Wll Many Democrats Fall on The Grenade for Obama?

Response to my last memo in which I cited the article by Ralph Peters. (See 1 below.)

When Napolitano sort of made a mess explaining the attempted Christmas terrorist attack and Obama sort of complained about the intelligence agency breakdown and structure created by former president Bush, the media helped carry the 'blame' message.

Now Obama is relying upon President Bush's efforts, post Katrina, which improved our response capabilities to natural disasters and Obama is being given credit for what is happening in Haiti by the press and media.

We also have Obama appearing with GW, who he demeans and blames at every opportunity, to assist along with former president Clinton. Why enlist GW if he is such a dim wit and despised ex-president? Is Obama seeking to make GW a protective raincoat against possible future criticism and judgement of how effective Obama is in handling the disaster called Haiti? You decide.

Finally, we have Biden laying the foundation for deflecting future criticism why things are moving slowly and defending against attacks from sideline Naysayers. By the time Biden finished his repetitive speech Haiti could have been rebuilt.

I also see a lot of private fat cat jets down there bringing supplies.

The problem in Haiti like in New Orleans, starts with infrastructure devastation making it hard to deliver necessary relief equipment and life saving food, water, medicine and medical responders.

You also have the comparable problem of a segment of the population that become looters while their ability to do so is enhanced by a decimated police force.

Many Haitians will die who are currently alive and under debris, because rescue teams cannot reach them in time. This is nature's fault not the fault of either president.

GW had New Orleans and he made many mistakes: his initial indifference,a federal and state bureaucracy, a once in a life time disaster and a large uneducated and dependent populace that was not equal to the challenge.

Obama now has Haiti and he too will be blamed for things that are outside the scope of his ability to cope. What I am suggesting is that GW was mostly vilified by the press and media while Obama has been mostly praised. Just more evidence of duplicity and double standards among our press and media.

Fearing another political Haiti, Democrats are quickly trying to stitch together health care legislation before the Mass. vote so they can present a claimed victory to our new "gipper' before his State of The Union Speech.

It will be interesting to see how many Democrats were forced to fall on the grenade to save Obama.(See 2 below.)

The author of this article seems to get it when it comes to old 'dumb' Sarah. Palin gets her message across because she is at one with her audience. Something Obama is not and thus cannot.

Sarah, in many ways, is real and that scares the 'bejesus' out of Liberals who are un-real. This is why they need to besmirch her and make snide comments about her sincerity and, above all, question her intelligence. After all Sarah went to a college no one ever heard of so how bright can she be when held against the bright lights of Hahvahd!

Well Sarah was bright enough to do a bang up job governing Alaska against all odds, even those from within her own Party. Being bright,lacking common sense and having a tin ear defines Obama and you can throw in arrogance and aloofness and you have a president falling like a stone in the polls dashing off to save another politician cut from similar cloth.

Our messiah is learning on the job every day - all presidents do - because no one ever goes to school to become president. So all presidents enter the office with a resume of varied experience. Obama's was thinner than Sarah's so I suspect Sarah could handle the job were it to ever come her way.

Meanwhile, Sarah is having fun, earning some well deserved bread, speaking her mind in her own voice. Rather than fear her, as they do, Liberals should hope she gets plenty of exposure because, in this day and age, too much exposure is what does most people in - even late night comedians who exemplify bad taste.(See 3 below.)

Well if the article on Sarah does not get Liberal juices flowing let's try this one on Glenn Beck. (See 3a below.)

Rami Khouri writes the EU is getting its Palestinian act together - finally. Well whoopee doo! (See 4 below.)

The arrogant Labor payoff should give labor pains to the rest of the populace but then Democrats have been delivering for Labor for decades.

Remember the previous picture of the little girl and her doll house that I showed at the top of one of my memo's. Well her future just got burdened by some $200 more debt. (See 5 below.)

I posted this once before but someone sent it to me and I thought it was worth re- posting. (See 6 below.)

Have a great week, pray for the Haitians and hope that Mass. comes to its senses.

Dick



1)Ralph Peters wrote a splendid paper. Right on target. It certainly calls to mind the endless prattle from our President and Sec. of State that Iran must change its ways vis-a-vis nuclear armament or a really strong letter will follow.

Our intellectually driven society is sick to the bone with correctitude, wimpishness, and "do it my way or I'll sue." Joining hands and singing "Kumbaya" works only if all are on the same page.

Take Japan - - - As nearly totally destroyed as it was in the early summer of 1945 its people would never surrender. We could not understand the zealotry of the code of bushido. It was unimaginable that the enemy would strap bombs to themselves and die trying to kill us - -that is essentially what the Kamikaze was. Sound familiar?

Japan's militarist leaders correctly perceived that the US was war weary and if they could just hang on we would make a deal to bring Johnny home. They also knew that our primary interest was in Eruope (folks like us) and that our political leaders and much of the public was satisfied with the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Further they knew that we really had no stomach for the all out push it would take to defeat Japan. We were now flush with wealth from the war economy, had become fat cats and were sick of being told we could not buy this or that because of rationing and shortages. For the first time since the 1920s folks had discretionary funds for goodies.

The planned invasion of Japan in the fall of 1945 was estimated to cost as many or more casualties as we had suffered in the entire war up to that time (ca. 500,000 dead alone). Were we willing to suffer that for the sake of the Orient with whom we had little cultural connection?

Of course the bomb did it and the revisionists excoriate Truman for that "inhumanity." However, he was correct in feeling that had he allowed one more GI to die when he had the means to end it suddenly, he should have been impeached. As I think he said, "I could not have faced one mother whose son was killed because I refused to use the bomb."

Dick

PS - - Re our population's ignorance of history. I am reminded of a trip to the bank I made a year or so ago just before Armed Forces (Armistice) Day. I told the young lady teller that she would have the day off to celebrate the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 when WWI ended." She looked at me with open mouth and wide eyes, saying, "Well, I never heard of such a thing."



2)Democrats seek quick deal on health-care bill
By Lori Montgomery



President Obama and congressional leaders raced Friday to strike a compromise on far-reaching health legislation, hoping to settle lingering disputes before Tuesday, when a special election in Massachusetts could hand Republicans their 41st vote in the Senate and the power to defeat Obama's top domestic initiative.

If Republicans claim the seat held for nearly a half-century by Democrat Edward M. Kennedy, who died in August, Senate Democrats would lose their ability to overcome a GOP filibuster. Democrats said Friday that losing the seat could deal a crippling blow to the health-care measure, which last month required the vote of every member of the Senate Democratic caucus to overcome united Republican opposition.

