The leg tingler who says Sarah Palin doesn’t know anything turns out not to know anything: “There is nothing, and I mean nothing, like watching Chris Matthews get his a– demolished on Celebrity Jeopardy. … Do I smell a Wolf Blitzer repeat? If you aren’t watching tonight, how else would you learn that the Rocky Mountains actually run through California? Christo is on fire!”
The latest in the Fort Jackson food poisoning investigation is here. A new wrinkle: it is not clear whether the suspects were U.S. citizens or part of an outreach program to non-citizens who can speak “fluent Arabic, Dari, Pashto, or some other needed language.”
Par for the course for Chicago pols: “Rep. Joe Sestak (D., Pa.) said yesterday that the White House offered him a federal job in an effort to dissuade him from challenging Sen. Arlen Specter in the state’s Democratic primary.” You kind of see why Blago thinks “everyone” trades jobs and public offices.
It’s not hard to figure out why Obama “seems incapable of speaking to Muslims without slyly suggesting he is one of them.” (We saw that “in his Cairo address, he basically so bloated up the early relations between Morocco and America that his version amounted to a virtual falsehood … [and] he still thinks his speech to the university in Cairo was historic.” ) Answer: Obama has a bloated view of his own importance and has adopted the Left’s Third Worldism, in which the “Muslim World” — another fiction! – is oppressed by the West. (Recall that he also told us Palestinians are like enslaved African Americans.)
Martin Feldstein on Obama’s deficit blame-mongering: “The administration’s projected $18.5 trillion debt in 2020 would be more than double the size of the debt when Mr. Obama took office. The annual interest on that debt would exceed $800 billion, requiring a 36% rise in the personal income tax just to pay that interest. Mr. Obama complains about the problems he ‘inherited.’ But the key to shrinking the nearer term deficits is to avoid his costly new initiatives.’ Feldstein complains that instead Obama is focused on tax hikes which “would hurt incentives, hurt the recovery, and hurt the economy’s long-term growth.”
Andy McCarthy, prosecutor and critic of the Obama-Holder criminal-justice approach to terrorism, does the impossible: he gets treated fairly in the New York Times. Yes, read the whole thing.
Charlie Cook says that “if I had a choice of the Republican Party’s problems right now or the Democratic Party’s problems, I think you could triple the Republican Party’s problems and I’d still rather have their problems than the problems facing Democrats.” It’s that kind of year.
Minority Whip Eric Cantor says that if Obama is going to jam through ObamaCare with reconciliation, then forget the “bipartisan” health-care summit. He seems to have a point — the hamhanded Democrats shouldn’t have rolled out their “we’ll do it anyway” plan before the summit. What were they thinking?
Yuval Levin thinks it’s crazy talk: “The apparent decision to push Obamacare through reconciliation gives new meaning to the term political suicide. It will almost certainly fail, for one thing. And it will persuade rank and file Democrats in Congress that their leaders have lost their minds, and so will badly divide the Democratic caucus and make for a very difficult year to come for them.”
I’m not the only one who noticed that Tim Pawlenty has an authenticity problem.”When I read that the governor ‘appealed to the tea-party movement, calling its critics a ‘brie-eating’ elite from ‘Ivy League schools’ who don’t like ‘Sam’s Club Republicans’ who ‘actually like shopping at places like Wal-Mart,′ I thought just one thing: The guy’s a phony. And patronizing, too. Good grief.” Yeah, but it’s only 2010.
JPod, don’t you get it? This Kabuki Theatre exercise is entirely for the benefit of the Saudis, who, after being nicely asked, just increased oil production. They control marginal supply, and therefore price, of oil, which will now start to moderate. The U.S. economy was vulnerable; now less so.
No one gives a crap about the Palestinians, least of all the Saudi’s. There must be, however, the proper noises. Israel may, and will, continue building settlements and expanding established ones, with tacit U.S. approval. Israel may deal with its enemies as it sees fit.
The appearances of the “Road Map” will stay in place as a Potemkin Village. The reality,as all parties understand, will continue unabated.
Self-actualization during summer vacation?
What Herbert Rubin, M.D, said.
Rice knows exactly what she’s doing, and has known for some time. Her critics are utterly clueless.
She is dealing with the weakest, most fecklessly inept Israeli Government in history. For three weeks in 2006, she held Olmert’s hand after he had promised her, Cheney, and Rumsfeld that the IDF would achieve Victory through Airpower. It was utter nonsense, of course. The Olmert Government was a legion of half-steppers, and Rice wisely called a halt to the nonsense.
After which every apologist for Israeli ineptitude in this town blamed Condi. Meanwhile, while the Israelis couldn’t hack Hezboallah, our own Army and Marine Corps decisively annihilated Al Qaeda in Iraq and the J’aish al-Mahdi, an offensive that she had something to do with (contrary to the myth peddled by the likes of Steven Hayes at the Weekly Standard).
