The end is nigh for the Willy Weaver Express, the campain of John McCain and the thrilla from Wasilla, Sarah Palin who, sadly enough will have to face Sen. Joe Biden, presently occupied as Democratic candidate for Vice President, but who is still the titular head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The strategy of both contestants will be interesting, but Joe Biden's primary job will put into "whitespeak" why the country should vote for Barack Obama for President and why it is a dangerous thing to think about doing anything else. Mr. Biden will have the task of reassuring folks from Scranton that it's OK to vote for a black guy for President. Mr. Biden will have to be careful not to attack Mrs. Palin directly: after all, SNL is not doing devastating sketches about Mr. Biden. He should give Tina Fey more material so that ultimately, there is a remake of "All in the Family", and Mrs. Palin can play Sally Struthers' heretofore inimitable "Gloria Bunker" who, taking up the faithful opposition to "Meathead" Rob Reiner's raving liberalism, is remade into a modern day Anita Bryant, only way more sexy, but probably more puritanical as well.
After Mr. Biden is through attacking John McCain for 90 minutes and Mrs. Palin is finished with showing how nice she can be at the same time she tries to attack Barack Obama, the colllective national cringe factor will be strained as much as Wall Street and Congress, and we will together see that the present problems are truly not going to be solved by Mr. McCain's moral relativism and backwards looking perspective without the help of a Vice President who will add to, rather than detract from the strength that he, Mr. McCain is going to have to invest into the issues that will dog the next President for the entire length of his Presidency. Or Her Presidency. As in President Sarah Palin? Yes, that issue will be front and center Thursday night. Mr. Biden can sew up the election for himself and Mr. Obama if he shows what a truly great asset he will be to Mr. Obama and just what a formidable team they will make together.
Nothing that Mrs. Palin offers Mr. Biden should be particularly surprising. Mrs. Palin knows about five or six talking points and has been told "just to be herself", and I am certain that the people prepping Mr. Biden do not have to tell him what those talking points are. He should come off like the pit-bull that Mrs. Palin wishes she was, albeit to Mr. McCain, but should leave Mrs. Palin and the rostrum of the debate as clean as a surgeon's operating theater after having performed surgery on Mrs. Palin herself. She will wake up Friday morning, reach for the Post-Dispatch, and say to herself "did I really say that"? She should have to honestly answer herself: "Yes I did." And pick up the phone, call John McCain, and tell him that she has had an epiphany: that she needs to spend more time with her family and that she quits.
In all honesty, I hope that she doesn't. Indeed, I doubt she will. From the looks of that family, nobody knows how to say "no".
Randy Shiner
Showing posts with label Joe Biden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joe Biden. Show all posts
29 September 2008
05 September 2008
Jewish Voters May Be Wary of Palin
View from a booth:
I can tell you that this is one Jewish voter who is wary of Sarah Palin, at least in a political sense. I only hope that Penthouse offers her an island in Dubai or something in exchange for a nude photo shoot. I'd pay money to see that, but she will not get my vote, regardless of how much skin she shows. We are living in a "B" movie.
Randy Shiner
Jewish voters may be wary of Palin
By: Ben Smith
September 3, 2008 11:28 AM EST
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13098.html
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Barack Obama has struggled for 18 months to lock down the support of a traditionally Democratic group, Jewish voters.
In the past week, John McCain may have helped Obama with his Jewish
problem by choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.
McCain and Obama are battling over a portion of the Jewish community: older, conservative Democrats, largely in South Florida, some of whom backed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. McCain’s secular, hawkish credentials appeal to many in that group, who are skeptical of Obama’s relatively short record and have been deluged with rumors about his pro-Palestinian leanings.