"It will kill the health bill," said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

Frank said he expects Attorney General Martha Coakley, a Democrat, to prevail, but Democrats nonetheless began trying to plot a health-care strategy if they lose their supermajority in the Senate. Senate aides said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has shut down talk of the most obvious option: avoiding the need for another Senate vote by having the House approve the Senate-passed version of the health bill, rather than merging the two and having each chamber vote again. Pelosi has repeatedly said she could not rally the votes to approve a package that many House Democrats think would force people to buy health insurance without ensuring that they could afford it.

If state Sen. Scott Brown succeeds in his bid to fill Kennedy's seat, Democrats could also try to delay seating him until Massachusetts officials have certified his victory, a process that could take up to two weeks. But Kennedy took the seat within hours after winning it in a special election in 1962, and senior Senate aides acknowledged it would be difficult to justify a postponement long enough to push the health bill to final passage.

Some Democrats have raised a third option: using a fast-track procedure, known as reconciliation, that would permit the bill to pass the Senate with 51 votes. "Getting health-care reform passed is important. Reconciliation is an option," Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of the House leadership, said on Bloomberg Television's "Political Capital With Al Hunt."

But reconciliation would require lawmakers to start over, dismantle the bill and scale it back dramatically.

Throughout Friday afternoon, House and Senate leaders pressed toward an agreement between the two chambers, meeting at the White House for a third straight day. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters upon returning to the Capitol that negotiators were "pretty close" to a final compromise.

Top aides were planning to work through the weekend to transmit a complete package to congressional budget analysts, who must attach a price tag to the legislation before it proceeds to final votes in the House and Senate.

Democrats briefed on the talks said negotiators were close to completing plans to create a national marketplace for insurance, as the House prefers, although the states would also have input. House negotiators were poised to accept the Senate's proposal to grant an independent board broad powers to rein in future Medicare spending.

In a separate development, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), the last senator to sign on to the health bill last month, asked Reid to pull a controversial provision that would have fully financed an expansion of Medicaid in his state and replace it with an expensive provision that would do the same for all states. Republicans have accused Nelson of winning a special deal for Nebraska at the expense of taxpayers elsewhere.

The much-maligned provision, under which the federal government would permanently pay the cost of vastly expanding Medicaid in Nebraska, gained another critic on Friday: former president Bill Clinton.

"Get as much gunk out of the Senate bill as possible. That Nebraska thing is really hurting us," Clinton told House Democrats in a closed-door speech at the Capitol Visitor Center, said a House aide who attended the session.

3)Sarah and Her Tribe
By Jonathan Raban

When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

There's a moment of near rapture in the video of Sarah Palin's acceptance speech at the Republican convention in St. Paul on September 3, 2008. It begins in the eleventh minute, after her Westbrook Pegler quote ("We grow good people in our small towns...") and before her "lipstick" quip about hockey moms and pit bulls. Following a nervous start, she is now entirely at ease in front of the biggest crowd of her speaking life, and riding high on the chants of "Sarah!" "USA!" and "Drill, baby, drill!" Her smile looks ecstatic, as she allows herself a snuffling chuckle at the acerbity of her own wit, then shows off her repertoire of little nods of self-approbation, complicit left-eye winks from behind her glasses, and lips smugly pursed to signal that an unanswerable point has just been made. When the camera cuts to the crowd, face after face is a joyful mirror image of Palin's own, as if transfigured by a shared triumph. (Striking exceptions among the faces include those of Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, and Cindy McCain, all of whom register a cautious agnosticism in the presence of the epiphany.) In Going Rogue, Palin and her ghost, Lynn Vincent, write of the speech, "By God's grace I was having a ball."

In contrast to Barack Obama, who maintained a detachment verging on aloofness from his most fervent and adulatory campaign crowds, Palin achieved an extraordinary at-oneness with her supporters; not least, perhaps, because she appeared to be such an enthralled fan of her own performances. She managed to endow her threadbare homilies about free enterprise, tax cuts, patriotism, and the evil of government spending with the novelty of her own sudden, fresh-faced presence on the national scene. Most of all, she seemed to embody in her person and her life story the accumulated grievances of the heartland and the West: the resentment in the countryside and the exurbs against the liberal tyranny of the big cities; the antipathy of those she calls "real Americans" toward the "East Coast elites"; the surly resistance of states' rights proponents to "the Feds."


Her nasal voice, pitched in the upper register, with the upsy-downsy, singsong delivery of a kindergarten teacher, became, rather improbably, a great electoral asset. Her diction and accent were shaped more by class than region, and spiced with faux-genteel cuss words like "dang," "heck," "darn," "geez," "bullcrap," and "bass-ackwards." It was a voice unspoiled by overmuch formal education and boldly unafraid of truisms and clichés; a perfect foil for Obama's polished law-school eloquence. In the narrative of the McCain campaign, she was the exemplary real American, Obama the phony one, and when people are now interviewed in the interminable lines for her book signings, by far their most common remark about her is "She's real."

Alaska, the particular reality from which Palin hails, is so little known by most Americans that she was able to freely mythicize her state as the utopian last refuge of the "hard work ethic," "unpretentious living," and proud self-sufficiency. Her anti-tax rhetoric (private citizens spend their money more wisely than government does) and disdain for "federal dollars" were unembarrassed by the fact that Alaska tops the tables of both per capita federal expenditure, on which one in three jobs in the state depends, and congressional earmarks, or "pork." So, too, she mythicized the straggling eyesore of Wasilla (described by a current councilwoman there as "like a big ugly strip mall from one end to the other") as the bucolic small town of sentimental American memory. Listening to Palin talk about it, one was invited to inspect not the string of oceanic parking lots attached to Fred Meyer, Lowe's, Target, Wal-Mart, and Home Depot, or the town's reputation among state troopers as the crystal meth capital of Alaska, but, rather, the imaginary barber shop, drugstore soda fountain, antique church, and raised boardwalks, seen in the rosy light of an Indian summer evening.

To audiences struggling to keep their heads above water through a deepening recession, her Alaska de l'esprit, this land of boundless natural resources and minimal government and taxation, "microcosm of America" as she liked to say, sounded a fine place to which to escape from the exigencies of living in the real United States in 2008. When talking to people who talk and think as she does, Palin has an exceptionally canny political instinct for connecting with her own kind. She turned her campaign rallies into giant family picnics, at which the assembled thousands, striking for their physical resemblance to one another, basked in having their own family catchphrases, like "politics as usual," returned to them in magnified form by the monitor screens and loudspeakers. Safely within her tribe, Palin speaks fluently, with warmth and humor,[1] though grammatical logic tends to evade her; it's away from the tribe, talking, for instance, with Katie Couric, Charles Gibson, and other members of what she now calls the "lamestream media," that she dissolves into flustered babble.