The Saudis wanted this Road Map nonsense, so we gave it to them. In return, they gave the Maliki Government quiet, tacit support. That’s why Rice does this stuff, to the hoots and hollers from the likes of Caroline Glick. The Saudis need to step on their local mad zombies and make it look as if they’re getting results.
And it’s true; nobody gives a rat’s ass about the Palestinians.
But they should. Israel’s settlements policy is a long-term catastrophe. They should separate themselves from the Pallies and leave them to their own devices before a South Africa situation develops.
Herb: you’re right, of course, about the need to please Saudi Arabia, but I think it goes well beyond the Saudis to Rice’s determination to succeed in this area beyond all hope or reason.
As for oil supplies, the Saudis by the end of this month (or early in July) will have upped their production by half a million barrels per day, yet the price is holding stead within a $10-12 band from the mid-$120s to the high $130s. Market forces explains most of this, but there is definitely a portion of the price hikes explained better by traders bidding up the price unrelated to supply and demand — but that’s another subject.
What Herbert Rubin MD and Section 9 said. And Section 9 is 100% right about the settlements policy. It’s throwing gasoline on a fire, or (according to the latest medical advice) putting ice on a burn (don’t do it!)
There isn’t a rational person on the face of this earth who believes that a deal of any meaning can be reached with these players this year. And yet Rice is determined to go down with this ship. What’s even stranger is that she reposed hopes in Olmert once before, when she and George W. Bush backed him for a month in the Hezbollah war, only to learn that Olmert had made feckless promises about destroying Hezbollah he was in no position to keep.
Doesn’t Rice have a friend who could sit her down and gently explain that she is simply setting herself up to enter the ranks of American foreign-policy hands who will only be able to speak ruefully about their efforts to strike a peace accord between a nation that wants one and a people who don’t?
Here are some likely explanations for her obsession with punishing Israel:
1) Condi is positioning herself to be the next James Baker or at least Edward Abington.
2) She thinks of Israel as a Jim Crow-KKK racist state that oppresses poor black children (she is on record of having compared the Palestinians to the civil rights movement in the 1960s and that the Palestinians are the blacks.
3) She sensed that Israel could be manhandled like no time in her history due to to its worst and most craven prime minister of all time, and thought that it would not end in failure (by her definition of success). In short, she thought that her bargaining position was the strongest the US has ever had over Israel and she thought she could strong arm the Israeli government into the most far reaching concessions yet. She may have been right, and Olmert is still in office and is trying to do a fire sale before he is tossed out kicking and screaming (which god willing will be next week). Of course she saw how Sharon bullied and tricked the nation into retreating from Gaza and thought that Olmert as Sharon’s protege would be willing to go even further. She and her foggy bottom boys sensed that momentum was on the side of Israeli concessions. Just as Daniel Pipes says, it is not despair that pushes the terrorists but hope that they can win. In the same vain, Condi smelled weakness and thought that she could be the one to finally push Israel over the cliff. Arafat was gone, Abbas is weak and he may have agreed to something if Condi could, as she likely thought, get concessions on Jerusalem and return of refugees. It was hope that has pushed Condi.
I think there are probably elements of all of those motivations in Condi’s conniving mind. I think she really does see herself as the MLK of the Palestinian cause, and that she really has no love for Israel. While I do not think that she is directly auditioning to be the next Saudi anti-Israel mouthpiece to leave the State Department, I do suspect that her views have been informed by her close relations with the Realist crowd and expect her to end up at saudi funded anti-Isreal formums and think tanks. She is not as naive as Dennis Ross who I believe is a well meaning fool. She does not mean well for Israel and, if not already obvious, will become so when she leaves office. Expect a shades of Walt and Mearshimer and Jimmy Carter memoir of how the Israelis ruined all chances of peace by building a few apartments, while the angelic Abu Mazen tried and tried and tried.
It would be refreshing to see an international diplomat with his/her head on straight. Maybe, someday.
Some American ambassadors to the UN have had the right stuff.
Condi’s effort are futile. She is doing it partly for the Saudi’s but more for posterity. She wants to be able to claim post-Bush that she tried, that she WAS a peace-maker. As of late, Bush is revealing the same psychological need.
Israel will never have ‘peace’ as long as Gaza and the West Bank exist as seperate entities within greater Israel. The Palestinian elevation of Hamas to rulership of the ‘government’ is clear proof of this assertion. Hamas does not want peace and is only open to a ‘peace’ that involves the dissolution of Israel and the forced migration of every Jew from ‘Palestine’.