But Democrats hope Palin’s social conservatism, her paper-thin record on Israel, and — perhaps most importantly — her cultural roots in evangelical Christianity may be a major turnoff to Jewish voters, just as Republicans have tried to reach women disappointed that Obama didn’t choose Hillary Clinton, Democrats have already begun to to capitalize on the choice of Palin — over Jewish Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman — in South Florida and elsewhere. A prominent Obama backer, Florida Rep. Robert Wexler, has attacked Palin for appearing at a 1999 event with Pat Buchanan — who has attacked the influence of the Israeli lobby in America. And the same factors that are rallying the evangelical base to Palin may push away the Jews.
“There is almost always an inverse proportion between a candidate's popularity among conservative Christians and secular Jews,” said Jeff Ballabon, a Republican lobbyist long active in Jewish politics who supports McCain.
An illustration of that gap came just two weeks ago, when Palin’s church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to a figure viewed with deep hostility by many Jewish organizations: David Brickner, the executive director of Jews for Jesus.
Palin’s pastor, Larry Kroon, introduced Brickner on Aug. 17, according to a transcript of the sermon on the church’s website
http://wasillabible.org/sermons.htm.
“He’s a leader of Jews for Jesus, a ministry that is out on the leading edge in a pressing, demanding area of witnessing and evangelism,” Kroon said. Brickner then explained that Jesus and his disciples were themselves Jewish. “The Jewish community, in particular, has a difficult time understanding this reality,” he said.
Brickner’s mission has drawn wide criticism from the organized Jewish community, and the Anti-Defamation League accused them in a report
http://www.adl.org/special_reports/jews4jesus/jews4jesus.asp
of “targeting Jews for conversion with subterfuge and deception.”
Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven't embraced Christianity.
"Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It's very real. When [Brickner's son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment — you can't miss it."
Palin was in church that day, Kroon said, though he cautioned against
attributing Brickner’s views to her.
The executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, Ira
Forman, cited the “cultural distance” between Palin and almost all
American Jews. “She’s totally out of step with the American Jewish community,” he said. “She is against reproductive freedom – even against abortion in the case of rape and incest. She has said that climate change is not man-made. She has said that she would favor teaching creationism in the schools. These are all way, way, way
outside the mainstream.”
Huffington Post on Tuesday posted http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html portions of Palin speaking at her former church, a politically conservative Assemblies of God congregation, in which she suggested that an Alaska pipeline plan reflects God’s will.
A spokesman for McCain and Palin, Michael Goldfarb, dismissed the notion that Palin would bring a Jewish problem. “If this is going to be about who was at church on the day of which sermon, that’s not going to be an argument that the Obama campaign is going to win,” he said, a reference to Obama’s controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. “This woman has been on the national stage for all of four days – of course it’s going to take some time for people to get a sense of what her views are on some things,” Goldfarb said. “Once she’s had a chance to make her positions clear on these issues, the Jewish community is going to be very, very comfortable with her.”
In the meantime, however, there’s simply little information availableabout Palin’s views. Two of Palin’s prominent Alaska Jewish allies, Rabbi Joseph Greenberg and businessman Terry Gorlick, told Politico they consider her a friend of the Jews. But they said they’d never heard her discuss Middle East policy in detail and that she’d never visited Israel, though they cited a boilerplate Alaska-Israel friendship resolution she signed.
Her thin record was underscored when the staunchly loyal Republican Jewish Coalition e-mailed its members evidence of her support for Israel: a video in which a small Israeli flag can be seen poking out from behind a drape.
"I think it speaks volumes that she keeps an Israeli flag on the wall of her office," the group's executive director, Matt Brooks, told Politico in an e-mail. "It clearly shows what's in her heart.”
Obama’s Jewish allies, meanwhile, are doing their best to fill that gap with unsettling information, an effort that in some ways mirrors the overt and covert campaigns against Obama in that community.
“My constituents are bewildered by Senator McCain’s pick and they just don’t understand it,” said Wexler, the Florida Democrat, citing the report that Palin had gone to a Buchanan event, and Buchanan’s “frightening views.”
