.  No more than he was initially willing to identify the nine banks receiving $125 billion in public money, and no morethan Neel Kashkari - the "bailout czar" and yet another Goldman, Sachs alumnus- was willing to entertain questions after a speech on Monday.  The absolute arrogance of the Bush Executive has not diminished a whit, nor has its fondness for secrecy nor itscomplete contempt for Congress.

Wait, there's more of the more of the same:  the Bush administration is vying to go beyond the "worst administration in history" to become "the worst administration of which the human imagination can conceive.."  Paulson also praised a new set of guidelines issued Wednesday by the Federal Reserve and other bank regulators.  These guidelines "urgeinstitutions to continue lending to credit worthy borrowers and to work with mortgage borrowers to avoid defaults," and "encourage the banks to set dividend payments for shareholders and compensation for executives with the current crisis in mind.  The Fed, FDIC, and Office of Thrift Supervision all announced that all financial institutions are expected to follow the new guidelines, even those not receiving federal assistance.  Note the verbs here.  "Urge," "encourage,""expected"; it's the same old completely discredited game of voluntary compliance.  We are still not learning from the British example that the way to get banks to lend money is to provide them with funds on the condition that they lend them.  We -- our President and his administration -- are still parroting the tired old "magic of the markets" line even after Alan Greenspan's mea culpa (he was shocked, shocked, to learn that people will not voluntarily forego profit in order to preserve the integrity of the system.)

Keep in mind that the TARP program is not by any means the only game in town.  All told, the government has allocated more than $2 trillion so far, including more than $1.4 trillion in loans to banks in the form of purchases of collateral, most of itsubsequent to September 14th rules changes that lowered collateral requirements for lending; the monthly limit on these loans was increased to $300 billion in October.  $29 billion went into aspecial lending facility to save Bear Stearns so that JP Morgan could take themover.  $11.4 billion has been drawndown so far from the FDIC's deposit insurance fund after 19 bank failures in 2008.  $3.9 billion went to states and municipalities in assistance to buy up and rehabilitate foreclosed properties, and there have already been $9 billion so far in government purchases of student loans from private lenders. A whole series of programs directed at money market funds, more than $1.1 trillion just since September14th when the rules governing collateral for such loans were relaxed. These loans have been made under 11 different programs, 8 of which have been createdin the past 15 months. 

In other words, it is rapidly becoming an alphabet soupout there, an environment that invites entrepreneurial lobbying and gaming the system. Some of the particular programs are almost laughable.  Consider the $300 billion thatwas allocated in July for the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which is authorized to buy back and renegotiate an estimated 400,000 mortgages.  That program started October 1st; unfortunately, lenders are not interested because they are required to absorb losses up front and participation in the program -- you guessed it -- is entirely voluntary; effectively, it's up to the homeowner to persuade her lender to participate.   In the first two weeks of its operation the Hope for Homeowners program got a total of 42 applications. 

There are some hopeful counterexamples.  This past week the FDIC -- in apparent defiance of the administration -- has announced a plan to set aside $24 billion to help 1.5 million households avoid foreclosure, and a number of major lenders are engaged in renegotiating large numbers of mortgages on their own initiatives.  Then there is the Commercial Paper Funding Facility that was mentioned earlier in connection with AIG.  Under that program, which went into operation at the end of October, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York agree to buy outstanding unsecured and asset-backed 3-month loans.  The model involves government seed money used to attract private investment in bonds.  The proceeds go to a newly created purchasing entity, which will hold the commercial paper until maturity and will use the proceeds from maturing commercial paper and other assets to repay its loan from the New York Fed.  What is extraordinary about the CPFF is that it actually seems to make sense.