Since this is the now the de facto palestinian ‘position’, Israel should say to the palestinian’s “Ok, you have 72 hours to change your position to one of full recognition of Israel’s right to exist OR we are going to adopt your position, regarding you…
What’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.
It’s long past the time for Israel to push every ‘palestinian’ out of the country, no more Gaza, no more West Bank, pay the Palestinian’s financial reparations but they ALL have to leave. Any who do not will be forcibly removed. And when the UN and ME nations howl, tell them to go pound sand.
There’s a reason WHY the old testament Jews killed off and forced the previously occupying tribes out of what would become Israel. Human nature is such that no other ‘policy’ has any chance for success when creating a new country.
The Sioux did it 150 yrs before the white man showed up in occupying what would become
their ‘sacred’ Black Hills and the european colonists did it in creating the US.
It’s unfortunate that ‘people just can’t get along’ but then that’s what Jesus tried to talk to us about and look what it got him. Until men’s ‘hearts’ change, nothing will change.
Hmm. Latest news is that Israel has reached a truce with Hamas in Gaza. What was that about not negotiating with terrorists? I guess Israel has decided to become anti-Semitic.
the combination of appeasing the saudis, israel elite crisis and inability to have any effect on the pals, tons of jiziyah notwithstanding clearly explain why she is doing what she is doing.
in fact, the US power has declined to such a level, that about the only thing it is reduced to doing is bullying israel to appease everybody else they cannot deal with. pathetic.
this does not, however, negate the fact that rice is an idiot. another empty suit who is all talk no substance. for all her years of service she has only failures to show for it. and like so many she has come to realize america’s descent and is now acting accordingly, whether consciously or not.
oao
http://fallofknowledgeandreason.blogspot.com/
It’s unfortunate that ‘people just can’t get along’ but then that’s what Jesus tried to talk to us about and look what it got him. Until men’s ‘hearts’ change, nothing will change.
Oh, please. A major reason why people dont get alone is religion. This is certainly the root of the arab-israeli conflict. Whatever the jesus myth is, it has produced the first source of violent anti-semitism in history.
As Hamas is the elected government of the palestinians it is not a fair comparison, but
since Hamas has no intention of actually honoring ANY truce beyond its temporary interest, its a moot point. So your attempt to use this as proof that negotiating with terrorists can work is deeply flawed. Leopards don’t change their spots.
Your anti-semetic insinuation is beneath comment.
“Oh, please. A major reason why people dont get alone is religion. This is certainly the root of the arab-israeli conflict. Whatever the jesus myth is, it has produced the first source of violent anti-semitism in history.”
Religion can be a major reason why people don’t ‘get along’ and certainly religious dogma is the main reason why islamist fundamentalists don’t like us. BUT the arab-israeli conflict is about land, NOT religion. religion is merely the excuse that muslims use to cover up the deeper issue, lost territory.
Jesus was NOT a myth but we will have to disagree to disagree. It IS historical fact however that anti-semiticism existed long before the emergence of Jesus or his ‘myth’.
Anti-semitism goes back, at the least, to Jewish captivity in Egypt.
I meant to say, agree to disagree.
Geoffrey
“Anti-semitism goes back, at the least, to Jewish captivity in Egypt.”
Can you elaborate a little further on this? There are certainly historical circumstances/events which suggest that anti-Jewish feeling existed in Egyptian society from the Persian period but I’m curious what evidence you have to suggest that clearly defined anti-semitism existed that far back?
Incidentally, I’m pretty happy to say that anti-semitism itself (as activity) is probably first represented in antiquity in the Alexandria riot of the 1st C CE – as detailed by Philo or in literature earlier in the Ptolemaic period with Manetho – as detailed by Josephus etc.
This is drawing a distinction between anti-semitism and anti-Jewish feelings of course.
If a line is to be drawn between anti-jewish feelings and anti-semitism, I would imagine it would center in activity. Anti-semitism is prejudicial actions taken against Jews.
The historical evidence you seek regarding anti-semitism in ancient egypt is two-fold.
First, the status of slavery endured by ALL Jews in Egypt, after their earlier arrival in Egypt as a free people. The Jews were enslaved by the Egyptian’s. Ancient Egypt’s slavery is certainly ‘anti’ and it is an active state of denial of rights to an entire people.
Secondly, human nature and its need to rationalize and justify wrongful actions and beliefs. Psychologically, human’s do so when what they want and do is morally wrong. So its not likely, its certain, that Egyptians of that time would have come to think of their Jewish slaves as less than human, because psychologically, they would have HAD too. With all the rationalizations and justifications and beliefs NEEDED to support that morally reprehensible behavior.
Just as southern slave owners insisted that black’s were inherently incapable of fully participating as equals in a ‘free’ society.
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