Also Tuesday, a new Jewish Democratic group, JewsVote.org, sent out an email under the heading “Who is Sarah Palin?” an echo of conspiratorial anti-Obama emails that have criss-crossed the Jewish community.
“Given her record as a hard-right Christian conservative, her embrace of Pat Buchanan, her praise of Ron Paul, and her lack of credentials on foreign affairs, it is likely that her selection would raise serious red flags about the McCain/Palin ticket among Jewish swing voters,” they wrote, asking their members to send out their own anti-Palin emails.
McCain aide Goldfarb called the email “unbelievably cynical—fighting smears with smears.” Gallup and other polls conducted over the summer showed Obama beating McCain by a roughly two-to-one margin among Jewish voters - a comfortable lead, but narrower than John Kerry's and Al Gore's wins among Jewish voters in the last two elections.
Tuesday, both sides scrambled to play on the changed turf of the Jewish vote. Palin, shepherded by Lieberman, introduced herself to leaders of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC in St. Paul on. Tuesday.
"We had a good productive discussion on the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and we were pleased that Gov. Palin expressed her deep, personal, and lifelong commitment to the safety and well-being of Israel," AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said. “AIPAC is pleased that both parties have selected four pro-Israel candidates.”
Obama's running mate, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), meanwhile, campaigned
through the Jewish heartland of South Florida, showing off his cultural familiarity, dropping Yiddish words into his talk to a crowd of hundreds at a retirement community.
"I want to remind those of you who don't know me — and those of you who do know me — what my record has been. It has been unstinting in the defense and support of Israel," he said.
It was a contrast Wexler said he relished.
“There’s just no relationship, there’s no comfort, there’s no
natural affinity with Palin,” he said. “There is with Joe Biden.”
© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC
I can tell you that this is one Jewish voter who is wary of Sarah Palin, at least in a political sense. I only hope that Penthouse offers her an island in Dubai or something in exchange for a nude photo shoot. I'd pay money to see that, but she will not get my vote, regardless of how much skin she shows. We are living in a "B" movie.
Randy Shiner
Jewish voters may be wary of Palin
By: Ben Smith
September 3, 2008 11:28 AM EST
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13098.html
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Barack Obama has struggled for 18 months to lock down the support of a traditionally Democratic group, Jewish voters.
In the past week, John McCain may have helped Obama with his Jewish
problem by choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.
McCain and Obama are battling over a portion of the Jewish community: older, conservative Democrats, largely in South Florida, some of whom backed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. McCain’s secular, hawkish credentials appeal to many in that group, who are skeptical of Obama’s relatively short record and have been deluged with rumors about his pro-Palestinian leanings.
But Democrats hope Palin’s social conservatism, her paper-thin record on Israel, and — perhaps most importantly — her cultural roots in evangelical Christianity may be a major turnoff to Jewish voters, just as Republicans have tried to reach women disappointed that Obama didn’t choose Hillary Clinton, Democrats have already begun to to capitalize on the choice of Palin — over Jewish Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman — in South Florida and elsewhere. A prominent Obama backer, Florida Rep. Robert Wexler, has attacked Palin for appearing at a 1999 event with Pat Buchanan — who has attacked the influence of the Israeli lobby in America. And the same factors that are rallying the evangelical base to Palin may push away the Jews.
“There is almost always an inverse proportion between a candidate's popularity among conservative Christians and secular Jews,” said Jeff Ballabon, a Republican lobbyist long active in Jewish politics who supports McCain.
An illustration of that gap came just two weeks ago, when Palin’s church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to a figure viewed with deep hostility by many Jewish organizations: David Brickner, the executive director of Jews for Jesus.
Palin’s pastor, Larry Kroon, introduced Brickner on Aug. 17, according to a transcript of the sermon on the church’s website
http://wasillabible.org/sermons.htm.
