Mau-Mauing The Supreme Court

Anyone who listened to the Supreme Court hearings on Obamacare knows that the opponents of the law won the argument. Still, if I had to bet, I would put my money on the court declaring the law constitutional, perhaps with an explanation.

The Supreme I would worry about most is Chief Justice Roberts. According to most reports, Roberts is very sensitive about the court’s image, especially after the 2000 election debacle when the court had to bring the chaos to an end, a decision that, in effect, made Bush the winner. It is also reported that Roberts likes to avoid 5 to 4 decisions when it comes to major controversial issues, if possible.

Roberts also knows that Obama, the Democrats and their media will make the “right-wing, unempathetic” Supreme Court a major whip-up-the-base issue in the coming war, er, campaign. And if Anthony ” The Weather-Vane” Kennedy agrees to make it 6 to 3, all the better.

If Roberts votes with the majority for the law’s constitutionality, he, as I understand it, will get to write the majority opinion where he can deal with the “Is there any limit on Congress’s power?” issue by employing the allegedly “unique” nature of medical insurance argument. In that way, Roberts, Kennedy and the 4 Democrats can claim that there is some at least theoretical limit to federal power under the Commerce Clause which has yet to be discovered. It’s there all right; we just can’t see, hear, feel, smell or taste it right now. But someday…

Of course, this whole mess could have been avoided if the Democrats had done what a Washington Post editorial suggests in today’s edition:

…[Congress] could have enacted a broadly based tax to pay for the health care it wants to subsidize.

It didn’t…for a couple of reasons. One was that reform advocates didn’t seriously entertain the constitutional vulnerability of the mandate. But the bigger reason is a more familiar one in Washington these days: None of the politicians wanted to acknowledge the costs.

The pols love to bash insurance companies that exclude anyone with preexisting conditions. They demand that the companies charge less for old people than the actuarial tables would dictate. They want to give insurance to poor people who can’t afford it. But they, like their voters, don’t want to pay for the subsidies implied by any of those rules. When President Obama was running in 2008, he insisted he could deliver universal coverage without a mandate. Once in office, he found that wasn’t true. But he still didn’t want to use the word “tax,” and neither did anyone in Congress.

On the other hand, I may be wrong about Roberts and Kennedy. In addition to obviously believing the mandate to buy medical insurance is unconstitutional, they also may be motivated to “push back” against Obama after the tongue lashing he gave them as the justices sat below him at a State of the Union speech a couple of years ago.

Roberts may want to show Obama that he and the court’s conservatives will not be mau-maued. I hope so.

The Black Boy’s Burden: Other Black Boys

While the Democratic media and the usual race hustlers continue to portray a fantasy America where, typically, young blacks are hunted down and murdered by racist whites while the authorities seem not to care, crime expert Heather MacDonald reports from planet earth:

…is the [Trayvon] Martin shooting emblematic of a larger problem [than the issue of self-defense law]? Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the mainstream media here and abroad certainly are portraying it as such. That larger problem, of course, is lethal white racism and a criminal-justice system allegedly indifferent to the killing of blacks. At a rally Thursday night in Sanford, Sharpton said that “Trayvon represents a reckless disregard for our lives that we’ve seen for too long,” and warned that “they,” presumably whites, would try to trick black protesters into violence by “send[ing] in provocateurs.” “Blacks are under attack,” said Jesse Jackson on Friday from Chicago. “Targeting, arresting, convicting blacks, and ultimately killing us is big business.” MSNBC analyst Karen Finney claimed that “racist rhetoric” used by Rush Limbaugh and several Republican presidential candidates was responsible for Martin’s death.

So determined has the New York Times been to fit the shooting into its favored racial story line that it has been referring to the Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic,” contrary to its usual practice of referring to Hispanics without any additional racial characterization. The fact that Zimmerman’s father is white does not explain this departure from the Times’s racial protocols; the Times’s one-drop rule still applies to Barack Obama, who is, according to the Times and every other media outlet, America’s “first black president.” (The Grey Lady referred to Zimmerman for the first time on Friday simply as “Hispanic.”)

Times columnist Charles Blow dealt with the complicating factor of Zimmerman’s ethnicity with a simple duality: “Trayvon is black. Zimmerman is not,” he wrote last Saturday, presumably conferring on Zimmerman putative white status. The Rainbow Coalition has apparently broken down.

Blow went on to claim that it is the “the burden of black boys in America” to be at high risk of being shot by non-blacks: “This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them ‘suspicious.’”

