In a recent Gallup poll Obama has a 61% job-approval rating. Not bad (although the president’s showing among all polls has been less positive of late). His Achilles heel however is his fiscal policy. “At the low end of the spectrum, only 45% of Americans approve of Obama’s handling of federal spending, and 46% of his handling of the federal budget deficit.” And on the economy more generally, Gallup finds:
Obama’s job approval rating for his handling of the economy has dropped from 59% in February to 55% today, while his disapproval rating has risen by 12 points, from 30% to 42%. The fact that Obama’s approval on the economy has become more negative over this time period is of interest, given that Gallup’s measure of consumer mood has become more positive between March and the current time.
Might it be that Americans don’t like a $1.8 trillion deficit, nationalization of car companies, and a $787 billion stimulus plan that hasn’t done much of anything (except “scam” some people and balloon the national debt)? It seems those rubes who showed up at the Tea Party protests were more in tune with the majority of Americans than the Obama team and the Congress. But stay tuned — let’s see what happens if Congress passes a mammoth energy tax in the guise of cap-and-trade, unemployment continues to rise, or General Motors doesn’t miraculously turn around. In other words, this is likely to be the high point in the popularity of the Obama economic agenda.
Bravo.
Thank you so much for that.
Don’t expect anything from the Obama administration in this matter other than its characteristic doubletalk, double dealing and deceit.
Israel needs to do what is in their people’s best interests first, not pleasing the MSM. They will never please the MSM or the Islamic Countries, regardless of what they do. Gaining the approval of these folks will be futile, unless they subjugate themselves to slavery.
It is not the slavery of Israeli’s that Hamas, et al seeks but rather the non-negotiable demand of its elimination…nothing less than genocide will slake its thirst.
The issue of a Palestinian state is less central to Israel’s reputation than it is to other countries’ fantasy that they can appease Arab terrorists and Muslim supremacists by demanding it. Needless to say, that is a fool’s errand. And Israel could do far worse accordingly than to dismiss out of hand any further talk of a Palestinian state for the next hundred years. Unfortunately Israel has its own share of Gal ut-minded “realists” for whom appeasing the goyim takes precedence over long-term survival. Of course in their lexicon appeasement IS survival, as that was the way of the helpless Jew for millenia. And needless to say , even such “realists” and their many enablers abroad fastidiously couch their prescriptions in moral, even Jewish moral terms, as if it is a Jewish state’s Jewish duty to drink the hemlock. In fact what they yearn for is to escape from Jewish adulthood and return to the womb of the ghetto, if not the peace of the grave.
Seth Halpern has exposed the real problem so very nicely. Yes, most of the civilized world would gladly sacrafice Israel to buy themselves a false security, but it is a certain type of Jew, masquerading as moral paragon, that is a bigger threat. They need to be exposed, called out for what they are and corralled.
I stand corrected, #4 is right. Slavery would not suffice; however, total elmination possibly would. The spirit of stupid once again prevades as #5 so nicely says.
Seth, if your analysis in #5 is correct, then Israel, against its professed principles, has ironically been pushed into a diaspora-style relationship with other countries. The trappings of independence can’t hide this. And a lot of the pushing has been done by American Jews working for the US Government.
Nonie Darwish, Egyptian: “What was wrong with allowing a few million Jews to live among us in peace? Arab land was plenty. They had only a small sliver of land….”
Bob, I don’t think it’s an accident that the Exodus story remains central to Jewish experience. Freedom is often frightening and people don’t always need much pushing to reject it or hide from it.
We are our own worst enemies, easily.
Indyk, Ross, the J-street asses, ‘journalist’ Cohen, the ‘Rabbi’ Learner, England’s sycophantic Chief Rabbi Sachs . . . . the list goes on, and on, and on . . . .
Seth,
I believe Rashi comments that 4/5 of the Jews in Egypt died during the plague of darkness…the reason: in their hearts, they didn’t want to leave the “comforts” of slavery in Egypt for the scary unknown and Israel.
That rings true today as well…unfortunately.
#11–Wait a minute–”our own worst enemies,” indeed. I converted to Judaism precisely because I was tired of people telling me I was my own worst enemy, and I figured as a Jew I’d surely have plenty who outstripped anything I could do in that vein. And now you tell me it was all for naught? No way!
I agree with Peter Wehner’s points completely but perhaps if the Israelis stopped trying to eke out more land from Palestine (what’s the difference between that and ‘lebensraum’?) thy might evoke a little more sympathy. The rationale of “God gave us this land” (show me the contract) is sheer arrogance.
But then if I was brought up being told that I am a superior form of human being, a member of the Chosen People I would have that arrogance too. (By the way, what’s the difference between Chosen People and the Master Race…?)
The Master Race determines that when you die, if you haven’t had communion, or baptism, or whatever, i.e. if you’re not one of us, you can’t go to heaven. Where’s the contract for that?
MIke should re-read Peter Wehner’s column. There is no Palestine to ‘eke out land from” and the original Palestine (British Mandate) included the whole of what is now Jordan. So far from israel ‘eking out land from Palestine”, the Arabs have already taken very liberal helpings of Palestine and named it Jordan. But then Mike , like the rest of the world, really doesn’t want any reality checks on present world thinking (see Wehner’s column). All they want is to bash The Jews and , if it would be up to them, could not care less if Israel disappeared tomorrow.
The simple fact is that in the DNA of gentiles is imprinted hatred of jews. And al lthose wonderful gentiles who have converted, these are the lost jewish souls that are coming back.
Mike #14:
You appear to be ignorant of the meaning of “chosenness” or you have chosen to adopt (perhaps inadvertently) the trappings of the anti-semite. Since you post on this blog, you are probably familiar with Commentary Magazine. May I suggest that you pick up a copy of last month’s or the prior month’s Commentary. There is an interesting article on the meaning of “chosenness” as used when explaining the Jewish people’s relationship to God. Reading it may help you avoid making silly statements like the one in your post about the supposed motivations behind the Israeli need for “lebensraum.”