“He’s a leader of Jews for Jesus, a ministry that is out on the leading edge in a pressing, demanding area of witnessing and evangelism,” Kroon said. Brickner then explained that Jesus and his disciples were themselves Jewish. “The Jewish community, in particular, has a difficult time understanding this reality,” he said.
Brickner’s mission has drawn wide criticism from the organized Jewish community, and the Anti-Defamation League accused them in a report
http://www.adl.org/special_reports/jews4jesus/jews4jesus.asp
of “targeting Jews for conversion with subterfuge and deception.”
Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven't embraced Christianity.
"Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It's very real. When [Brickner's son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment — you can't miss it."
Palin was in church that day, Kroon said, though he cautioned against
attributing Brickner’s views to her.
The executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, Ira
Forman, cited the “cultural distance” between Palin and almost all
American Jews. “She’s totally out of step with the American Jewish community,” he said. “She is against reproductive freedom – even against abortion in the case of rape and incest. She has said that climate change is not man-made. She has said that she would favor teaching creationism in the schools. These are all way, way, way
outside the mainstream.”
Huffington Post on Tuesday posted http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html portions of Palin speaking at her former church, a politically conservative Assemblies of God congregation, in which she suggested that an Alaska pipeline plan reflects God’s will.
A spokesman for McCain and Palin, Michael Goldfarb, dismissed the notion that Palin would bring a Jewish problem. “If this is going to be about who was at church on the day of which sermon, that’s not going to be an argument that the Obama campaign is going to win,” he said, a reference to Obama’s controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. “This woman has been on the national stage for all of four days – of course it’s going to take some time for people to get a sense of what her views are on some things,” Goldfarb said. “Once she’s had a chance to make her positions clear on these issues, the Jewish community is going to be very, very comfortable with her.”
In the meantime, however, there’s simply little information availableabout Palin’s views. Two of Palin’s prominent Alaska Jewish allies, Rabbi Joseph Greenberg and businessman Terry Gorlick, told Politico they consider her a friend of the Jews. But they said they’d never heard her discuss Middle East policy in detail and that she’d never visited Israel, though they cited a boilerplate Alaska-Israel friendship resolution she signed.
Her thin record was underscored when the staunchly loyal Republican Jewish Coalition e-mailed its members evidence of her support for Israel: a video in which a small Israeli flag can be seen poking out from behind a drape.
"I think it speaks volumes that she keeps an Israeli flag on the wall of her office," the group's executive director, Matt Brooks, told Politico in an e-mail. "It clearly shows what's in her heart.”
Obama’s Jewish allies, meanwhile, are doing their best to fill that gap with unsettling information, an effort that in some ways mirrors the overt and covert campaigns against Obama in that community.
“My constituents are bewildered by Senator McCain’s pick and they just don’t understand it,” said Wexler, the Florida Democrat, citing the report that Palin had gone to a Buchanan event, and Buchanan’s “frightening views.”
Also Tuesday, a new Jewish Democratic group, JewsVote.org, sent out an email under the heading “Who is Sarah Palin?” an echo of conspiratorial anti-Obama emails that have criss-crossed the Jewish community.
“Given her record as a hard-right Christian conservative, her embrace of Pat Buchanan, her praise of Ron Paul, and her lack of credentials on foreign affairs, it is likely that her selection would raise serious red flags about the McCain/Palin ticket among Jewish swing voters,” they wrote, asking their members to send out their own anti-Palin emails.
McCain aide Goldfarb called the email “unbelievably cynical—fighting smears with smears.” Gallup and other polls conducted over the summer showed Obama beating McCain by a roughly two-to-one margin among Jewish voters - a comfortable lead, but narrower than John Kerry's and Al Gore's wins among Jewish voters in the last two elections.
Tuesday, both sides scrambled to play on the changed turf of the Jewish vote. Palin, shepherded by Lieberman, introduced herself to leaders of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC in St. Paul on. Tuesday.