Going Rogue is about further cementing her connection to the tribe. A book that begins with Governor Palin visiting the Alaska Right to Life booth at the 2008 state fair ("With their passion and sincerity, the ladies typified the difference between principles and politics") clearly isn't aiming to pander to liberal trespassers among its readers. Her encounter with the sincere and passionate ladies, and the jangling false antithesis between "principles" and "politics," which goes little further than the fact that both words begin with a p, sound the opening notes of Palin's dominant theme, as she markets her brand of "Commonsense Conservatism."

Commonsense Conservatism hinges on the not-so-tacit assumption that the average, hardworking churchgoer, like the ladies at the booth, equipped with the fundamental, God-given ability to distinguish right from wrong, is in a better position to judge, on "principle," the merits of an economic policy or the deployment of American troops abroad than "the 'experts'"—a term here unfailingly placed between derisive quotation marks. Desiccated expertise, of the kind possessed by economists, environmental scientists, and overinformed reporters from the lamestream media, clouds good judgment; Palin's life, by contrast, is presented as one of passion, sincerity, and principle. Going Rogue, in other words, is a four-hundred-page paean to virtuous ignorance.

Much of the book is given over to establishing what Palin shares in common with the "patriotic, good-hearted Americans" who've been crowding the malls to await the arrival of her tour bus, so one learns more than one would ideally like about her habits as a consumer. Her preferred fashion label is Carharrt, the manufacturer of outdoor work clothes; she says she shops at Costco and clips coupons. "We buy diapers in bulk and generic peanut butter." She dislikes "fancy food," "fancy clothes," and "fancy jewelry." When she and Todd Palin "eloped" to Palmer (which is all of eleven miles distant from Wasilla) to get married, they celebrated with a wedding dinner at "the Wendy's drive-thru." Later, they "bought a $35 wedding band from a street vendor in Hawaii, and it still works!" "My family is frugal," Palin remarks, rather unnecessarily.

Meat is what she likes to consume most, though not rare, or even pink, meat (which might strike a too-fancy note with her target demographic):

I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals—right next to the mashed potatoes....
People outside Alaska are often clueless about our reliance on natural food sources. (You know you're an Alaskan when at least twice a year your kitchen doubles as a meat-processing plant.)
Her sarcophagous appetite for flesh and slaughter goes hand in hand with her scorn for vegetarians—more, it seems, because of their presumed social class and education than because of the food on their plates. An old enemy in Wasilla (the book is full of them) is described as a "Birkenstock-and-granola Berkeley grad who wore her gray hair long and flowing and with a flower behind one ear." Palin's speechwriter on the McCain campaign, Matthew Scully, is also the author of an admired book on animal rights, Dominion. He becomes "a bunny-hugging vegan and gentle, green soul who I think would throw himself in the path of a semitruck to save a squirrel" and "the classic absentminded professor." Though his speeches were "like poetry," it required a real, meat-eating, normal American to give them substance.

In a welcome moment of shading and contrast, Palin the consumer finds space to mention the fact that she drives a black VW Jetta, which seems an odd choice of car for an all-American patriot, since US Jettas are imported from the Volkswagen assembly plant in Puebla, Mexico.

"Everything I ever needed to know, I learned on the basketball court," Palin says, reprising a sentence she first wrote in an Op-Ed piece for the Anchorage Daily News in April 2004, before ghostwriters entered her life. "I loved competition." On one hand, she paints herself as the average mom, a "Main Streeter," as she described herself in her campaign debate with Joe Biden; on the other, driven by her "gift" of "determination and resolve," she's a born winner, but only of reassuringly average trophies, which are lined up in the book as on the family mantelpiece.

There's the medal she won as a ten-year-old from the VFW for her poem about Betsy Ross (alas, not reprinted here), along with the sashes from the Miss Wasilla contest ("I won every segment of the competition, even Miss Congeniality") and her place as second runner-up to Miss Alaska in the state final. "Every year in school I ran for something in student government—vice president, treasurer, something." Her many exploits in track and field culminate in the high school basketball championship game between the Wasilla Warriors, captained by Palin with a badly sprained ankle, and the Service Cougars of Anchorage. "I'd never worked so hard for anything in my life, because I'd never wanted anything so badly." Small town played big city. Small town won. "That victory changed my life."

Her father, Chuck Heath, hunter, taxidermist, elementary school science teacher, and sports coach, loomed imposingly over her childhood, and clearly inspired her egregious appetite to compete in, and to win, every contest that came her way:

My siblings all won many more sports awards than I, as I wasn't equipped with anything close to their natural talent. But I once overheard Dad say to another coach that he'd never had an athlete work harder. Overhearing those words was one of the most powerful experiences of my life.
No wonder she found political elections irresistible, and basketball, with its multiple opportunities for tactical cheating, in the way of well-executed pushes, jersey-pullings, bumpings, and "flops," supplies a fitting analogy for how the bright, intensely willful, energetic, but academically mediocre housewife and salmon-fisher gamed her way from the Wasilla city council to the gubernatorial mansion in Juneau. Palin showed her form in her first big race, in 1996, when she challenged the three-term incumbent mayor of the town, John Stein, who seems not to have known what hit him. With the backing of her church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, and the hunting interest, she campaigned on the nonmayoral issues of abortion and gun-ownership. It was put about that the Steins were living in sin: they produced their marriage certificate. It was also put about that Stein, a lapsed Lutheran, was Jewish. In 2008, he told William Yardley of The New York Times:

Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff, and I was like, "Whoa." But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits and the religious born-again thing. I'm not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: "We will have our first Christian mayor." I thought, Holy cow, what's happening here?
In Going Rogue, Stein is described as "relatively new to the community." "He wasn't a born-here, raised-here, gonna-be-buried-here type of hometown guy." Those darned wandering Jews.