The effects of all this for the credit markets have thus far been modest.  At the meeting with foreign leaders on November 15th Bush declared that there were signs of progress,that credit is no longer "frozen" and that it will take time to get money to the banks, which in the administration's view is the really important thing.  Has credit become more liquid?  The Libor/Treasury spread, which was up to 480 in October, is now "down" to a little over 200; prior to Sept. the all-time record was 250 and the 10-year average was 22.  The total amount of "Asset Backed Credit Products"  - i.e. total pool of all credit for car loans, student loans, floorplan loans, fleet loans, mortgages- is down 51% ($748b) since June 2007. An awful lot of banks that have received money are just sitting on it,or using it to pursue mergers and acquisitions; at the end of the day one ofthe consequences of Paulson's plan may simply be that the biggest banks get even bigger and small ones disappear. So much for small business.

And now it's the automakers' turn.  Democrats in Congress are talking about making an additional $25 billion available to the Big Three on top of  $25 billion the auto industry hasalready received this year to help speed the development of fuel-efficien tvehicles.  At the moment the plan seems to lack the necessary votes, but some version is likely to be forthcoming.  (All of this, incidentally, follows an earlier discussion of using government money to fund a GM-Chrysler merger that was said to be essential to GM's survival but has since been called off.  They changed their minds, too.)  

But even that may not be enough.  GM announced last week that it will "approach the minimum amount necessary to operate its business" by the endof this year, and are asking for $50 billion from Congress GM says they need $25 billion to pay for retirements, and an additional $25 billion to pursuefuel efficiency.  Readers may be forgiven for lacking faith in GM's commitment to this laudable goal, particularly if they happened to catch the following exchange in a recent Frontline episode entitled "Heat." The interviewee was Beth Lowery, General Motors' vice president for environment, energy and safety policy, was particularly interesting.  In response to the question "Why did Toyota beat you to the Prius?" here was Lowery's answer: 

"Actually, Toyota and General Motorsworked together on a number of technologies over time. Toyota looked at the hybrids and the Prius from an overall standpoint, knew there would be the lossof money for some time on the cost of that, but looked at it from an overall marketing and image standpoint, and General Motors really looked at it from abusiness [perspective]: Can this vehicle make money?" 

Lowery goes on to extol GM's success in -- I am not making this up -- selling a million vehicles in China; the best-selling line is Buick.  She also explains that CAFÉ standards are not effective mechanisms for reducing dependency on oil imports.  The executives of the American auto manufacturer have doubled down on trucks and SUVs over and overagain, effectively ceding the market in well-made, efficient passenger cars to Asian and European manufacturers. Ford's new models are said to be a vast improvement, but at this point American companies have spent 20 years building a reputation for shoddy workmanship, poor design, and terrible service; it will take a long time before American consumers will trust them. GM's response?  Build cars for the Chinese.  To really add insult to injury, just this weak GM's board issued a statement that it has no reason to lack confidence in the company's management team.

In other words, any bailout of the auto industry looks like a temporary measure to delay the inevitable consequences of mind boggling stupidity, greed, crony capitalism, and willful ignorance on the part of American auto executives. In fact, it is difficult to think of any group less deserving of huge transfers of public money, or less likely to use that money in the ways that will do the most good for the public weal . . . except for the financial industry.

I described the Bush administration as exhibiting intellectual and political bankruptcy. After banktruptcy, in the best case scenario, comes reorganization.  That would be the Obama administration.  So we are allwaiting for this long national descent into policy nightmare to be over.  But by the time Obama takes office, the Bush administration will have transferred a staggering amount of money, measured in trillions of dollars, to private banks.  That money will no longer be available for the kind of employment-based stimulus package that we desperately need, nor for targeted and potential more effective mechanisms to increase liquidity in the credit markets such as an expanded version of the CPFF, nor to secure access to education.  And still, after all this time, the Bush administration is seeking to jam this enormous program down the throats of Congress and the American people without consultation ,oversight, or transparency.  Will Congress just stand there and watch this happen?  Again?

Marty's favorite definition of leadership is that leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb. One of Obama's most attractive traits is that he has the capacity to stand back and see what is happening while he is in the midst of the action. He appears to reflect in real time, unlike many people in public life who are so caught up in their public personae that they find it difficult to reflect at all, never mind while the action is still going on. So he understands and has acknowledged that he will not, cannot, meet the multiple and grandiose expectations that we have placed on him. Obama's cautionary notes also remind us of our own responsibility. At this possible turning point, what is our share of the work?