"We had a good productive discussion on the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and we were pleased that Gov. Palin expressed her deep, personal, and lifelong commitment to the safety and well-being of Israel," AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said. “AIPAC is pleased that both parties have selected four pro-Israel candidates.”
Obama's running mate, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), meanwhile, campaigned
through the Jewish heartland of South Florida, showing off his cultural familiarity, dropping Yiddish words into his talk to a crowd of hundreds at a retirement community.
"I want to remind those of you who don't know me — and those of you who do know me — what my record has been. It has been unstinting in the defense and support of Israel," he said.
It was a contrast Wexler said he relished.
“There’s just no relationship, there’s no comfort, there’s no
natural affinity with Palin,” he said. “There is with Joe Biden.”
© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC
29 August 2008
Sarah Palin?
This answers the question of whether John McCain was watching the Democratic National Convention. Clearly he was so moved by the major speakers there, especially Mr. Biden, his long-time friend and Senate colleague, that he wanted to just raise the white flag then and there, and so picked the 44 year old governor of the State of Alaska, whose only other representative office to which she had been elected was as the Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population 5,000. I haven't checked Google Earth to see exactly where that is as it doesn't matter.
McCain has turned this election into a referendum on Mr. Obama - solely. He is going to measure just how much people distrust a young Black man to lead their country. To the extent that Ms. Palin is a completely unknown quantity, she is truly irrelevant to the McCain campaign. She is nothing of what McCain himself has said are the qualifications to be President: not ready to lead on day one, no experience in being the leader of anything larger than a state the population of which is the size of San Bernardino, never mind commander-in-chief of the US Armed Forces, and no other relevant experience that would otherwise qualify her to be President. That is, unless Mr. McCain is going to tell the country, "look, I nominated the only other person in the world older than 35 that is even less qualified to be President that Barack Obama. So vote for me."
If this is the strategy by his crack campaign staff, it will be an abysmal failure. Abysmal. I fell in love with that word - abysmal - during Joe Biden's speech Tuesday night as he described the last eight years of the Bush administration. Abysmal is the most apt word to describe the Bush administration's policies on nearly everything, that is, up until the last couple of months when it has come around to the Obama view of the world which he, Bush, categorized only last May before the Israeli Knesset as "appeasement", by talking to Iran and setting a timetable for the orderly withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Regardless of those things, Bush has left the country on the edge of an abyss from which, if McCain is elected, the country will fall into. We are not in just a ditch. We are, again, on the edge of an abyss.
Who would you rather have one heartbeat (or lack of it) away from the Presidency of the United States? A guy whose 72nd birthday is today, August 29? Who has none of the "maverick" from his 2000 campaign left in him? Who arguably still suffers from PTSD? Who has sold his soul to special interests and the Republican base (or what is left of it)? Or would you rather have Joe Biden, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who knows how to communicate broad themes as well as policy minutiae? I am confident that Sarah Palin has her good points: she is the devoted mother of a Down's Syndrome child, so she undoubtedly has the patience of Job and her heart in the right place. But Presidential timber? Not a chance.
I have to believe that Mr. McCain watched and listened to the positions of the Democrats, listened to the collective howl that went up among people who do not own 11 homes, and said to himself: "Let's see. Between me and Mitt Romney, we'll have 24 homes between us; that ain't gonna play well in Peoria, Detroit or Cleveland, where people are trying to hang on to their only homes. Mitt's probably not a good choice to keep up the charade that I've been playing to try to appear to understand what problems ordinary Americans are facing. So let's get someone whom no-one knows anything about, other than her recent election to one of our least populated states to keep the focus away from me and on Obama."
If McCain's staff is so stupid to think that angry Hillary supporters who can't get past her defeat will vote for John McCain because of the fact that they might share the same sex organ and other features as Ms. Palin, I hope that those Hillary supporters are smart enough to realize that they are being shamelessly pandered to, if indeed that is the point of this nomination.