Palin won by 651 votes to Stein's 440. Installed in the mayor's office, she sacked the town planner, police chief, museum director, and librarian (who was later reinstalled after a public protest), and set about her mission of deregulating Wasilla. Business inventory and personal property taxes were abolished; land was rezoned from residential to commercial to meet the needs of incoming big-box chain stores and fast-food outlets, and from single-family to multi-family to encourage speculative condo development; Palin cast the tie-breaking vote in council to stop the city adopting a building code. She held out the invitation to prospective investors in Wasilla to build what they liked, where they liked, out of any materials and to whatever standards that they chose. The long, unlovely, centerless ribbon of commerce that stretches along Alaska's Highway 3, punctuated by the signage of Subway, I-Hop, Burger King, Arby's, KFC, Taco Bell, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and the like, is a monument to Palin's cherished vision of the free-market, free-enterprise society. As she boasts—justifiably—of her time in Wasilla, "Basically, we'd gotten government out of the way."

After her two terms as mayor were up, she gained statewide recognition in her campaign to become lieutenant governor. What followed was pure basketball—swift, sure, and hard to follow without slow-motion action replays. The US Senate seat vacated by Frank Murkowski when he became governor was in his gift, and Palin, who'd campaigned for him, was one of several people he interviewed for the job before he gave it to his daughter, Lisa. Her pride sorely wounded, Palin nonetheless accepted his consolation prize, the chair of the three-person Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, where she sat alongside the chairman of the state Republican Party, Randy Ruedrich, and a geologist, Dan Seamount.

Hearing rumors that Ruedrich was leaking confidential state information to a natural gas company, she and a technician hacked into Ruedrich's e-mail account one evening and found evidence that he was conducting Republican Party business from his public office—an offense with which Palin was familiar, since she'd sent out flyers promoting herself from the mayor's office in Wasilla when she was running for lieutenant governor in 2002. She reported Ruedrich to the governor, demanding that he be sacked. When nothing happened, she threatened to resign herself if Ruedrich didn't go. Murkowski reluctantly told Ruedrich to step down or be dismissed. Two months later, in January 2004, Palin herself resigned from the commission, telling the press that she'd been gagged by the governor from speaking in public about Ruedrich's ethical violations.

In Going Rogue, this episode is held up as the supreme example of Palin's courage, independence, sincerity, and passion. "As I typed out the [letter to Murkowski], I thought, This is it. I'm taking on the party and putting it in writing. My career is over. Well, if I die, I die. " It also illustrates her acute political gumption, her keen ear for the mood of the moment in the strip mall and the stands of the sports arena. Murkowski then was fast turning into Alaska's most unpopular governor on record, and the Alaska Republican Party was deeply implicated in the ongoing federal probe into the VECO Corporation bribery-and-corruption scandal, which would soon send five Republican lawmakers to jail.

At that time, 53 percent of Alaskan voters were registered as independents. By cutting herself loose from the tainted party, to great applause from the local press, Palin perfectly positioned herself to take on Murkowski in the gubernatorial primary of 2006, which she won by an overwhelming majority, as she went on to win the general election in November. It's impossible to know how much conscious calculation went into Palin's extremely smart moves in the Ruedrich affair; probably as much, and as little, as LeBron James needs to make when in possession of the ball.

She takes on the Republican Party again in the 130 pages of Going Rogue that describe her national travels as McCain's running mate; not McCain himself, but the functionaries who make up the rules of politics-as-usual, a pampered elite, with their fancy clothes, affected speech, and fancy hotels, led by Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace. Schmidt is portrayed like a TV villain; a "rotund" smoker who says "fuck"—or rather "f***"—in front of Palin's seven-year-old daughter, and is in the habit of wearing sunglasses in the dead of night, perched on top of his bald skull. Wallace is said to be "outwardly very affectionate," meaning that inwardly she's mean as hell. Palin's campaign chief of staff, Andrew Smith, appears briefly as Schmidt's personal goon, "a tanned, kind of tired-looking guy in a suit" who worked on Wall Street and speaks "in a thick East Coast accent" (enough said). He's never seen again.

This band of thugs, or "paid operatives" from the "professional political caste," acting on orders from an invisible headquarters that Palin isn't permitted to visit, keep her gagged and bound as they attempt to transform this sterling American original into a conventional politician. When she tries to speak to a journalist, "different pairs of hands hustled me into the campaign's Suburban." For hours on end, they torture her with facts on flashcards and prewritten evasive answers to tricky questions. "I couldn't force myself to play it safe and sound like a politician." Leaks from the campaign, about how Palin is a "diva," suffering from "postpartum depression," and "going rogue," find their way into the press, and Palin traces them to Schmidt himself:

Schmidt issued a threat that was veiled enough for deniability but as clear as day if you were on the receiving end: if there were any more leaks critical of anybody in the handling of Sarah Palin, then a lot more negative stuff would be said about Sarah Palin.
Steve Schmidt has called Palin's account of the campaign "total fiction"; Nicolle Wallace says it's "pure fiction." They're on well-trodden ground: in February 1997, three months into Palin's first term as mayor of Wasilla, her local paper, the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, carried an editorial that said, "Mayor Palin fails to have a firm grasp of something very simple: the truth." Fact-checkers from the Associated Press and several tireless bloggers have uncovered scores of inaccuracies and "lies" in Going Rogue. It's fair to doubt that any line of direct speech in the book was ever uttered by the person to whom it is attributed, and to assume that every factual detail has probably been either invented or twisted out of shape in order to cast Palin in the best possible light. That said, one might also remember the useful distinction made by the Barbizon painter J.F. Millet between the artist who paints directly from life and the artist who paints the same scene from memory: "...the last may succeed better in giving the character, the physiognomy of the place, though all the details may be inexact."

Surprisingly, perhaps, this seems to be the case with Going Rogue's treatment of Palin's vice-presidential run. In Sarah from Alaska, Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, who were embedded reporters on the Palin campaign for CBS and Fox News, and earn for themselves a couple of paragraphs of abuse in Going Rogue, which adds to their credibility, largely confirm Palin's story in its broad outline and coloring. Their Schmidt and Wallace are characters nearly identical to her Schmidt and Wallace. Read side by side, the two books work like a stereoscope through which to watch the steadily darkening atmosphere of the campaign, the quarantining of Palin from the press, the infighting, the stream of leaks, and the vain attempts to educate the candidate in current affairs. Conroy and Walshe report that when Schmidt gave her a copy of Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, she obediently carried the book around in her purse but chose to read People, Us, and Runner's World.

By both accounts, Palin was treated with extraordinary condescension from the start; more as a dim and wayward eighth-grader than as a sitting governor, putative vice-president, and the speaker whose rallies drew ten and twenty times the crowds that showed up to hear John McCain. Her admirers will see in these chapters a brutal crash course in the chicanery, pettiness, and sexism of national politics, from which their heroine emerges annealed, but with her spirit unbroken, as "real" and fiercely principled as on the day she took McCain's phone call on her BlackBerry at the Alaska state fair.