In our work with Jewish organizations, we often see the disappointment that results from the hyperbolic expectations people have about CEOs. How these critical moments are managed is a real test of leadership.

These moments also test us, in terms of our own civic engagement - in this country and in the Jewish community. We wrote a how-to book, Leveling the Playing Field, because we believe that gender equity is vital to the health of Jewish organizations, and that everyone can exercise leadership on this issue. If you're sitting in the corner office, or just getting started in your career, or even reading this blog at home as a curious onlooker, you can make a difference.

In the Jewish community, gender equity has been the problem that many people would prefer would take care of itself. Gender equity is often removed from the agenda of priorities, under the excuse of external crisis or urgent agency business. So, this kind of deep-rooted organizational change may take a long time. Meanwhile, you need to grab opportunities and take risks even if you're not completely ready or the climate is not exactly right. Plot a course between the ideal and the realistic, between what is desirable and what is achievable.

Everyone asks us what the "promised land" will look like. We want to know what you think. Frame the big vision, as well as the "small wins" along the way, and let us know how you imagine a Jewish world in which women and men share leadership.

Shifra Bronznick, Didi Goldenhar, and Marty Linsky, co-authors of Leveling the Playing Field: Advancing Women in Jewish Organizational Life, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy. This is their parting post. Want more? Buy their book!

Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony, is guest blogging as one of Jewcy's Lit Klatsch authors.  His book narrates the lives of a young couple from the time they meet in college through fifteen years of their journey through life together.

So last Tuesday (can it really be only a week ago?) my wife and I drove down from Brooklyn to Philly to get people to the polls. We were stationed in northeast Philly, in a largely African American neighborhood, and I admit to feeling more than a little uncomfortable playing the role we played, the same role hundreds of others played (all the volunteers at our station seemed to hail from Brooklyn, and just about all of us were white, well-educated, etc.). I felt like a carpetbagger, and a very particular kind of carpetbagger. A white guy from New York come to Philadelphia to tell black people to vote for a black man. I wasn't sure how I would feel if I was on the other end. So I was delighted by the reception we got, which was utterly enthusiastic, with not a trace of resentment from anyone (save from one middle-aged woman who was voting for McCain), and it felt to me that one of the wonderful things about this election was the way racial differences were transcended not just in the voting booth but in interactions between voters.

But to take a step back, I was an enthusiastic Obama supporter, though I never quite drank the Obama Kool Aid that some of my friends did. This takes nothing away from his candidacy, which was obviously historic. And he ran a disciplined, tight campaign, and he's serious and extremely intelligent, all the things that we need in a President today and that our current President and Obama's opponent lacks.  This all goes almost without saying. And being only a few years younger than Obama, I have several good friends who were classmates of his at law school and co-editors with him on the Harvard Law Review, and the reports are nothing less than glowing. In his heart of hearts, he's probably a real liberal, certainly more liberal than any President in memory.

That said, the guy's a politician, and anyone who doubts that he's going to govern very much from the center should have a look at Ryan Lizza's long and thorough profile of Obama in the New Yorker from a few months back. It's sobering and a real reality check to those who think they're getting Adlai Stevenson.

But then, Adlai Stevenson never became President, and he'd have even less of a chance of winning if he were alive today. I thank god that Obama was elected. I'm struck, though, by the degree to which smart liberals seem deluded about whom they're getting and deluded, even more so, by what the election of Obama portends. Yes, it's huge and historic, and yes, the number of new voters was incredible, but all this talk about a permanent change in the political landscape seems silly, as does the argument that Obama proved that the way to win is to take the high road. Yes, Obama won, and yes, he took the high road (Mccain, by contrast, ran an absolutely scurrilous campaign, and anyone who wants to give him credit for giving a "gracious" concession speech, well I'm not even going to go there...), but he won despite having gone the high road, not because of it.