Blow is right about one thing: Black boys do face a much higher chance than non-blacks that they will be shot when they are “out in the world.” Black males between the ages of 14 and 24 were seven times more likely to die of homicide in 2007 than white and Hispanic males of the same age group combined. But the danger they face comes overwhelmingly from other black males, whose homicide offending rate in the 14 to 24 age category was nearly ten times higher than that of young white and Hispanic males combined. (The federal government’s crime data puts Hispanics and whites in a single category of “white,” thus overstating the non-Hispanic white offending and victimization rates). Most homicides are intraracial, but the chance of a black being killed by a white or Hispanic is much lower than the chance that a white or Hispanic will be killed by a black. Seventeen percent of what the FBI calls “white” homicide victims in 2009 were killed by blacks, compared to 8 percent of black homicide victims who were killed by “whites.” There were two and a half times as many white and Hispanic victims of black killers in 2009 as there were black victims of white and Hispanic killers, even though the black population is one-sixth that of whites and Hispanics combined. If Hispanics were removed from the category of “white” killers of blacks, the percentage of blacks killed by Anglo whites would plummet, since a significant percentage of what the FBI calls “white”-on-black killings represent gang warfare between Hispanic and black gangs. (Needless to say, there is no reason to think that racism plays a more frequent role in white-on-black killings than in black-on-white killings.)

Blow’s fear that his children will be blown away by a white is particularly ludicrous in New York City. Blacks commit 80 percent of all shootings in the city — as reported by the victims of and witnesses to those shootings — though they are but 23 percent of the population; whites commit 1.4 percent of all shootings, though they are 35 percent of the population. Add Hispanic shootings to the black tally, and you account for 98 percent of all of the city’s gun violence. In New York, as in big cities across the country, the face of violence is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic.

No evidence has yet surfaced to support the charge that the failure of the Sanford police to arrest Zimmerman results from racial bias, as opposed to ambiguities in the application of Florida’s self-defense law and the absence of eye-witnesses to the killing. But if such evidence of racial indifference does emerge, it would be not only shameful but also a great exception to the practice of police departments across the country. Far from showing a “reckless disregard for [black] lives,” in Sharpton’s words, it is the police and prosecutors who are the most reliable responders to black victimization, trying relentlessly to put together a case even when the witnesses to crime refuse to cooperate. Most police chiefs will say that they could solve every inner-city killing if the people who saw the crime or know the perpetrators came forward, instead of obeying the “no snitching” code.

And it is the concerted efforts of police departments across the country to bring safety to urban neighborhoods that have played a central role in the 50 percent drop in the black homicide victimization rate from 1991 to 2008. In New York City, over 10,000 minority males are alive today who would have been killed had homicide rates remained at their early 1990s highs; the largest cause of that crime drop is the New York Police Department’s policing revolution, which has created an unprecedented sense of urgency about protecting lives. The NYPD’s weekly meetings at police headquarters, known as Compstat, focus relentlessly on one overriding question: How can we save more people — overwhelmingly minorities — from being victimized by crime? Many an NYPD commander has lost his post because he has not had an adequate answer to that question…

[T]he racial storyline that has been imposed on the shooting does not fairly represent contemporary America. That storyline is not just wrong, it is dangerous, because it only feeds black alienation and anger. Family breakdown, not white racism, is the biggest impediment facing blacks today, producing such casualties as the 18-year-old gangbanger who fatally shot a 34-year-old mother picking up her child from school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, last October. Sharpton and the national media didn’t show up for that killing, just as they don’t for the thousands of other black-on-black killings each year…

As for President Obama, he might have given us a real profile in courage the other day in his my-son-could-have-been-Trayvon remarks by urging Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the Democratic media and the million marching hoodies to shut up until all the facts are known. As of now, it will be all but impossible for the shooter to receive a fair trial.

And if he’s tried and acquitted (God forbid!), we can then thank Al, Jesse, and yes, Barry for the Rodney King type riots that will surely ensue.

Time For Another Race Conversation?

The Enabler

If I didn’t know better, I would think NBC’s David Gregory was working for the Obama campaign. Not only did David devote almost the entire hour of today’s Meet the Press to the Trayvon Martin case, but he even went so far as to suggest to Obama campaign genius David Plouffe that the president “lead a national conversation on race.”