Her detractors rejoiced when, on July 3, 2009, at a hastily assembled press conference outside her Wasilla house, Palin announced that she was going to resign as governor, in a wild and rambling speech, delivered from notes at breakneck speed, about lame ducks, dead fish, selfless troops, basketball, quitters, General MacArthur, the politics of personal destruction, ethics complaints, destiny, the media, putting first things first, and how America was looking north to the future. She appeared to have lost her wits.

Now she's back: reviving the book business in provincial towns from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Richland, Washington; working on her keynote address to the Tea Party movement's national convention, to be held in Nashville, Tennessee, in February; tweeting daily, sometimes hourly, to her tribal followers about the state of the nation; and everywhere parading her Down's syndrome son, Trig, along with her most photogenic daughter, Piper, as living testaments to herself as the model pro-life mother. What she's running for is not yet clear, but she's evidently running for something.

Going Rogue is stuffed with dubious quotations from Famous Authors, among them one often attributed, but never reliably sourced, to Pascal: "the God-shaped vacuum in every human heart." Unfortunately, there does seem to be a Palin-shaped vacuum in the heart of the American electorate, and it's not hard to see why. After the ritual brandishing of the flag and her shout-outs to her fellow Christian fundamentalists, Palin's core message is, as it always has been, about fiscal policy.

In our present neo-Keynesian moment, economics has never seemed more bewildering and arcane, or more the exclusive preserve of hated "experts" from the "East Coast elites." Most people I know, myself included, can't readily follow the algebraic equations that explain the "Keynesian multiplier," which, in its turn, is needed to explain TARP and the stimulus package. Belonging to a tribe different from Palin's, I simply take it on trust as a matter of faith that Paul Krugman, in his columns for TheNew York Times, is more likely to be right about such things than, say, Lou Dobbs or Senator John Thune, but I share in the general apprehensive fogginess about what's happening.

For Palin, it's simple. The national economy is a straightforward macrocosm of the domestic economy of the average god-fearing family of four. What's good for the family is good for the nation, and vice versa; and the idea that the family should spend its way out of recession is an affront to common sense, conservative or otherwise. On December 3, she tweeted: "Baffling/nonsensical: Obama's talk of yet another debt-ridden 'stimulus' pkg. Fight this 1, America, bc after last 1 unemployment rose, debt grew." Five days later, while Obama was speaking at the Brookings Institution about the economy, Palin wrote, "Quik msg b4 book event: Prez pls pay down massive, obscene U.S debt &/or give 'stimulus' $ back to Americans b4 propose spending more of our $."

Palin's general economic theory, so snugly adapted to Twitter's 140- character limit, carries great weight. At a time when everyone should be clipping coupons, tightening belts, and buying generic peanut butter, Obama (Columbia and Harvard), Larry Summers (MIT and Harvard), Tim Geithner (Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins), and Peter Orszag (Princeton and London School of Economics) are out on a spending spree that is "baffling," "nonsensical," and "obscene." But then what did we expect of the East Coast elites?

Against their transparent profligacy should be set the record of Sarah Palin (University of Idaho, School of Journalism and Mass Media). She made Wasilla hum, while putting an end to personal property taxes. As governor of her state, she taxed "Big Oil" and in 2008 mailed out a check for $3,269, drawn against the Alaska Permanent Fund, to every resident. (This payout shrank to $1,305 in 2009, after Palin quit the governorship.) She not only makes economics perfectly comprehensible at the level of the kitchen table, she makes it work brilliantly in practice.

The rage for Palin's pert simplicities reflects in part the failure of the Obama administration to persuade people of the wisdom and benefits of its far more sophisticated policies. Recently, I came across FDR's fireside chat of April 14, 1938,[2] when, speaking from the bottom of the second trough of the double-dip recession, he delivered a plain and passionate defense of deficit spending; Keynes for the family, and as resonant and topical now as it was seventy years ago. Nothing I've heard from the present administration matches its clarity, and where puzzlement and incomprehension exist, Palin leaps to fill the gap with facile and völkisch answers.

She's much more deeply in touch with her followers than Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, or any other recent candidate who's tried to court the same constituency. (Admittedly, they also lacked her flirty sex appeal.) She has the knack of turning public debate sulfurous with a phrase, as she did last summer with her remark that Democrats want "death panels" in their health plan. She is a catalyst around whom the Tea Party movement[3] is growing alarmingly in size and strength, PAC on PAC, determined to purge the Republican Party of its surviving moderate candidates, like Carly Fiorina and Charlie Crist, as, with Palin's help, it purged Dede Scozzafava in New York's Twenty-third Congressional District. Having hoisted her banner of Commonsense Conservatism, and campaigned across the country by Lear jet and tour bus to promote Going Rogue, she's unlikely to assuage her compulsion to be a winner merely by selling more books than anyone else during 2009's holiday season. She is the stuff of democratic—with a small d—bad dreams.

Notes
[1]As she did in her speech at the Vanderburgh County Right to Life dinner at Evansville, Indiana, in April 2009, which can be seen at www.conservatives4palin.com/2009/04/right-to-life-dinner-video-live-feed.html.

[2]See www.mhric.org/fdr/chat12.html.

[3]See Michael Tomasky's essay, "Something New on the Mall," The New York Review, October 22, 2009.

3a)'Nobody's Watching Charlie Rose': Glenn Beck on conspiracy theories, his critics on the right and left, and how he resembles Howard Beale of 'Network.
By JAMES TARANTO


Glenn Beck didn't always believe in what he was doing. "When I was young, I used to hear people say, 'He's a golden boy. Look at that guy. Can you imagine what he's going to be like when he grows up?' Well, I unfortunately bought into that. And I hadn't even found myself. Quite honestly, I was running from myself. But I knew how to work Top 40 radio."

"Golden boy" was no exaggeration. "I was in Washington, D.C., on the morning show, by the time I was 18, programming a station by 19, No. 1 in the mornings. I think I was making, I don't know, a quarter of a million dollars by the time I was 25," he tells me in his midtown Manhattan office, a few blocks from the Fox News Channel studio where he now broadcasts his eponymous program every afternoon.

A drinking problem helped plunge Mr. Beck into personal and professional crisis: "By the time I was 30," he says, "nobody would work with me. I was friendless, I was hopeless, I was suicidal, lost my family—I mean, it was bad. Bottomed out, didn't know what I was going to do. I actually thought I was going to be a chef—go to work in a kitchen someplace."

