The Jewish Vote

The loyalty Jews have for the Democratic Party is amazing, given that the party’s ideology does little to further Jewish interests.

As a group, Jews are in the upper income brackets. The Democrats’ redistributionist tax policies hurt Jews. Also, Democrats favor public sector programs which ought to be an anathema to Jews who are more likely than other groups to be self-employed.

Then there’s the Democrats’ support of so-called affirmative action programs. Racial preferences discriminate against Jews (and Asians) who are most often rejected at elite universities in order to admit less qualified “minorities.” When it comes to affirmative action, Jews and Asians are considered historically privileged.

Then there’s the issue of Democratic Party anti-Semitism. Not too long ago former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell stood on a stage and held hands with Louis Farrakhan. This year, the Democrats welcomed Al Sharpton to the presidential primary race and gave him a platform at their convention despite the fact that Sharpton had a few years ago instigated the fire bombing of a Jewish owned store in Harlem, a crime which resulted in the deaths of store employees. Sharpton also roused the rabble in the earlier Crowns Heights pogrom where a rabbinical student was murdered and Jewish residents were terrorized for days.

Just imagine the reaction if the Republicans had invited a white supremacist to speak at their convention. Also imagine the reaction if a Republican mayor had held hands with David Duke. On the contrary, the Republicans read Duke out of their party and also forced out borderline anti-Semite Pat Buchanan. Rudy Giuliani, when he was Mayor of New York, refused to allow Yasser Arafat to attend a concert at Lincoln Center, about which the Democrats howled that Rudy had insulted a “partner for peace.”

This brings us to Israel. The Clinton administration placed unbelievable pressure on Israel to come to terms with Arafat, even going so far as to dispatch the hit team of Carville and Begala to run Ehud Barak’s campaign. I don’t remember any of the Democratic media criticizing Clinton for intervening so obviously in another country’s election. What would they have said if Republicans had sent their people to run Netanyahu’s campaign?

So Barak won and then proceeded to make concessions to Clinton and Arafat that caused Yitzhak Rabin’s widow to assert that her husband must be spinning in his grave. Did anyone accuse Barak of acting as Clinton’s hand puppet the way the Kerry campaign has described Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi? I don’t think so.

Arafat rejected the Clinton plan (which Barak accepted) presented to both sides in December, 2000. Then Arafat began the bloody terror campaign against innocent Israelis on the buses and in the shopping malls and restaurants.

Now Democrats criticize Bush for refusing to get involved in the “peace process”(read: pressure Israel to make concessions) until the Arabs decide they really want peace and choose leaders committed to that end. While Bush remains firm, the liberals engage in moral equivalence or blaming Israel outright.

Jews ought to realize the current Democratic Party, like Europe, is pacifist. They ought to understand better than most that they can’t depend on others to protect them from racist murderers, that it is foolhardy to make deals with or appease monsters.

The Orange Kerry

Is John Kerry preparing for the first debate by going under the sunlamp? Or is it Man Tan? Kerry’s Kennedy obsession has now reached the clinical stage. First he follows Jack Kennedy’s path to the Navy, then to the swift boats (the Vietnam equivalent of Kennedy’s PT boat), then to his 1970’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony where he adopted a weird variation of the Kennedy accent which he hadn’t exhibited before and has not exhibited since. Now he’s trying to repeat history by appearing deeply tanned at the first debate as Kennedy did in his first debate with Nixon. Observers then and since have speculated that Kennedy’s tan (which we now know had more to do with symptoms of his Addison’s Disease than with exposure to the sun) carried the day in that debate since Nixon, just out of the hospital after a knee operation, looked pale and thin.

As reported in the Drudge Report, Kerry’s excuse for his orange glow is Kennedyesque: a weekend flag football game. But participants in that game said Kerry’s face was an orange hue before the game began.

Da Boss

Andrew Sullivan picked up these words of heaviosity from Da Boss:

POSEUR ALERT: “Pop musicians live in a world of symbology. You live and die by the symbol in many ways. You serve at the behest of the audiance’s imagination. It’s a complicated relationship. So you’re asking people to welcome the complexity in the interest of fuller and more honest communication.” – Bruce Springsteen, Rolling Stone.
– 1:34:03 AM

Un-American Campaigning?

The Kerry campaign’s megaphone, The New York Times, is trying to use the “McCarthyism” smear to attack the Bush campaign for daring to suggest that Kerry and his surrogates are giving aid-and-comfort to the enemy in their hysterical attacks on Iraqi prime minister Allawi and the war in general.

A little historical perspective is necessary. During most of the Cold War, both parties adhered to the idea that partisanship ended at the country’s shores. Go back and look, for example, at the Kennedy-Nixon campaign and you’ll be amazed at how polite and civil the candidates were towards each other. They understood that one of them was going to be president and that it was dangerous for the winner to be undermined before he took office. This is why Nixon refused to challenge the close election results, despite evidence of real and extensive fraud in Richard Daily’s Cook County, Illinois machine and Lyndon Johnson’s Texas; the kind of fraud entirely lacking in the 2000 Florida race.