Now, there’s a new idea! Seems to me we have had innumerable such conversations dating back to the 1967 Koerner Commission that investigated the cause of the then ubiquitous summer race riots. And didn’t Obama himself kick off such a conversation in his famous race speech during the 2008 campaign which rationalized why he had been a member of a racist church for two decades by throwing his white grandmother “under the bus”?

It’s not like Obama needed any encouragement to start such a conversation. Just the other day, in response to an obviously planted question about the Trayvon case, he urged that we (but obviously not he) all “do some soul searching.”

For those of you who have forgotten the last excruciatingly politically correct race conversation, here’s how it goes: A very angry group of self-appointed “black leaders” sit down with a bunch of guilt ridden, sado-masochistic white liberals who beg to be humiliated before they are publicly tarred and feathered.

Believe me: the president needs no advice on when or where to play the race card. And he can certainly count on Al Sharpton and his media enablers to keep the Trayvon case going until November.

Gas prices, the XL pipeline, Iran, 8% unemployment? Not while we’re talkin’ race!

The Million Hoodie March?

Criminal Wear

Perhaps someday we will know what happened between shooting victim Trayvon Martin and his alleged killer George Zimmermann. Surely, we can all agree that the violent death of an unarmed teenager is a bad thing, whatever the circumstances.

Having said that, I must say a word about the plethora of “million hoodie” marches sprouting up around the country to protest this sad incident.

At my local bank branch, there is a sign on the door which reads something like this: Before entering this building, you must remove head wear, scarves, and dark glasses. Being me, I have often wondered whether the bank has yet been sued or cited by the ACLU or some other organization of First Amendment ambulance chasers, like Amnesty International.

Obviously, my local bank branch manager neither cares about his (or her) customers’ attire, nor does he (or she) wish to be hauled in front of the Thought Police. So why the sign? Could it have something to do with the fact that the preponderance of bank robbers, smash and grab jewelry store thieves, and other such criminals are almost always dressed in hooded sweat shirts and dark glasses? Just asking.

Yes, I know: Not everyone dressed in a hooded sweat shirt is a criminal. However, most thieves and other street criminals seem to prefer the hooded sweat shirt-dark glasses look. And even white guys so dressed are likely to evoke a reflexively suspicious response from his fellow Americans. So perhaps suspicion of hoodie wearers isn’t about racism or “hate.”

I actually own a hooded sweat shirt which I was wearing while walking around mid-town Manhattan a couple of months ago. When I pulled up the hood, my wife gave me a horrified look, observed that I looked like a criminal, and demanded I wear my beret the next time. Obviously, she preferred to be out and about with a presumed French intellectual rather than a guy who knocks over convenience stores.

Mmmmm…Which is worse -a French intellectual or a purse snatcher? (I’m thinking, I’m thinking!) But since that night in New York, I have refrained from wearing the hood in public. I recommend that others of all races, religions, and genders do likewise…unless, of course you are a criminal or wish to be thought of as one.

What’s Worse Than Actual Dead Jews?

Just Another Guy Named Mo

While American Jews prepare for their upcoming Passover seders, during which Rick Santorum and/or Rush Limbaugh will replace Pharaoh as the latest nemesis of Jews and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Sandra Fluke and Barack Obama will will vie for the role of Moses, back on planet earth a few lonely observers seem to get it.

From the reliably insensitive Mark Steyn:

The killer of French schoolchildren and soldiers turns out to be a man called Mohammed Merah. The story can now proceed according to time-honored tradition:

Stage One: The strange compulsion to assure us that the killer is a “right wing conservative extremist”… The insistence that the killer was emblematic of an epidemic of right-wing hate sweeping the planet is, regrettably, no longer operative. Instead, the killer isn’t representative of anything at all.

So on to Stage Two: Okay, he may be called Mohammed but he’s a “lone wolf.” Sure, he says he was trained by al-Qaeda, but what does he know? Don’t worry, folks, he’s just a lone wolf like Major Hasan and Faisal Shahzad and all the other card-carrying members of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. All jihad is local.

On to Stage Three: Okay, even if there are enough lone wolves around to form their own Radio City Rockette line, it’s still nothing to do with Islam…

And then, of course, Stage Four: The backlash that never happens. Because apparently the really bad thing about actual dead Jews is that it might lead to dead non-Jews: “French Muslims Fear Backlash After Shooting.” Likewise, after Major Hasan’s mountain of dead infidels, “Shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army.” Likewise, after the London Tube slaughter, “British Muslims Fear Repercussions After Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.” Oh, no, wait, that’s a parody, though it’s hard to tell.