Instead he found a calling in talk radio. It was late in the 1990s: "I did one of my first shows at WABC [in New York]. I was filling in for somebody. . . . I used to have to write everything out and keep copious notes on everything. I overprepped everything. And I got to the end of my first hour, and I looked down at all the notes, and I hadn't touched the first piece of paper. It was all off the top of my head. It was me being me. That's when I knew: This is what I have to do."

Mr. Beck, 45, has many detractors, but there's no denying that he has made a success of himself. In addition to his Fox show, he hosts "The Glenn Beck Program," syndicated on radio, publishes a magazine and a Web site, and has written seven books. "Somebody told me that our footprint in a month"—the number of people he reaches in all media—"is about 30 million," he says.

His politics are libertarian. "I really kind of dig this whole freedom thing," he says. "I'd like to pass it on to the kids." But he is pessimistic about the prospects for doing so: "I'm a dad, and I no longer see a way for my kids to even inherit the money that I'm making, let alone go out there, have an idea, and create it in their own lifetime."

Mr. Beck blames a political system that he describes as corrupt and out of touch, a sentiment that is widely shared: "People in Washington . . . not all of them, but a lot of them, are not men and women of honor anymore," he says. "I just saw a poll today that said 25% of Americans now believe that their government officials will, for the most part, do the right thing. Only 25%. It's the lowest number ever recorded."

Mr. Beck appeals to a slice of the remaining 75% with a style that is earnest and emotional; he is known to cry on air. Although he has reported on some major news stories, including the scandals involving Acorn and former Obama aide Van Jones, he thinks of himself as a commentator and entertainer rather than a journalist. "I'm not interested in breaking news," he tells me. "I'm interested in telling the story of what's going on and then trying to figure it out."

In doing so, Mr. Beck draws strong negative reactions for both his right-of-center views and his populist style. "Right now, I'm getting hammered by the left and the right, and I get hammered for being an opportunist," he says.

He pleads innocent, arguing that he was as hard on George W. Bush—especially over spending and immigration—as he is on Barack Obama: "Nobody seems to recall the years . . . when I was saying the same thing and program directors were calling me saying, . . . 'Are you kidding me? You're on a conservative talk radio network. You can't come out against George W. Bush.' Well, here it goes.

"That's why I connect now with the American people, because the listeners that . . . have been with me for a long time know that I have said these things at my own peril, that I'm not in it for—I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm a capitalist. I dig money. But I'm not in it for the money."

Cheerful and affable, Mr. Beck responds good-naturedly, even eagerly, when I ask him to respond to his critics. It's a far cry from the liberal stereotype of an angry hater. But his worldview has a dark side: "I don't believe our government officials will do the right thing. They will do the right thing for special interests and for some sort of agenda that they're not bringing me in on."

When I ask him to respond to the charge that he is a conspiracy theorist, he answers, "I am the guy who debunked conspiracy theory."

Mr. Beck says he received death threats from "truthers"—crackpots of the far left and the far right who believe that the U.S. government was behind 9/11—after he denounced them on his old CNN Headline News show in 2007. (Mr. Beck's revelation that Van Jones had signed a truther petition helped force Mr. Jones to resign from the White House Council on Environmental Quality in September 2009.)

"I said those people were a gigantic danger from within, because we must trust each other," Mr. Beck says. "There are limits to debasement of this country, aren't there? I mean, it's one thing to believe that our politicians are capable of being Bernie Madoff. It's another to think that they are willing to kill 3,000 Americans. Once you cross that line, you're in a whole new territory."

Yet while this is all to Mr. Beck's credit, it is not quite responsive to the question. It is possible, after all, to reject one conspiracy theory while espousing others, and the claim that "our politicians are capable of being Bernie Madoff" is, to say the least, a rather sweeping indictment.

Mr. Beck's answer: "I believe the conspiracies, quote-unquote, that are happening now are happening all out in the open. All you have to do is track their actions. Their actions speak louder than their words. It's easy to throw out, 'Well, he's a conspiracy theorist.' Why do you say that? 'Well, because they say they're not doing that.' But their actions show that they are.

"TARP, stimulus—a stimulus package that makes no sense whatsoever. No sense whatsoever! TARP, stimulus, health care that is behind closed doors, where they're giving Medicaid free to states, where they're saying, 'We're going to pay for it by reducing the cost of Medicare while we expand Medicare.' When you look at all those things, and you know that the people who are in and around the planning of those things believe in [welfare activists Richard] Cloward and [Frances Fox] Piven, believe in ["Rules for Radicals'" author] Saul Alinksy—that's not a conspiracy. That's a pretty good educated guess."

As an example, Mr. Beck notes that Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, last month described the Senate health-care bill as a "starter home." Says Mr. Beck: "Sen. Harkin says to the progressive left, 'This is a starter home. Don't worry, we can add additions to this, and we'll grow it'"—a paraphrase of Mr. Harkin's remarks, but an accurate one. Mr. Beck continues: "Excuse me? That's everything that I've been saying you're going to do, and you've been denying it."

This fall, Mr. Beck drew friendly fire on an American Enterprise Institute blog from Charles Murray, a social scientist with strong libertarian political leanings, who conceded that "Beck is spectacularly right (translation: I agree with him) on about 95 percent of the substantive issues he talks about." But Mr. Murray does not care for Mr. Beck's manner: "Our job is to engage in a debate on great issues and make converts to our point of view. The key word is converts—referring to people who didn't start out agreeing with us. We shouldn't be civil and reasonable just because we want to be nice guys. It is the only option we've got if we want to succeed instead of just posture. The Glenn Becks of the world posture, and make our work harder."

Mr. Beck answers carefully: "I'm sorry he doesn't agree with me—doesn't agree with my approach." Then he notes the irony of a think-tank intellectual criticizing a populist media star for lacking broad appeal: "How many are reading his blog, and how many are listening to my radio show, television show, reading my books, going to conventions, seeing me on stage? I mean, I think, while I respect his position and his difference in opinion on presentation, I think one of us is probably reaching more people daily."

He continues: "Look, I know a lot of people will disagree with the way I present things. I am being myself—I am a guy who is a recovering alcoholic, who lived a pretty fast life, who works hard every day, quite honestly, not to use the F-word—it used to be an art for me. I am a work in progress. But I also am a businessman that looks to get the word out to the maximum number of people."