Obama won because Lehman Brothers collapsed. Simple as that. We are in the midst of the worst economic crisis in nearly a century, and the timing of that crisis worked perfectly for Obama's campaign. Yes, he's smart and charismatic; yes, he ran an incredibly disciplined campaign; yes, he managed not to be baited into becoming the "angry black man," all of which are notable accomplishments. But none of that would have mattered were it not for the economic crisis. Everyone hates negative campaigning, but politicians continue to do it because it works, and now there's extensive neuroscientific research explaining exactly how and why it works. It didn't work this time, but only because of wildly unusual circumstances. This was an election with perhaps the most unpopular President ever in a country in just about the worst economic crisis it has ever faced, and in such circumstances, Bill Ayers and socialism and Rashid Khalidi and Barack Hussein Obama and all the other nonsense that got thrown at him didn't stick. Swift Boat wouldn't have stuck, either, and neither would Willie Horton. John Kerry would have won this election. Even Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale might have won this election. And anyone who thinks that North Carolina is now officially and henceforth a blue state is seriously deluded.

****************

Not to toot my own horn (OK, I will, if only briefly), but the book was a 2007 NY Times Notable Book, and the way this is relevant to you is that I'm offering a free copy to three lucky Jewcy readers. All you have to do is send me an email at Jhenkin at SLC dot edu with the subject "Achin' for Matrimony" and you'll be entered in the drawing. For more about the novel, click on here, and for those of you who want to skip straight over the foreplay and buy the book for yourself, your friends, your cousins (Chanukah isn't far away!) here's the place for you.

Finally, a note to book groups. I've been participating in a lot of book group discussions of Matrimony, so if you're in a book group, or know people who are, and would like a visit from the author either in person or by telephone, get in touch with me at the aforementioned email address or through the book group link on my website. 

Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

All the news that's fit to reprint.

• President-Elect Obama has asked the old guard to help out America's failing car companies.
• Jews and Mormons are at each others throats over the latters' practice of posthumously baptizing the formers' dead relatives. Good use of time and energy on both parts here.
• "The Little Rascals: The Complete Collection" is finally available on DVD. (Hey, if the NY Times thinks it was important enough to run on the front page of their website, who are we not to?
• The EU is willing to hear Russia's case for membership.
• The Japanese, who agreed to refrain from taking part in wars at the end of WWII, kind of want to get back into the game.
• Israel is holding hundreds of local elections today; we picked a black guy in our country, no big deal.
• Starbucks' fourth-quarter profits are way down.
• Barack Obama's daughters have been invited to appear on Hannah Montana.

The euphoria of Brother Obama’s election sure was fun, but welcome back to reality, America. Luckily, an increasing number of Americans have plenty of time on their hands to focus on the issues the country is facing, as they no longer have jobs to distract them. As the economy continues to falter, criminals populate the Senate, and the military invades foreign countries left and right (the enemy du jour appears to be Pakistan), headlines about the President Elect have begun slipping southward in the paper.

It was somewhat refreshing to see WashingtonPost.com leading with ‘Unemployment Rate Jumps To 14-Year High’ today, rather than the optimistic Obama cheerleading that has dominated the news media as of late. It is understandable that people seek the promise of better days ahead, it’s what people do -- in the early days of civilization, man conceived of Heaven and the afterlife when life became too horrible to deal with. However, avoiding real-life problems via escapism doesn’t really get anything accomplished, other than placating the masses. It’s obviously exciting that America has a young, charismatic new President coming to power, but he won’t take office for another 2 ½ months. During that time, a lot of people are going to be out of work, killed by American soldiers, lose their retirement money, be subjected to more movies where Jim Carrey falls victim to some wacky supernatural happenstance and other such misfortune.


I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, American should be careful to properly calibrate their expectations; things are just as likely to get worse as they are to get better in the coming months.  