Bi-partisanship in foreign policy collapsed during the Vietnam War when it became acceptable, in the name of “dissent,” for Democrats to charge both Presidents Johnson and Nixon with bad faith (and worse) in their war policies.

Would the New York Times and the Kerry campaign deny that such over-the-top anti-American rhetoric purveyed by protesters like the young John Kerry and then embraced by the Democratic Party as a whole didn’t give aid-and-comfort to the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong? Ask the former POWs who once suffered in the Hanoi Hilton whether or not their captors were well aware of and willing to use the words of the protesters and their supporters in the Democratic Party to torment them.

The North Vietnamese understood as our Islamic enemies do today that their best friends are the “war is not the answer” pacifists. Our present enemies also understand that the pacifists are now ensconced more firmly in the media and our education system (at all levels) than they were during Vietnam. They also know that most of Europe is living in a pacifist fantasy world enabled by decades of American military protection. They see how the UN handles genocide in Sudan with endless numbers of toothless resolutions and expressions of “concern.” These are the folks a Kerry adminstration would go to for help in fighting the jihadists?

Of course, the Kerry campaign cannot and should not be restrained from saying anything they want, but they ought to exercise a modicum of self-restraint since they, if they win, will have to deal with an undermined war and ally of their own creation.

So President Bush was correct in wondering how a President Kerry could deal with an Iraqi leader that his campaign described as a hand puppet of the Bush administration. It would be un-American not to wonder.

Bush the Blessed

“The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips.”

The above is from Joe Lockhart, former Clinton press secretary and current Kerry adviser, about Iraqi prime minister Allawi, who must be the world’s most courageous political leader. They want the voters to believe that Allawi would take on such an incredibly dangerous job for the sake of …George Bush? Will the voters buy such nonsense?

You’d think Lockhart would restrain himself given his involvement in Rathergate. Bush is truly blessed to have such an inept opposition to run against.

Doonesbury on Kerry – 1971

Here’s what Trudeau thought of Kerry back in 1971.

Kerry's Aid and Comfort

Retired Army officer Ralph Peters writes of Kerry’s aid and comfort for the enemy.

Bullseye

Mark Steyn scores a bullseye on Kerry and the post-1968 Democratic Party:

“…a vain thin-skinned droning blueblood with an indestructible sense of his own status but none at all of his own ridiculousness. If Karl Rove had labored for a decade to produce a walking parody of the contemporary Democratic Party’s remoteness, condescension, sense of entitlement, public evasiveness and tortured relationship with military matters, he couldn’t have improved on John F Kerry.”

Kerry Back in the Pacifist Fold

Kerry’s speech yesterday seems to show he’s back in the anti-war, pacifist camp for the rest of the campaign. After weeks of playing both ends against the middle, Kerry is now taking the New York Times’ advice that he stop waffling, declare Iraq a disastrous mistake, and proclaim that he will get out if elected.

This is music to the ears of Democrats who have remained firmly in the pacifist groove since their Vietnam era youth. (It’s also music to the ears of jihadists who would only have to wait out the full withdrawal at the end of Kerry’s first term.) Democrats preferred Howard Dean, but voted for Kerry because they believed Kerry’s war service would inoculate him against the charge of being a pacifist, a defense not available to Dean who spent much of the Vietnam War as a ski bum after receiving a 4f deferment.

This, I believe, is a losing strategy. As I said previously, since 1968, voters have tended to reject Democratic presidential candidates except during the 1990’s when there were no obvious enemies Americans needed to worry about. Yes, Carter defeated Ford but this was a result of Ford’s granting a pardon to Nixon and his spectacular debate blunder of declaring Eastern Europe free of Soviet domination. Thus Ford allowed Carter to position himself to the right of the Republican on national security.

It’s possible that Kerry could win if Bush is seen as losing control of events in Iraq and refusing to act with serious military force to put down the “insurgency.” One of the really important lessons of Vietnam is that the public will not support a war if it perceives that the administration is not willing to do what’s necessary to win.

But I find it hard to believe that given the choice between a too cautious Republican and a pacifist Democrat, the voters will choose the pacifist.

I hope American voters emulate the Indonesians, who yesterday voted their appeasing president out, rather than the Spanish who voted the appeasers in.

Michael Berg Again

This from today’s Online Wall Street Journal. West Chester’s Michael Berg , playing off the gruesome murder of his son by Islamic Nazis, compares Bush to Saddam Hussein.

The Phoenixville (Pa.) News reports that at an event sponsored by the Phoenixville Democratic Committee, Michael Berg, father of terrorism victim Nick Berg, made the case for John Kerry:

“I challenge anyone deep in your hearts to realize that Kerry isn’t like Bush,” said Berg. “Bush is like Saddam Hussein. Bush condones rape and murder, and does it with a wink of an eye. Bush says he does it in the name of economic policy.

“John Kerry decried rape, murder and genocide while he was in Vietnam. If you think John Kerry will end this war too soon, I say ‘too soon for what?’ It’ll save our sons and daughters.

“I can’t afford a third party vote. This time, there is only one issue, justice in foreign policy. Vote for John Kerry–I’m going to.”

Kerry’s supporters are beginning to make Howard Dean seem sane by comparison.