And he rejects the implication that his is a lowbrow appeal: "You name the conservative that can do a full hour—a full hour—on Woodrow Wilson and the roots of modern liberalism—for an hour—and have high ratings with it. . . . I had like three really big eggheads on the show, and people watched it. Now, you could be Charlie Rose all you want, but nobody's watching Charlie Rose."

Mr. Beck identifies with the Howard Beale character from the 1976 film "Network." Beale, played by Peter Finch, is a news anchor on a fictional broadcast network who has a nervous breakdown on air, becomes a raving populist, and is a big hit with viewers. Mr. Beck invokes the fictional anchorman's most famous line: "I am mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. The part of Howard Beale that I liken myself to is the moment when he was in the raincoat, where he figures everything out, and he's like, 'Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! Why the hell aren't you up at the window shouting outside?'"

Mr. Beck adds, "What the media wants to make me is the Howard Beale at the end, the crazy showman that's doing anything for money. That I don't liken myself to."

Some of Mr. Beck's detractors on the left, including MSNBC ranter Keith Olbermann, draw a more sinister cinematic analogy. Mr. Olbermann calls Mr. Beck "Lonesome Rhodes," the cynical TV demagogue played by Andy Griffith in 1957's "A Face in the Crowd."

"I had never heard of Lonesome Rhodes," Mr. Beck says. "I had never seen the movie. . . . As soon as I heard that, I watched it. . . . Lonesome Rhodes and I, I guess, had a few things in common. He was a drunk. I'm in AA; he wasn't. He, at the very beginning, said things that he believed—I think. I'm not really even sure on that. I used to not say the things I believe. . . . Now I've made a vow to myself—it actually comes from Immanuel Kant, the philosopher: 'There are many things that I believe that I shall never say. But I shall never say the things that I do not believe.' . . . The minute I violate that, I'm back to the old drunk Glenn."

The source of the comparison points to another difference between Mr. Beck and Lonesome Rhodes. Mr. Olbermann is no closer to the old ideal of the straightforward, objective newsman than is Mr. Beck, and cable television has yielded up a multitude of other personalities who blend news, strong opinion and entertainment in varying degrees, including Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Jon Stewart and, until his recent departure from CNN, Lou Dobbs.

By contrast, the authors of "A Face in the Crowd" and "Network" imagined their protagonists as singular sensations who drew massive audiences at a time when viewing options were far fewer. At his peak, Lonesome Rhodes claims 65 million viewers, more than one-third of the entire U.S. population in 1957. Mr. Beck's Fox show, the third-highest-rated on the cable news channels, averaged 2.9 million viewers a day in 2009, according to Nielsen Media Research. Even his estimated monthly multimedia audience of 30 million amounts to less than 10% of all Americans.

The development of cable television, with its diversity and audience segmentation, seems to have been a necessary condition for the emergence of such programming. Charles Murray may be right that Mr. Beck mostly preaches to the choir, but the observation applies equally to Mr. Beck's competitors and their respective choirs.

Mr. Taranto, a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.


4)Welcome a more activist EU on Palestine
By Rami G. Khouri


Just as the United States apparently is gearing up for phase two of its foray into Arab-Israeli peacemaking, some Europeans seem to be waking up from their long slumber on the issue. Several symbolic or rhetorical gestures in recent weeks indicate that the European Union wants at least to raise its voice and profile on Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Their approach is intriguing, given Europe’s potential to play a more activist role in promoting the rule of law as the basis for a negotiated agreement.

The most striking development was an unusually blunt statement last month by the EU calling for an end to Israeli settlements, and for Jerusalem to be the capital of both an Israeli and a Palestinian state. The initial draft statement by Sweden angered and probably frightened the Israeli government, which used its formidable powers of lobbying and threats to force the Europeans to tone it down. The final text nevertheless criticized Israel’s settlements, the “separation barrier” and the demolition of Palestinian homes, saying they were “illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible.” The EU also reminded all concerned that it “has never recognized the annexation of East Jerusalem.”

The European statement may be the most meaningful such gesture since the June 1980 Venice Declaration by the European Council. That statement caused a stir by calling for the implementation of “the two principles universally accepted by the international community: the right to existence and to security of all states in the region, including Israel, and justice for all the peoples, which implies the recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,” including a right to “self-determination.”

The Europeans did not follow up on the Venice Declaration with any significant diplomatic muscle, and it will be much more difficult for them to do so now in view of the expansion of the EU from nine nations then to today’s 27 members. Yet the European Council’s December statement could herald a

new approach to a more constructive role in this arena, which would be to constantly remind all parties of the critical role of international law as the sole source of the legitimacy that is needed to frame, prod and perpetuate any lasting peace agreement.

When I asked several European diplomats and officials involved in Middle East issues how we should interpret the December statement, they repeatedly returned to the theme of the centrality of international law in driving diplomacy. Two key points emerged in what they said.



The first is that only international law can be a response for the solution of the status of Jerusalem and a shield against the extreme unilateral actions of any party that would claim the city for itself and exclude others. International law in this case comprises the several pertinent UN Security Council resolutions – Resolutions 242, 478, 1515, among others – international legal statutes related to the law of occupation and international humanitarian law (the Geneva Conventions), and previous commitments that should be applied to both sides with equal vigor.

The second theme sees Europe as being angered by years of Israeli deceptions on peacemaking, culminating in the brutal attack against Gaza one year ago. This viewpoint contends that Europeans are tired of being marginalized and taken for a ride, and feel they must regain their role at least as a beacon of legitimacy and morality on what is right and wrong, legal and illegal, in Israeli-Palestinian policies and behavior.

It is interesting in this respect to note several small developments, such as an EU delegation of 50 parliamentarians from 12 European countries who are on their way to Gaza this week to assess conditions there a year after the Israeli attack and the imposition of a strict siege by Israel.

At the same time, the British ambassador in Jordan, James Watt, wrote in his blog this week that, “We are all appalled by the suffering inflicted quite unjustifiably on the population of Gaza by the Israeli blockade. The British government has repeatedly called on Israel to lessen the restrictions on the Gaza crossings, and to allow the legitimate flow of humanitarian aid, and of reconstruction and trade goods, as well as the movement of people. We regularly remind the Israeli government of its obligations under international law …”

Watt also emphasized the importance of taking “full account of the exact provisions of international law,” and upholding the rule of law.

The rejuvenated European focus on the central role of international law can only represent a positive development. However, to have an impact it must transcend verbal commitments or admonitions and venture into the realm of actions and sanctions. Europe is well suited to play the role of the champion of international law that is applied equitably to all parties.