Look…isn’t it just a teensy-weensy little bit to do with Islam? Or at any rate the internal contradictions of one-way multiculturalism? No, it’s not a competition. Most times in today’s Europe, the guys beating, burning and killing Jews will be Muslims. Once in a while, it will be somebody else killing the schoolkids. But is it so hard to acknowledge that rapid, transformative, mass Muslim immigration might not be the most obvious aid to social tranquility? That it might possibly pose challenges that would otherwise not have existed — for uncovered women in Oslo, for gays in Amsterdam, for Jews everywhere? Is it so difficult to wonder if, for these and other groups living in a long-shot social experiment devised by their rulers, the price of putting an Islamic crescent in the diversity quilt might be too high? What’s left of Jewish life in Europe is being extinguished remorselessly, one vandalized cemetery, one subway attack at a time. How many Jewish children will be at that school in Toulouse a decade hence? A society that becomes more Muslim eventually becomes less everything else. What is happening on the Continent is tragic, in part because it was entirely unnecessary.

Meanwhile back in Obama’s America, NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly seems to be “disturbing” a lot of New York Jews and other liberals like Attorney General Eric Holder by keeping close watch on mosques and Muslims in general, even outside of New York City, especially those Muslims who like to vacation on the lovely beaches of Pakistan and Afghanistan, as the Toulouse “lone wolf” liked to do. One French government official said that the only way they could’ve captured the latest guy named Mo before he murdered Jewish kids would have been to turn France into a “police state.”

I mean, how many times does a French citizen of Algerian descent have to travel to Pakistan and/or Afghanistan before the cops raid his apartment and drag him down to headquarters for some serious conversation?

To my American Jewish relatives and acquaintances: Yes, I know we don’t live in France; however, if you are planning to hold your Passover seder at an identifiable Jewish sight, it wouldn’t hurt to budget for a well-armed couple of guards outside along with the matzoh and gefilte fish.

Now, How About An Obama Biopic?

Obama and his "mentor"

Respectable Bill

It is times like these when I wish I had connections in Hollywood. I have a great idea that might evolve into a concept that could result in a script that might interest one of the cable movie channels. Not the “premium” channels like HBO; I’d settle for Reelz or Flix.

Since HBO’s biopic Game Change is apparently the “most watched HBO original movie in 8 years,” how about one on the 2008 Obama campaign? My idea is a that we focus on the campaign’s reaction to the Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers revelations.

For those of you who have long ago flushed those two tangential figures down the old memory hole, I am sorry for bringing a skunk to the garden party: Reverend Wright was Obama’s pastor for two decades during which he ranted and raved about white racist America while praising the Jew-hating Louis Farrakhan as one of the greatest men of the 20th and 21st centuries. And Bill Ayers was a violent domestic terrorist who wrote about his acquittal on a technicality for a bombing, “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—it’s a great country.” Nevertheless, Obama worked closely with Ayers during his community organizer days, and reportedly launched his political career in Bill Ayers’ living room.

I know what you’re thinking: This is all ancient history and besides Barry was only building up his political street-cred with the brothers and sisters by joining the most edgy, over-the-top rock-‘n-roll church on Chicago’s South Side. Of course, he never heard the Rev say any of those awful things about America, Jews etc.

And Bill Ayers? Hey, weren’t those 1960’s the greatest? And didn’t we have fun smoking dope, getting laid, dressing funny, planting bombs, robbing banks, murdering policemen?

Bill Ayers…what a card! And as Ayers’ friend professor Stanley Fish wrote a while back in the New York Times:

…Ayers is a longtime professor of education at UIC, nationally known for his prominence in the “small school” movement. [Bernadine] Dohrn [Ayers’wife] teaches at Northwestern Law School, where she directs a center for child and family justice. Both lend their skills and energies to community causes; both advise various agencies; together they have raised exemplary children and they have been devoted caretakers to aged parents. “Respectable” is too mild a word to describe the couple; rock-solid establishment would be more like it. There was and is absolutely no reason for anyone who knows them to plead the fifth or declare, “I am not now nor have I ever been a friend of Bill’s and Bernardine’s.”

Do I need to add that Bernadine was a leader of the so-called Weather Underground and, according to Wikipedia, … “went underground in early 1970, engaging in bombing activities”? The more-than-respectable woman also said this in reaction to the Manson murders, …””First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the pig Tate’s stomach! Wild!” Grooovy!