Regardless of the point behind it, this pick dooms the McCain ticket. Even before this VP pick, I could not think of a single reason to vote for McCain as opposed to reasons not to vote for Obama. Not one. Why would anyone want John McCain, who turns 72 today, to be President at this point in American history?
As a Jew, I know that a strong America is essential to peace in the world. A strong American economy is necessary to the safety of minorities in the United States, including, sadly, Jews. We are the first ones to be gone after when economies go to hell; 2000 years of history tells me that we are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. And this economy has gone to hell. It is de rigueur to blame "the Israel lobby" for the world's ills. This is transparently anti-Semitic. If that is not your perspective, I'd suggest that you do some more reading and research to confirm for yourself that that is the case. An economically strong America is essential because strength is a necessity in this globalized, interconnected and increasingly morally and politically unstable world to ensure that the rest of the freedom-loving world, including Israel, is safe, too. Without a strong America, the rest of the world and her inhabitants suffer. Just ask the Georgians.
If America does not reassert herself economically and morally, and soon, this country will have fallen into an abyss from which there is no return. That is what is at stake in this election. Nothing less. A McCain/Palin ticket is a sick joke on the American people at a time that it needs true vision and true leadership. In my view, only the Obama/Biden ticket is worth even considering as qualified to meet the challenges that we all face.
McCain has turned this election into a referendum on Mr. Obama - solely. He is going to measure just how much people distrust a young Black man to lead their country. To the extent that Ms. Palin is a completely unknown quantity, she is truly irrelevant to the McCain campaign. She is nothing of what McCain himself has said are the qualifications to be President: not ready to lead on day one, no experience in being the leader of anything larger than a state the population of which is the size of San Bernardino, never mind commander-in-chief of the US Armed Forces, and no other relevant experience that would otherwise qualify her to be President. That is, unless Mr. McCain is going to tell the country, "look, I nominated the only other person in the world older than 35 that is even less qualified to be President that Barack Obama. So vote for me."
If this is the strategy by his crack campaign staff, it will be an abysmal failure. Abysmal. I fell in love with that word - abysmal - during Joe Biden's speech Tuesday night as he described the last eight years of the Bush administration. Abysmal is the most apt word to describe the Bush administration's policies on nearly everything, that is, up until the last couple of months when it has come around to the Obama view of the world which he, Bush, categorized only last May before the Israeli Knesset as "appeasement", by talking to Iran and setting a timetable for the orderly withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Regardless of those things, Bush has left the country on the edge of an abyss from which, if McCain is elected, the country will fall into. We are not in just a ditch. We are, again, on the edge of an abyss.
Who would you rather have one heartbeat (or lack of it) away from the Presidency of the United States? A guy whose 72nd birthday is today, August 29? Who has none of the "maverick" from his 2000 campaign left in him? Who arguably still suffers from PTSD? Who has sold his soul to special interests and the Republican base (or what is left of it)? Or would you rather have Joe Biden, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who knows how to communicate broad themes as well as policy minutiae? I am confident that Sarah Palin has her good points: she is the devoted mother of a Down's Syndrome child, so she undoubtedly has the patience of Job and her heart in the right place. But Presidential timber? Not a chance.
I have to believe that Mr. McCain watched and listened to the positions of the Democrats, listened to the collective howl that went up among people who do not own 11 homes, and said to himself: "Let's see. Between me and Mitt Romney, we'll have 24 homes between us; that ain't gonna play well in Peoria, Detroit or Cleveland, where people are trying to hang on to their only homes. Mitt's probably not a good choice to keep up the charade that I've been playing to try to appear to understand what problems ordinary Americans are facing. So let's get someone whom no-one knows anything about, other than her recent election to one of our least populated states to keep the focus away from me and on Obama."
If McCain's staff is so stupid to think that angry Hillary supporters who can't get past her defeat will vote for John McCain because of the fact that they might share the same sex organ and other features as Ms. Palin, I hope that those Hillary supporters are smart enough to realize that they are being shamelessly pandered to, if indeed that is the point of this nomination.