This is a guest post by Ben Cohen at Z Word

The various attempts, as the Presidential campaign heated up, to depict Barack Obama as hostile to Israel had minimal impact on American Jews, 78 per cent of whom voted for him. Among young Jewish voters, as this informal AJC poll indicates, the percentage was even higher. Indeed, as we reported yesterday, wariness about an Obama administration is more pointed in the Arab and wider Islamic world. One reason why, today, all eyes are on Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, who has been appointed as Obama's Chief-of-Staff.Emmanuel Obama

Emanuel is Jewish. His Jerusalem-born father, as pointed out by Ha'aretz and a number of other outlets, served in the Irgun. Among the descriptions and anecdotes about Emanuel churning through the news cycle ("tough," "bad boy," "Washington insider," "master strategist," "inspiration for the Josh Lyman character in the ‘West Wing'"), what Al Jazeera's Rob Reynolds calls his "strong links to Israel" would seem, at this moment in time, to be defining him.

Well, Israel is his middle name. For Martin Sieff, writing an informative profile on the Daily Beast, the selection of Rahm (named, apparently, for an Irgun comrade of his father's called Rahamim) Israel Emanuel, "gives the lie to an endless wild myths that political enemies have tirelessly spread during the campaign that he was supposed to be a closest America-hater and no doubt anti-Semite because of his Kenyan background and boyhood in Indonesia."

Serious observers of the Middle East know that there are enduring aspects to the US-Israel relationship which tell us more about what lies ahead than any nasty political gossip about the ethnic origins of Administration appointees can hope to do. For Ali Abunimah, though, the Emanuel selection is cast-iron proof that Obama will not break with break with "the George W. Bush Administration's pro-Israel policies."

Perspectives like these echo the basic thesis of Mearsheimer and Walt's flawed book "The Israel Lobby" - that the disproportionate representation of pro-Israel individuals and groups in the upper echelons of US government determines why the US does what it does. And that, perhaps, is a more comforting explanation than the more obvious conclusion, namely that the basic values and strategic goals of the US and Israel spectacularly coincide.

In the more sinister corners of the internet, the fingers of the hardcore conspiracy theorists are already typing furiously. A new arrival to the blogosphere, as the New York Times observes today, is former Malaysian Prime Minister and dedicated antisemite, Mahathir Mohamed. Mahathir continues to fulminate against the Jewish conspiracy - in this post here, for example, he insists that "money has been funnelled to certain individuals and parties to ensure that a well-known candidate with extensive connection to the US Jewish lobby would somehow become the Prime Minister of Malaysia."

In his latest post, in which he congratulates Obama and then predicts his failure, he leaves the antisemitic ranting to his dedicated commenters. Among the pearls they offer are these: "we know that US is indirectly controlled by the jews (sic) and hence israel;" "resistance will come from his home grounds the rich and powerful jews who will try to dictate behind close doors;" "this man (meaning Obama) says to the Jewish American that Jerusalem is an undivided Israeli capital!" And so on, ad nauseam.

Doubtless, these fellows will have a field day with Rahm Emanuel. Doubtless, some of the columnists in the Arab press will join in. That much, we can predict.

Cheers to my brother's girlfriend. Always the optimistic, tree-hugging, whale-saving, jailed-protester, "I like the Shins and think voting is important" bleeding-heart liberal with a heart of gold, the girl whose car's bumper has more opinions than any human I've ever come across was one of the lone people to have apparently kept things in prospective amongst last night's revelry. Upon arriving home after wading through the celebrations in the street following Barack Obama's acceptance speech, I logged onto the Facebook and was greeted by a message on the News Feed: Obama's fictitious doppelganger

"Amanda Duzak is very happy that Obama won, but remember he has no intentions to bring down the capitalist system."

As kind of an asshole, it never slipped my mind that while Obama's election is exciting and historic and all, things are still pretty bad right now, and unlikely to change significantly. In fact, an argument can be made that there may even be cause for concern, as tough times, economically and politically, are the primordial ooze for the rise of tyranny. Am I insinuating that Obama will become a Stalin-esque dictator? No, it doesn't seem terribly likely. However, the guy is already pretty powerful, and doesn't even take office for another several months. On a side note, from my ironic, detached pedestal, nothing would make me happier than for Obama to show up to his Inauguration in full Muslim garb and proclaim himself Caliph of the new Western Islamic Empire.