And anyone who’d object to a candidate for president associating with these folks obviously didn’t get any during the 60’s.

Still, wouldn’t you love to see a behind-the-scenes biopic with actors playing Obama and campaign managers Davids Axelrod and Plouffe? The scenes with those three and perhaps Michelle (Is Halle Berry available?) would be great. Especially when Barry comes up with the idea of accusing his then living grandmother (the one who raised him while his mother was off somewhere doing some really interesting sociological research) of racism. I’ll bet both Davids’ jaws dropped in awe at the ideas coming from the man who would soon become the “smartest person to ever occupy the White House.”

Here’s how I imagine it:

Obama: I need talking points on Wright!

Plouffe: Don’t worry. It’ll die after a couple of days. If not, we’ll scream RACISM.

Obama: Of course! But what about Ayers?

Axelrod: Come on. You were only 8 when Ayers was making bombs and planning to set off one at a Ft. Dix army base dance. Besides, everyone loves Ayers now. What a son, father, husband; and he also loves animals, is pro-choice and is a vegetarian.

Obama: Wow! You guys are almost as smart as me.

Scores Settled

I watched the HBO movie Game Change last night. You know… the one that purports to reveal the behind-the-scenes goings on in the 2008 McCain-Palin campaign. I hadn’t planned on watching it, but I ran into neighbors walking their dogs who asked me if I had seen it.

I answered their question with another question: Why would I sit through a movie based on a book written by Democrats and produced, written, directed by, and acted in not only by Democrats, but Democrats who had contributed loads of money to the Obama re-election campaign? My neighbors insisted that I really couldn’t say anything about the movie until I had seen it.

So OK, I saw it. Well, not all of it, rather a little more than 2 hours of it. First of all, let me say that I am not a big fan of “biopix,” movies where famous actors impersonate famous real people whom viewers have seen and heard in real life. I just can’t get past thinking: So there’s Jamie Foxx doing a superb impersonation of Ray Charles or there’s Meryl Streep doing an impersonation of Bill Clinton (Don’t laugh; it may be coming). Julianne Moore and Ed Harris are good actors, but not for one second could I suspend my disbelief that they were Sarah Palin and John McCain.

So now to the movie’s substance (such as it is). Clearly, this is a story told from the point of view of the two professional political consultants who ran the McCain-Palin campaign, namely Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace. Why is that so clear? Because those two are the only characters on the screen for more than a minute who come across as intelligent, informed, and not prone to catatonic hissy fits.

So what was the moment in the show where I couldn’t take it any more? Hints: It wasn’t when Sarah revealed that she didn’t know who the combatants were in World Wars I and II. And it wasn’t when she allegedly revealed that she thought the Queen ran Great Britain.

No, it was when, after the infamous Palin-Katie Couric interview, Ed Harris (impersonating a caricature of McCain) bursts into the office of Woody Harrelson (doing an impression of Steve Schmidt at his best) and whined, “I thought Katie liked me!,” in the tone of a 15 year old whose dream girl had just shot him down.

Let’s remind ourselves. After John McCain graduated from the Naval Academy, he volunteered for just about the most dangerous job any person can ask for: combat jet fighter pilot. And let’s recall that he was shot down over North Vietnam, where he spent 5 and 1/2 years in captivity during which time he was tortured (not the piddly stuff they did at Guantanamo), and when his captors found out that he was the son of a high naval officer and wanted to send him home, McCain refused.

Now here’s the Wikipedia entry for Game Change director Jay Roach:

Roach was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his father was a military worker.[2] He graduated from Eldorado High School in 1975. He received a B.A. in economics from Stanford University in 1980 and later earned an M.F.A. in film production from the University of Southern California in 1986.[3] He directed the 2010 film Dinner For Schmucks, the American remake of Le Dîner de Cons, featuring Steve Carell and Paul Rudd.[4][5] He did not return to direct Little Fockers, the third installment in the Meet the Parents series, taking a producing role only.[6]

And for the screen writer, Danny Strong:

Strong was born and raised in Manhattan Beach, California. where he would rent videos from Video Archives, becoming friends with Quentin Tarantino who was then a clerk there. “I would just literally sit and chat with him for 45 minutes, an hour at a time about movies, and he got me turned on to all these different movies that 10 year olds don’t see.”[1] Strong studied film and theatre at the University of Southern California.[2]