Regardless of the point behind it, this pick dooms the McCain ticket. Even before this VP pick, I could not think of a single reason to vote for McCain as opposed to reasons not to vote for Obama. Not one. Why would anyone want John McCain, who turns 72 today, to be President at this point in American history?
As a Jew, I know that a strong America is essential to peace in the world. A strong American economy is necessary to the safety of minorities in the United States, including, sadly, Jews. We are the first ones to be gone after when economies go to hell; 2000 years of history tells me that we are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. And this economy has gone to hell. It is de rigueur to blame "the Israel lobby" for the world's ills. This is transparently anti-Semitic. If that is not your perspective, I'd suggest that you do some more reading and research to confirm for yourself that that is the case. An economically strong America is essential because strength is a necessity in this globalized, interconnected and increasingly morally and politically unstable world to ensure that the rest of the freedom-loving world, including Israel, is safe, too. Without a strong America, the rest of the world and her inhabitants suffer. Just ask the Georgians.
If America does not reassert herself economically and morally, and soon, this country will have fallen into an abyss from which there is no return. That is what is at stake in this election. Nothing less. A McCain/Palin ticket is a sick joke on the American people at a time that it needs true vision and true leadership. In my view, only the Obama/Biden ticket is worth even considering as qualified to meet the challenges that we all face.
28 August 2008
Joe Biden's Acceptance Speech August 27, 2008
This was one of the best speeches I think I have ever heard. I had the privilege of watching it with my son; we were both wowed at its content and delivery. Outstanding political theater.
Randy Shiner
Randy Shiner
19 June 2008
Foreign Policy's Best Hope
Foreign Policy's Best Hope
By David S. Broder
Thursday, June 19, 2008; A19
Judging by the rhetoric coming out of the Obama and McCain campaigns this week, the United States is fated to endure another four years of bitter foreign policy partisanship, whoever wins this election. The rival nominees clashed on the proper approach to the war on terrorism; the way to handle the world's major trouble spots, including Iraq; and the approach America should take on everyone from Raúl Castro to the Iranian mullahs.
If there is any hope of reconstructing what this country and the world desperately need -- an American national security policy that commands broad support across party lines -- the impetus will have to come from elsewhere.
Last week, I visited the likeliest source. I spent two hours in separate but parallel interviews with the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden of Delaware, and the ranking Republican on that panel, Richard Lugar of Indiana.
Despite all the static in the political atmosphere, Biden and Lugar left me believing that there is hope of overcoming the divisive legacy of the past six years -- in large part because of the work these two have done together to prepare the way.
They are not unique. There are deep friendships and cordial working relationships on a few other Senate committees, including Armed Services, where Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican John Warner of Virginia enjoy a similar bond.
But in the years since the troublemaking Jesse Helms of North Carolina retired and Lugar and Biden have passed the chairmanship back and forth, they have established a code of comfortable collaboration that has pervaded the entire panel.
Both these men are dead-serious students of international affairs. They travel the world and read and consult widely. There is a deep mutual respect; I lost count of the number of times Biden quoted Lugar, and vice versa, during our conversations.
As foreign policy specialists know, Biden and Lugar have conducted scores of hearings exploring the trouble spots in the world with officials from this administration and its predecessors, along with academic experts without regard to ideology.
Their emphasis has been on future policy choices, and both men said that as views have been exchanged and policies tested, the area of agreement within the committee has grown -- and the differences have narrowed.
Increasingly, Biden said, he and Lugar have begun to focus on some of the structural problems that impede America from achieving its goals in the world. "We need a new national security act," he said, one that equips the United States with a diplomatic and civil administration capacity as ready to move into Iraq-type conflicts as the military is to cope with hostile forces. "Lugar had it right five years ago," Biden said. "We needed to send 600 mayors to Iraq to get that country functioning again."