Sensationalism aside, what is more likely to happen is that the economy continues to falter, Iraqis continue to die, the environment breaks down even further, and the world will continue as it was on November 3rd. Sorry to lob a big matzo ball of pessimism out there, but what I really don't understand what anyone is expecting to happen now. The scenario of Obama's rise and subsequent election to high office in a lot of ways parallels the fictitious ascendance of Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti in the TV show, The Wire: A prominent local politician, a racial minority amongst his base, runs against the ruling party on a platform of hope and reform, inspiring the masses and being swept into office on the strength of a solid campaign based around cult of personality. The city sees the election of the new Carcetti Administration as "A New Day," with everyone, including Carcetti and his staff, ready to begin making real changes in the troubled city. Before long, however, reality sets in and the Administration is faced with having to cut money from the schools in effort to reach crime goals, from hospitals to help with schools, from community programs to help hospitals and so on and so forth. When the show leaves off, Carcetti has jumped ship on Baltimore to run for governor, and the city is left in exactly the same state as it was before he came to power.

The Wire is, of course, fictional, but the cyclical nature of hope, failure, prosperity, politics, and all that other good stuff is very real. One man isn’t going to step up and fix all the wrongs faced by the American people. The best anyone can really hope for is that his administration doesn’t make things worse, something that I personally believe he will probably succeed in. What will be interesting is to see how the jubilant but reactionary public reacts to President Obama when things don’t immediately get better. I’m fairly confident in the new Administration, and believe that it will actually do some good. However, calibrate your expectations, or you are setting yourselves up for disappointment.

This is the second of a two-part post about last night's election. For more, check out Part I: A New Hope

I'm not prone to sentimentality. The subtitle of my site is "Feelings Are Stupid." However, the people of Brooklyn's reaction to President-Elect Barack Obama was definitely something with which I was completely unfamiliar, and hence, may have had me feeling some feelings (I will admit to nothing). I voted for Obama, and subsequently wrote articles on this site about the meaninglessness of his New York Times endorsement, the public's vapid demonization of his rival's vice-presidential candidate and even how difficult it would be for someone to kill him. Earlier on Election Day, I wrote that there was nothing that I was anticipating more than the end of the campaign season because I was so sick of hearing about him.
The intersection of 5th Ave & Union St., 2:00am
Walking home from a friend's house where I had watched the Election returns, I encountered people, New Yorkers no less, pouring into the streets in celebration. I have never been to New Orleans, but I imagine it's a similar scene. At the intersection of 5th Avenue and Union Street in Park Slope, a crowd had gathered, hundreds deep. I commented to a police officer that was standing nearby that I had never seen anything like this before; it was like something you see on CNN or the BBC when the Prime Minister of some destabilized South Asian government is executed. It was like the video of the Iraqis pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein. The police officer shared my amazement, mentioning that maybe it was for real; maybe these people gathering in the street at 2:00 in the morning really did feel something linking them. Although I remained 100% confident that the people in front of me hated each other, and that the following morning they would go right back to quietly ignoring one another, I said nothing. The scene was awesome, in every sense of the word.

Admittedly, I was pretty drunk from getting swept up in the excitement (although not enough not to notice that John McCain referred to black people as "them" during his concession speech), but I was nonetheless impressed with my fellow Brooklynites. This is only the second election in which I have been of age to vote, and who knows if I'll even be alive to vote in the next one? But I'm fairly confident that the events of the night of November 4, 2008 will not be repeated in my lifetime. Of the U.S. Presidents past who have been considered despots in their time (your Lincolns, Roosevelts, Andrew Johnsons, etc.) I don't see G.W. Bush joining them in their varying degrees of redemption. I've defended him in the past, but at this point there's no denying it: America is in the midst of a tumultuous period in its history, one that may one day even be viewed in retrospect as the worst in history. However, the new guy, a black guy, is an inspiration to the masses, and a refreshing change to the status quo. It will be interesting to see how this works out, but last night, I let the people have their fun.

P.S.: I also totally high-fived a black guy last night. It was awesome. As a friend of mine noted, the scope of what is racially cool and not cool has been altered; For the next several years, we can all issue the retroactive caveat, "It's cool, my president is black," after saying something that may be considered suspect.