And the producer Tom Hanks:

Hanks studied theater at Chabot College in Hayward, California, and after two years, transferred to California State University, Sacramento. Hanks told The New York Times: “Acting classes looked like the best place for a guy who liked to make a lot of noise and be rather flamboyant. I spent a lot of time going to plays. I wouldn’t take dates with me. I’d just drive to a theater, buy myself a ticket, sit in the seat, and read the program, and then get into the play completely. I spent a lot of time like that, seeing Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Henrik Ibsen, and all that, and now look at me, acting is my job. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

As McCain said about Hillary’s attempt to create a Woodstock museum or something: I don’t remember Woodstock…I was tied up at the time.

So the closest Tom Hanks (or any of the others involved in Game Change) ever got to a life threatening situation is pretending to be a combat soldier in the movies.

As for the supposed airhead Sarah Palin, I can only say that unlike most of the other big shot women politicians in America, like Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer and Hillary, Palin didn’t have the advantage of having a well-connected politcian father (Pelosi), a talented husband (Hillary), or a fabulously rich husband (Feinstein, Pelosi, and Boxer). If Palin is as clueless as this movie portrays her, she has to be the most successful clueless politician in American history, with the possible exception of that other doofus, Ronald Reagan.

So my verdict on Game Change is the following: It is a bad movie, made by Democrats from the point of view of two professional political strategists who lost a big election and are now trying to rehabilitate themselves by shifting the blame, and in addition, settling scores.

Talking Vaginas and Hysterical Drama Queens

Gary McCoy

Ann Coulter, that skinny, drag-queen bitch (just a few of the names La Coulter has been called), is the second best columnist (Mark Steyn’s better) in America (enter Jewish liberals gagging).

Here’s some of her latest:

Did I miss the deadline for alternative opinions on Sandra Fluke?

What with liberal women constantly talking about their vaginas suddenly pretending to be offended by the word “slut,” and conservatives pretending to be as pussified as liberals about the nasty names they’ve been called, I never got an answer to the most pressing question about Sandra Fluke: Who are you again?

Was Fluke dragged out of obscurity after the women of America took a vote and chose her as our spokeswoman? Please, Sandra, we know how deeply private, publicity-shy and terribly busy with law school you are, but we need you to speak for us!

I don’t think that happened. Rather, Fluke is the latest in a long line of my absolute favorite liberal typology: hysterical drama queens.

From Murphy Brown to the Jersey Girls, Cindy Sheehan, Joe Wilson and the New School’s Jean Rohe, these fantasists inject themselves into a boiling-hot public debate and then claim victim status when anyone criticizes them.

At least since I’ve been keeping score, liberals had their first brush with the dark night of fascism in 1992, when Dan Quayle said of a fictional TV character: “It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown … mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”

Suddenly, it was 1939 Germany and multimillionaire Hollywood elites were the Jews.

At the Emmy Awards ceremony that year, the creator of “Murphy Brown,” Diane English, took the occasion to say: “I would like to thank our sponsors for hanging in there when it was getting really dangerous.”

Really dangerous? You want “really dangerous”? Try being a pedestrian crossing Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica when Diane English is being driven to the airport! (A year earlier, English’s husband mowed down the matriarch of Santa Monica’s Chez Jay, killing her, while driving his wife to the airport.)

Marge Tabankin, executive director of the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, said: “The community feels targeted. It’s created a chill and fear reminiscent of the ’50s. Let’s face it: We feel we’re being used as whipping boys.”

Yes, Hollywood liberals have got balls to spare, and that’s why I admire them so much.

But the Academy Award winners of liberal martyrdom are the Dixie Chicks. In 2003, Chick Natalie Maines sucked up to a Bush-hating London audience by saying, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”

What an odd coincidence that the only city Maines attacked Bush in was London! In a way, it was lucky for the band that, in their entire 60-city world tour, Maines claimed to be embarrassed by Bush only in London and not, say, Lubbock, Texas…

So, back to Fluke: Who is she, and how did she become the spokesperson for American womanhood? If we’re allowed to submit names, I think we can do better than a Georgetown law student whose claim to fame is that she belongs to a college club on “reproductive justice.”

Pursuing a typical path to liberal heroics, Fluke was an utter nobody whom the Democrats substituted in a last-minute witness-switch to testify about contraception — as if her haircut isn’t birth control enough — at a hearing on “religious liberty.”