5)Labor's $60 Billion Payoff: A health tax that hits everyone except the Democratic base

Democrats seem impervious to embarrassment as they buy votes for ObamaCare, but their latest move makes even Nebraska's Ben Nelson look cheap: The 87% of Americans who don't belong to a union will now foot the bill for a $60 billion giveaway to those who do.

The Senate bill was financed in part by a 40% excise tax on high-cost insurance coverage. The White House backs this "Cadillac tax" as one of the few remaining cost-control tokens. But Big Labor abhors the tax because union benefits tend to be far more generous than average, and labor leaders and House Democrats have been throwing a political tantrum for weeks.

So emerging from their backrooms, Democrats have agreed to extend a special exemption from the Cadillac tax to any health plan that is part of a collective-bargaining agreement, plus state and local workers, many of whom are unionized. Everyone else with a higher-end plan will start to be taxed in 2013, but union members will get a free pass until 2018.

Ponder that one for a moment. Two workers who are identical in every respect—wages, job, health plan—will be treated differently by the tax system, based solely on union membership.

Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO says this and other concessions mean the excise tax will raise some $60 billion less than the original Senate version. Democrats are probably going to charge investors for this political perk, by extending the 2.9% Medicare payroll tax to capital gains for the first time ever—on top of all the other taxes. Just what the economic recovery needs.

Meanwhile, the extra five-year dispensation gives labor lobbyists plenty of time to negotiate a permanent extension for the Democratic union base, even as labor is being armed with an important new organizational tool: Eliminating the secret ballot in union elections might be unnecessary when unions have an exclusive tax privilege at their political disposal. Right-to-work states will also be punished because they are less unionized.

The payoff shows that no one is doing a better job of rebutting the White House's technocratic cost-control claims than its own party. How exactly is the excise tax going to drive down premiums when a good part of the most expensive plans is exempted? The new union deal follows a similar one with Harry Reid that exempted the 17 states in which health costs are highest, plus longshoremen, construction workers, some farmers and sundry other liberal allies.

Amid the Beltway panic over Tuesday's special Senate election in Massachusetts and deepening public revulsion about sweetheart deals like Mr. Nelson's "Cornhusker kickback," it's more than a little surprising that the White House would be so tone-deaf to even contemplate a demand that is so contrary to basic fairness. But somehow Democrats have convinced themselves that the only tourniquet that will stop the political bleeding is to pass a bill that even President Obama admitted on Thursday is deeply unpopular.

Democrats wouldn't have to pay these partisan bribes had they chosen to write a less radical bill that could attract Republican votes. But then they would have had to pass something other than this destructive and unaffordable exercise in entitlement politics.

6)The Course of Obama's Anti-Israel Policy
Barack Obama and Islam: An Ongoing Saga
By Bishop E W Jackson Sr


Like Obama, I am a graduate of Harvard Law School. I too have Muslims in my family. I am black, and I was once a leftist Democrat. Since our backgrounds are somewhat similar, I perceive something in Obama's policy toward Israel which people without that background may not see. All my life I have witnessed a strain of anti-Semitism in the black community. It has been fueled by the rise of the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, but it predates that organization.

We heard it in Jesse Jackson's "HYMIE town" remark years ago during his presidential campaign. We heard it most recently in Jeremiah Wright's remark about "them Jews" not allowing Obama to speak with him. I hear it from my own Muslim family members who see the problem in the Middle East as a "Jew" problem.

Growing up in a small, predominantly black urban community in Pennsylvania, I heard the comments about Jewish shop owners. They were "greedy cheaters" who could not be trusted, according to my family and others in the neighborhood. I was too young to understand what it means to be Jewish, or know that I was hearing anti-Semitism. These people seemed nice enough to me, but others said they were "evil". Sadly, this bigotry has yet to be eradicated from the black community.

In Chicago, the anti-Jewish sentiment among black people is even more pronounced because of the direct influence of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Most African Americans are not followers of "The Nation", but many have a quiet respect for its leader because, they say, "he speaks the truth" and "stands up for the black man". What they mean of course is that he viciously attacks the perceived "enemies" of the black community – white people and Jews. Even some self-described Christians buy into his demagoguery.

The question is whether Obama, given his Muslim roots and experience in Farrakhan's Chicago, shares this antipathy for Israel and Jewish people. Is there any evidence that he does. First, the President was taught for twenty years by a virulent anti-Semite, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In the black community it is called "sitting under". You don't merely attend a church, you "sit under" a Pastor to be taught and mentored by him. Obama "sat under" Wright for a very long time. He was comfortable enough with Farrakhan – Wright's friend – to attend and help organize his "Million Man March". I was on C-Span the morning of the march arguing that we must never legitimize a racist and anti-Semite, no matter what "good" he claims to be doing. Yet a future President was in the crowd giving Farrakhan his enthusiastic support.

The classic left wing view is that Israel is the oppressive occupier, and the Palestinians are Israel's victims. Obama is clearly sympathetic to this view. In speaking to the "Muslim World," he did not address the widespread Islamic hatred of Jews. Instead he attacked Israel over the growth of West Bank settlements. Surely he knows that settlements are not the crux of the problem. The absolute refusal of the Palestinians to accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state is the insurmountable obstacle. That's where the pressure needs to be placed, but this President sees it differently. He also made the preposterous comparison of the Holocaust to Palestinian "dislocation".

Obama clearly has Muslim sensibilities. He sees the world and Israel from a Muslim perspective. His construct of "The Muslim World" is unique in modern diplomacy. It is said that only The Muslim Brotherhood and other radical elements of the religion use that concept. It is a call to unify Muslims around the world. It is rather odd to hear an American President use it. In doing so he reveals more about his thinking than he intends. The dramatic policy reversal of joining the unrelentingly ant-Semitic, anti-Israel and pro-Islamic UN Human Rights Council is in keeping with the President's truest – albeit undeclared – sensibilities

Those who are paying attention and thinking about these issues do not find it unreasonable to consider that President Obama is influenced by a strain of anti-Semitism picked up from the black community, his leftist friends and colleagues, his Muslim associations and his long period of mentorship under Jeremiah Wright. If this conclusion is accurate, Israel has some dark days ahead. For the first time in her history, she may find the President of the United States siding with her enemies. Those who believe as I do that Israel must be protected had better be ready for the fight. We are.

NEVER AGAIN! E.W. Jackson is Bishop of Exodus Faith Ministries, an author and retired attorney.

Email: bshpjksn@gmail.com