For a rebuttal to myself, continue reading Part II: Revenge of Thinking

• The black guy won.
• The Democrats now control the House and Senate as well.
• Doggone it, it appears as though not enough people like Al Franken in Minnesota, as the comedian's Senate bid heads to a recount.
• California's Proposition 8, which would ban gay marriages statewide, was too close to call as of 10:00am ET.
• New Delhi is overrun with stray cows.
• The US and Russia are at it again, building up missile reserves around Europe.
• November 28th has been declared "AC/DC Day" in Vancouver.

• The Supreme Court clearly has its priorities straight, spending Tuesday morning hearing a case between the FCC and FOX over whether the FCC is allowed to levy fines against the network for instances in which people accidently use profanity during live broadcasts.
• Los Angeles residents will vote today on Proposition 8, a ballot measure that would allow the city's homosexuals to wed.
• One of Osama bin Laden's 19 sons and his beautiful blind wife are seeking political asylum in Spain.
• A rare original pencil sketch of Winnie the Pooh is set to hit the auction block in England.
• Japanese scientists have cloned a cryonically frozen mouse (not the famous one).
• Benedict XVI is hosting a summit for Catholic and Muslim leaders in Rome.
• The Indian space probe, Chandrayaan, sent back its first pictures of the Earth.
• The top six online betting websites are heavily favoring Barack Obama in today's presidential election.
• Nevada's hookers are feeling the effects of the recession.

 

In the mid-90’s, Chris Rock famously joked that there could never be a black Vice President because some black guy was liable to kill the President and would be hailed as a hero in the black community for his involvement in putting the first black President in office. By 2009, Rock’s joke will have become obsolete for two reasons:Not quite...

a.) The first black President will take office without any overtly related murders
b.) Killing the President of the United States is nearly impossible

I’m fairly certain that George W. Bush is currently the hardest person to kill in the entire world, save for maybe the Pope and apparently Osama bin Laden. Between the President’s praetorian guard in the Secret Service, his network of decoys and the sheer amount of time he spends traveling, I am venturing to say that there are few tasks more daunting than killing a sitting President.

Of America’s 43 Presidents, four have been assassinated while in office: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy. Other than Kennedy, who was shot while riding in a convertible during a parade, all of the aforementioned assassinations occurred before the advent of reliable metal detectors, and Presidential protection from the Secret Service wasn’t mandated until after the death of McKinley (That’s right, it took three successful shootings before anyone thought to put a guard or two on the President of the United States). In all three cases, the killers simply approached the President they intended to kill and shot him. Today, no one is allowed to come near the Commander in Chief without rigorous screening by Secret Service agents, and President Bush hasn’t appeared in anything resembling a public parade since his limo was egged following his inauguration.

During a recent conversation, a friend of mine suggested that the odds of killing the President could be greatly increased by using explosives a large-scale, Oklahoma City-style assault on someplace that the President was scheduled to appear. The biggest problem with this theory would remain getting close enough to inflect mortal damage; bombs aren’t the globular black orbs that appear in Super Mario Brothers or Bugs Bunny cartoons, where you can just light the fuse and toss it at whatever you want to blow up. In order to blow up a building that houses the President, you would still need to get by the Secret Service with a truck or other similarly mobile mechanism for transporting the explosive into the building’s infrastructure.

In all likelihood, some yahoo will come out of the woodwork and make an attempt on Barack Obama’s life if he wins the Presidential election; two Tennessee men have been apprehended for allegedly conspiring to do so already. History has shown that people are interested in killing the President, and the racial aspect that an Obama Presidency would introduce would only exacerbate things. However, it is unlikely that anyone could succeed in such a mission, as measures are in place to make the President of the United States of America the safest person in the world.