Despite her credentials as a heretofore unheard-of “birth control activist,” the Oversight and Government Reform Committee declined to accept this 11th-hour witness on the grounds that Fluke did not have appropriate credentials for any congressional hearing, much less one on religious liberty.

That was the Republicans’ first foray into “silencing” Fluke’s “voice.”

Nancy Pelosi used an even less appropriate committee to ensure that Fluke’s “voice” would be heard — the Democrats’ Steering and Policy Committee, the normal function of which is to give House Democrats committee assignments.

One longtime Democratic operative admitted privately that Fluke was the least-qualified witness ever to appear before a congressional committee.

As a result of the huge commotion the Democrats’ made of Fluke’s “testimony,” she was ridiculed the same way people in ridiculous situations often are. She was called some mean names: “slut,” “prostitute,” “law student” …

In full indignation, Fluke said her critics were trying “to silence women’s voices.” She said this on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and a number of other national media outlets.

Thus, Fluke became a liberal hero even braver than an actress standing up for abortion rights in front of a Bill Maher audience.

President Obama called Fluke and told her that her parents should be proud of her and to make sure she was OK. Hillary Clinton said conservatives were trying to control women. Bill Clinton called her to see if she had any plans for the weekend.

(Fluke seems to be holding up wonderfully under the nightmare of constant TV appearances. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d think she’s enjoying herself tremendously.)

I don’t care what liberals believe. Just please stop telling me they’re courageous for saying exactly what every non-Fox media outlet in America is dying to hear…

Barack Hussein Micawber

"Something will turn up, my dear."

Last night I had dinner with a couple of old ( literally) friends, both of whom happen to be Democrats. After the bill was paid, I brought up my recent trip to Israel and how it had crystallized in my mind the alienation I feel towards American Jews, most of whom seem to equate “Jewish values” with the agenda of the post 1968 Democratic Party, that is, appeasement, pacifism and moral equivalence.

One of my dinner companions reacted thusly: OK, whom would you vote for if it comes down to a choice between Barack Obama and Rick Santorum? Without even a second’s hesitation, I said Santorum. Even though he knows my politics, my friend was shocked and got up to go. So I asked: What is so terrible about Santorum? My other friend referred to Santorum’s views on homosexuality etc. etc. And what had been a pleasant evening ended abruptly.

But back to Santorum and Obama. First of all, allow me to stipulate: I’m a Rudy Giuliani fan. (Rudy himself said the other day, “I could win the election; I just can’t win the nomination.”) Second, I do not agree with Santorum’s alleged views (and the views of the Catholic Church, among others) on contraceptives and abortion. But I really do not care very much about those issues, which are, in my opinion, phony issues used by the Democratic Party to make liberal women hysterical and thus work and vote for Democrats.

Furthermore, I really do not think Rick Santorum, were he, in the still unlikely event, to become President, could do (or want to do) much about gay marriage, abortion, contraceptives or any of the so-called social or “women’s health” issues.

Let’s enter, as Mary Matalin said on TV last Sunday, the “reality zone.” First of all, the famous Griswold decision of the U.S Supreme Court made it unlawful to ban the sale or use of contraceptives. Secondly, Roe vs. Wade prohibits the banning of abortion. And the issue of gay marriage, similarly, will eventually be decided by the Supreme Court.

The only way President Rick could affect those issues is to appoint Supreme Court Justices who, he believes, will overturn Griswold and Roe and find an inalienable right in the Constitution having to do with marriage. (Not impossible: In the Griswold decision, the Supremes found a right to privacy in the “penumbra and emanations” of the Consititution.)

But the president can only nominate, not appoint judges. They would have to go before the Senate Judiciary Committee, voted on and then be approved by the full Senate. In recent years, it has been extremely difficult to win Senate approval of controversial judges; just ask those whom Bush nominated who never made it to the bench.

But let’s say Rick is able to get these nominations approved: Who says they are going to vote the way Rick wants them to vote? Just the other day I read that many believe that Justice Scalia (arguably the most conservative justice of the nine) will find the Obamacare mandate constitutional. This view is based on his votes and opinions on similar issues in the past. The bottom line: No president can count on any judge to vote the way the president wants.

But let’s go further. Say some future Santorumized Supreme Court does in fact overturn Griswold and Roe. Does that mean that the supposed “War on Women” will have ended with a victory for those who wish to return women to their shackles? Not at all. Abortion and contraceptives would still be perfectly legal and available.