Lugar also sees the need for a recasting of foreign policy. Energy issues will increasingly foment international conflicts, he said, and therefore need to become an important part of the State Department structure and agenda. Last year, well before the current spike in oil prices, Lugar proposed that kind of shift.
It is not certain that Biden and Lugar will remain in their posts when the new president takes office. Biden is a plausible choice for vice president or secretary of state under Barack Obama. Lugar could serve as secretary of state for either John McCain or Obama, a man Lugar recruited for membership on Foreign Relations and a vocal admirer of his.
But if they stay where they are, they could be the best friends the new president has on Capitol Hill. Both Lugar and Biden have run for the presidency themselves, and both are genuinely ready to work with a new president after feeling more than frustrated by their dealings with the Bush White House. If that new president wants a genuine partnership on an American foreign policy, he would have to look no farther than these two.
davidbroder@washpost.com
By David S. Broder
Thursday, June 19, 2008; A19
Judging by the rhetoric coming out of the Obama and McCain campaigns this week, the United States is fated to endure another four years of bitter foreign policy partisanship, whoever wins this election. The rival nominees clashed on the proper approach to the war on terrorism; the way to handle the world's major trouble spots, including Iraq; and the approach America should take on everyone from Raúl Castro to the Iranian mullahs.
If there is any hope of reconstructing what this country and the world desperately need -- an American national security policy that commands broad support across party lines -- the impetus will have to come from elsewhere.
Last week, I visited the likeliest source. I spent two hours in separate but parallel interviews with the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden of Delaware, and the ranking Republican on that panel, Richard Lugar of Indiana.
Despite all the static in the political atmosphere, Biden and Lugar left me believing that there is hope of overcoming the divisive legacy of the past six years -- in large part because of the work these two have done together to prepare the way.
They are not unique. There are deep friendships and cordial working relationships on a few other Senate committees, including Armed Services, where Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican John Warner of Virginia enjoy a similar bond.
But in the years since the troublemaking Jesse Helms of North Carolina retired and Lugar and Biden have passed the chairmanship back and forth, they have established a code of comfortable collaboration that has pervaded the entire panel.
Both these men are dead-serious students of international affairs. They travel the world and read and consult widely. There is a deep mutual respect; I lost count of the number of times Biden quoted Lugar, and vice versa, during our conversations.
As foreign policy specialists know, Biden and Lugar have conducted scores of hearings exploring the trouble spots in the world with officials from this administration and its predecessors, along with academic experts without regard to ideology.
Their emphasis has been on future policy choices, and both men said that as views have been exchanged and policies tested, the area of agreement within the committee has grown -- and the differences have narrowed.
Increasingly, Biden said, he and Lugar have begun to focus on some of the structural problems that impede America from achieving its goals in the world. "We need a new national security act," he said, one that equips the United States with a diplomatic and civil administration capacity as ready to move into Iraq-type conflicts as the military is to cope with hostile forces. "Lugar had it right five years ago," Biden said. "We needed to send 600 mayors to Iraq to get that country functioning again."
Lugar also sees the need for a recasting of foreign policy. Energy issues will increasingly foment international conflicts, he said, and therefore need to become an important part of the State Department structure and agenda. Last year, well before the current spike in oil prices, Lugar proposed that kind of shift.
It is not certain that Biden and Lugar will remain in their posts when the new president takes office. Biden is a plausible choice for vice president or secretary of state under Barack Obama. Lugar could serve as secretary of state for either John McCain or Obama, a man Lugar recruited for membership on Foreign Relations and a vocal admirer of his.
But if they stay where they are, they could be the best friends the new president has on Capitol Hill. Both Lugar and Biden have run for the presidency themselves, and both are genuinely ready to work with a new president after feeling more than frustrated by their dealings with the Bush White House. If that new president wants a genuine partnership on an American foreign policy, he would have to look no farther than these two.
davidbroder@washpost.com
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