#16 & 17–Haven’t you fellows yet learned how foolish it is to credit the likes of Mike with mere ignorance? To treat his kind with a presumption of good, if ill-informed, intentions?
Here’s how you address a Mike: “We Jews routinely demonstrate our superiority to you subliterate goys by producing proportionately vastly more of what the world values. We have also demonstrated our superiority by creating the only democratic, prosperous country in the Middle East, while routinely seeing off the murderous if incompetent Arabs. Our only mistake was in not annexing the whole of the lands we conquered after those klutzes tried once again to wipe us out; everyone, including their Arab inhabitants, would have been better off. Now, if you and your cretinous ilk feel like disposing of lands taken in war, we suggest you start with California. Be sure to go with it, since your kind pulls down America’s average IQ and gdp, which we do so much to raise.”
Contempt and ridicule, that’s the only way to talk to the Mikes of the world.
I want to apologize to everyone on this blog for my crude, bigoted remarks. I was brought up by white supremacists and Jew-hatred was in my mother’s milk.
They even made me get a swastika tatoo on my forehead. It makes it hard to get work so I have to troll the internet looking for phantom enemies to slaughter. It’s either that or looking at kiddies on the web. I can’t help myself.
Maynard:
LOL. I try to give the benefit of the doubt unless its lester or Johnny Hartland.
Kudos, Halpern.
Personally, I’m sorry to see Peter Wehner get so exercised over this fellow Ethan Bronner’s piece in the International Trib (NYT). Seems to me, Bronner defines the liberal pretense of a case rather well. Clear, succinct and to the point. Saves this reader a great deal of eyestrain trying to figure out why Israel is so unpopular these days.
It’s the Gaza thing. The devastation of vital infrastructure. The torn bodies piled everywhere in heaps. Members of a legitimate government legally elected with a great American President and Nobel Prize monitoring and certifying procedures hunted like animals. Vital arteries for carrying medicines and foodstuff from Egypt into Gaza cut by aerial bombardment. Will the Plight of the Palestinians never end? Don’t the Israelis care what people say about them?
Javier Solana, Finlandized Spaniard, threatens the EU will reconsider its relationship with Israel if Israeli election results don’t meet expectations. The Egyptians (go know!) don’t like Lieberman. Anne Roiphe, at what? eighty-five? Ninety? feels like her husband has been buggered by Mussolini. Can’t the Israelis ever get it right?
As for advice on rebranding, you can’t ask for a better source than the NYT. Sulzberger Sr. rebranded himself an American with no European connections when his relatives from Germany came to him begging for the American familial sponsorship they needed to avoid their sure fate in Germany. Sulzberger Jr. rebranded himself a Christian (High Episcopalian, vu den?). The NYT itself was rebranded some years ago—dumbed-down copywise, gussied-up graphicswise, news and opinion nicely blended—and the positive results can be seen in the bottom line.
I wish Israel luck in its search for popularity. The trick has eluded us Jews in general for some time.
I have long struggled with my opposition to many of Isreal’s positions and tactics. I was very disturbed by the argument that why are we concerned with Palestineans whe when we care about hardly any other opressed people?
Then it occured to me. Its not the Palestians, but it is Israel and many of its supportors. Isreal and many supportors of Isreal have become rude, insulting, and insufferably arrogant. Israel has a right to do what it wants. But it recieves billions of dollars in aid from the United states and sofisticated weapons we wouldn’t give any other countries. We have thousands of troops in Iraq that could be endangered by Israel’s actions.
The American people have a fundemental right to comment on the actions of Isreal, because we are in a partnership with Isreal. We can not be dismissed. Friends of Isreal would do well to the concerns of Americans very very seriously. It is not good for Isreal that support for its actions are falling amongst the American electorate, even if it remains rock solid amongst government officials.
Discontent around the world may not matter. But discontent in United States does matter. Israel and its supporters need to stop lapeling this discotent and start doing something to change some minds.
To Robert Lee Hotchkins, Jr.
Is that really how you express yourself or are you trying to get a laugh?
Perhaps the Israeli government could stop building settlements on Palestinian land. But come to think of it, they’ve never done that.
Speaking of barbaric regimes – the one you served blew apart tens of thousands of Iraqis, Wehner. But I suppose most brown people are heathens to a deluded evangelical like yourself.
Maybe Wehner could explain his views a little further. Do his political sympathies lie with Netanyahu, who wants to imprison Palestinians inside a rump statelet? The quasi-fascist racist crook Avigdor Lieberman? Or the rogue IDF soldiers who shot Gazan women: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072040.html
People, I don’t otherwise want to become the co-dependent of self-loathing Jews everywhere, but this wholly disproportionate criticism of Israel and the fetishizing of the “Palestinian” cause is pretty obnoxious and, more importantly, an obstacle to tackling slightly more pressing issues such as:
The rape of Darfur and the Congo
The wars in Sri Lanka and Chechnya
Chinese lebensraum in Tibet and East Turkestan
I would also like to say that when you compare Israel to Nazi Germany or Sudan’s Janjaweed militia, you’re not simply criticizing Israel- you are also sanitizing whole-sale rape (i.e. the kind of sexual violence that used to be out of fashion) and genocide.
I know a lot of you on the Left get “Holocaust hangnail” every time you stub your toes- just don’t get “surprised” when one of us on the Right offers a different diagnosis- even those of us who otherwise don’t have a stake in a Jewish presence in the Middle East and couldn’t care less about the fate of the self-loathing, abrasive, ill-mannered Jews from Israel or Manhattan.