So what then? Congress could try to pass a law banning contraceptives? How likely is that to happen? Fuggetaboutit! The individual states could pass laws banning contraceptives? Not!!!

And abortion? Again, Congress could try to pass a law outlawing abortion. Would such a law ever get through the House and Senate, even if both were controlled by Republicans? No Way, Jose!!

Yes, yes, yes: Individual states could ban or restrict abortion. How many state legislatures and governors would be likely to approve such a bill? I’m thinking that, at most, you only need one hand to count.

So the very, very worst thing that could happen were Ricky to be elected president is that a woman wanting an abortion who happened to live in one of those few states, where the unenlightened majority disapproved of abortion, would have to travel to a neighboring state’s Planned Parenthood clinic.

As Joe Biden might say: Big Effin’ Deal!

But back to my friends whom I outraged with my preference for Rick over Barry. What about if Obama wins? The United States is currently approaching 16 TRILLION dollars in debt, fueled primarily by unsustainable entitlement programs, aka, Medicare, Medcaid, and Social Security.

So here’s the question to my old friends and their many like-minded compatriots: How bloody likely is it that Barack Obama and the Democrats are going to do anything about those programs (and the crushing debt) other than trying to pay for them by raising taxes on the “rich”? And while you’re thinking, show me one serious, informed person who actually believes that doing that will solve the problem. My God: Even Paul Krugman knows that won’t work; he simply refers to it as a “long-term” problem, meaning we should deal with it manana (read: well after anyone currently alive is dead) while we continue to spend zillions of borrowed dollars on “stimulating” the economy and whatever else the entitled think they have a right to get. The Democrats are, in essence, the Mr. Micawber party, named after the Dickens character whose solution to every crisis is, “Something will turn up.”

To be sure, it isn’t all that likely that the Republicans (including Rick) will do anything meaningful either. Politicians are hard-wired to give people stuff, not take stuff away. But with Obama, the chances of his doing anything to avert the coming collapse are ZERO.

Maureen Dowd’s Neighborhood

The Princess of Georgetown

I will give this to Maureen Dowd (not the Times’ worst columnist as long as Krugman lives): It is fair to attack Republicans for criticizing Obama’s completely clueless (if not ideologically driven) policy towards Israel and Iran. After all, says MoDo, they (the Republicans and a few Democrats like New Jersey Senator Menendez) don’t have to decide to send folks off to war, at least not yet.

But the Princess of Georgetown (the Washington neighborhood, not the law school that oppresses women) characteristically over-reaches with the following:

Bibi Netanyahu …governs a nation roiling with reactionary strains, ultra-Orthodox attacks on women and girls and attempts at gender segregation, and increasing global intolerance of the 45-year Palestinian occupation.

As the New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote, Netanyahu and his supporters too often “consider the tenets of liberal democracy to be negotiable in a game of coalition politics.” …

The Israeli fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon must be respected, not least because the regime intent on developing this weapon is the world’s greatest center of Holocaust denial. And the timing is tricky. As Bill Kristol put it, Obama’s urge to wait “would precisely undermine Israel’s ability to determine her fate.”

But I’d feel better if our partner was not the trigger-happy Netanyahu, who makes hysterical arguments even in the absence of a dire threat. At Aipac, he compared those who want to be less hasty than he does to America’s refusal to bomb Auschwitz in 1944…

Mmm…There are five and a half million Jews currently living in Israel, almost the same number as those murdered in the Holocaust (not just Auschwitz). Seems like an apt, unhysterical argument to me. How about you?

What MoDo can’t figure out is why Israelis can’t be more like the Jews she knows: funny, ironic, pacifist, Democratic Jews like Paul (Krugman), Tom (Friedman) and Jill (Abramson), her Jewish colleagues at the Times or that guy David from the New Yorker she quotes above, and all those other Jews she hangs out with in New York, Washington and LA who overwhelmingly voted for Obama. You know…the Jews who’d urge Obama to drop a bunker buster on Rush’s studio, but not on the mountains in Iran under which the mullahs are currently enriching uraniaum meant for bombs that will “wipe the Zionist entity off the map.”

Those Jews, MoDo knows, would never elect a Neanderthal like Netanyahu. And did you see that scary bodyguard standing next to him while he spoke at the AIPAC meeting? That guy can’t be a Jew!

As the “reactionary,” allegedly misogynist Israelis might say: MoDo lives in a different neighborhood.