Cal Thomas at the Washington Times has delved into the illustrious pages of dictionary.com to show us why an audio clip of Obama might be the smoking gun that proves he may as well be a socialist:


OK, Cal, I've got the Internet--shall we consider what dictionary.com says about the word 'fascism' then?  Fascism "appeals to strident nationalism" and "promotes suspicion or hatred of both foreigners and 'impure' people within his own nation."  It "does not demand state ownership of the means of production, nor is fascism committed to the achievement of economic equality."  And lastly, "fascists are usually described as right-wing."  While this is the proper definition, it can also refer to "governments or individuals that profess racism and that act in an arbitrary, high-handed manner." 

So, is it now time for the Obama campaign to roll out charges of fascism against the McCain camp?   McCain, who asks on the stump, "Who is the real Barack Obama?"   Whose operatives emphasize his foreign-sounding name and send out race-baiting robocalls as they gallivant around the nation intimidating voters by placing their commitment to fervent nationalism--to "Country First"--on the line?  An avowedly right-wing party, that has acted arbitrarily and high-handed by almost any measure?  McCain has made clear that economic equality is nothing he's committed to.  And think about this: fascist leaders are usually military men, too.  Barack Obama has never served in the military.  John McCain has.  Ergo, McCain has more in common with fascists than does Barack Obama.  

See how this logic works?  It's childish, it's loony and most of all it's false.  Of course John McCain isn't a fascist, even if he has stooped pretty low in the course of this campaign.  The drift toward partisan extremism is conjecture on the part of Obama detractors who imagine he would set the country on a Marxist course.  The drift toward right-wing extremism however, is on display in the here-and-now, evidenced in the parameters of argument set by some conservatives.  It isn't just liberals who will rejoice if Obama wins the election.  Sensible conservatives, one imagines, will be glad to see this aspect of their movement purged by a rejection of the McCain-Palin ticket, and a party once characterized by its distaste for crackpots, cranks and demagogues given the chance to restore its integrity.

As trite as it may be to discuss Barack Obama's big brother-esque, domination of television last night, it was somewhat of a unique scenario, and hence, worthy of a couple of paragraphs of thought. The ad, which ran on NBC, FOX and CBS and was the first such barrage since third-party candidate and perennial punchline Ross Perot pulled a similar stunt in 1992, differed very little from any other infomercial, with the future president of the United States serving as the product being hawked, rather than knives that can cut through larger knives or exotic spices from the Orient once only available to the wealthiest Venetian nobility.The embodiment of American politics

While the TV spot garnered solid ratings, beating out an episode of Pushing Daisies in which the character Ned was startled to meet a mysterious man claiming to be an old friend and associate of his father, the significance of the ad probably derives more from anticipation rather than the event itself. As the old idiom goes, "Any publicity is good publicity," and I assume that's exactly what the Obama campaign had in mind when they formulated the plans for last night's spot. As the Internet continues to swell with bloggers, forums and other user-driven information portals, television is still dominated by a select few targets for viewer attention. And while the Internet will one day surpass television as the central method of communication from event to public, every household, tavern and waiting room in America still has a TV set, and a single broadcast being shown across three of the four networks that are available for free on every one of those televisions generates that buzz that is so valuable to anyone that wants your attention.

The advertisement itself was disappointing, featuring little more than standard-issue "I remember meeting a woman in Iowa whose son is stationed in Iraq...." and Joe the Plumber-style hackery that foams from the mouths of Diamond Joe Quimby and his real-life ilk. The spot's target audience was well defined, with shot after shot of Obama shaking hands and trading hugs with middle-aged and elderly white people in town halls and Applebee's parking lots, with nary a single image of the candidate strolling down Canal Street or Massachusetts Avenue.

Way funnier than anything featured in the Obama infomercial was clearly the McCain-Palin ad that ran during the first commercial break on FOX's coverage of Game 5 of the World Series. The ad, a scathing denouncement of Obama's political experience, closed with raspy-voiced narrator supplementing the on-screen text, "Barack Obama is not ready to be president...Yet." What does the Republican party have to gain by implying that Barack Obama will one day be an able presidential candidate? Additionally, what are they thinking by playing the experience card in the face of the debacle that has been running with the governor of Alaska as their vice-presidential nominee? Politics is stupid.