Who Will Stand Up To Hatred And Bigotry-- Trump? Bernie?

We've covered her quite a bit before but in case you've forgotten, Brandy X. Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at Yale, best known for the bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Friday she penned an OpEd for the New York Daily News, Trump’s mental condition seems to be getting worse: He should subject himself to a rigorous assessment now. She wrote that in the two years since she organized the conference at Yale "about how mental health professionals could warn the public ethically and effectively" about what Trump is, their "predictions have borne out to be true: Donald Trump in the office of the presidency has proven more dangerous than people suspected, has grown more dangerous by the day, and, without proper treatment, is becoming increasingly uncontainable."

She points to many easy to recognize symptoms of his increasing mental impairment-- the more frequent and more vitriolic tweets, the vicious and violent rallies, the crackpot conspiracy theories that show him unable to tolerate reality but "most markedly," she wrote, "he has of late been growing less and less coherent. His two-hour Conservative Political Action Conference speech revealed many rambling sentences, tangential thoughts, repetitions and word-finding difficulties. There was also the 'Tim Apple' episode a few weeks ago, and then his calling Venezuela a company, confusing his grandfather’s birthplace with his father’s, mispronouncing 'oranges' for 'origins,' and stating, out of the blue, 'I’m very normal.' These are signs of cognitive decline, the source of which we cannot know without examining him, but there is no question he needs an evaluation... If an employee showed the kind of impulsivity, erratic thinking and belligerent behavior that the president does, the employer would likely have demanded testing right away before the employee could resume work. In the United States, the people are the president’s employers. An unprecedented Washington conference on fit leadership revealed that even non-mental health professionals agree that the president needs urgent mental health intervention. So the choice now seems clear: the president needs to submit to a proper, independent evaluation of fitness, or if not, he can always resign."



Yesterday I watched him at Sheldon Adelson's Kapo Convention in Las Vegas (video up top). Right after he introduced a slew of far right Republicans from Georgia, South Carolina, Bakersfield, North Dakota-- not exactly Jewish-friendly places but very Israel-friendly (see the difference and why here), he launched into a typical cheap shot, slandering Ilhan Omar (D-MN), soon after Patrick Carlineo, one of his supporters, was arrested by the FBI and charged with threatening to kill Congresswoman Omar. The Trumpist told authorities that he's a patriot who loves Trump, and "that he hates radical Muslims in our government." Trump always refers to Rep. Omar as a "radical Muslim," which isn't true. Carlineo told them that he had told Omar's office that "If our forefathers were still alive, they'd put a bullet in her head." [You can contribute to Ilhan's reelection campaign here.]

Trump spreads hatred and rancor whenever he goes and whenever he speaks. Bernie, an American Jew from Brooklyn-- we grew up a few blocks from each other and went to the same elementary school (PS 197) and high school (James Madison)-- has a different way of approaching people. Please, please, please watch this video. "Love Will Conquer Hate: Bernie Visits Islamic Center in California." That's the likely choice we'll be making in 2020. I can't tell you strongly enough how important this short video is:

Ready For Tuesday's Israeli Election? No One Else Is

If you watched the clip above, you already know that most popular American support for Israel is based on neither government strategic considerations nor on Jewish loyalty but on sad, untreated evangelical mental illness based on Bronze age myths. Didn't watch it yet? Please do... because it will help you understand why Jared Kushner can't solve the Middle East problem, why Trump still has a third of Americans willing to support him regardless of anything and everything that makes him anathema to normal people, and why Israel is more of a mess than it's ever been since it was born in 1948.

On Saturday, spooked by Friday polls showing him losing the election Tuesday, Netanyahu, appealed to the most right-wing Israelis by vowing to annex the West Bank if he's reelected, something not even Jared Kushner backs. I guess that's the end of the official U.S. policy of supporting a two-state solution-- at least until Trump is expelled from the White House. Netanyahu told Channel 12 News yesterday that "A Palestinian state will endanger our existence and I withstood huge pressure over the past eight years, no prime minister has withstood such pressure. We must control our destiny." And under Trump-- who Netanyahu sounds more like every single day, that would pretty much mean our destiny as well.

Always look very closely at where Jared is collecting money from

On Friday, the L.A. Times reported that Benjamin Netanyahu's world may be crumbling. Even if his party wins the Israeli Knesset elections on Tuesday, his legal peril isn't going away. "The smooth-talking, American-educated prime minister," wrote Noga Tarnopolsky and Laura King, "faces a vote that is widely seen as a referendum on him. If the election keeps him in power, Netanyahu, 69, will hit a political milestone later this year, becoming Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, a distinction held until now by founding father David Ben Gurion. But with a criminal indictment on corruption charges hanging over his head, that historic marker might carry a very large asterisk."

He has long been willing to form alliances across the political spectrum to maintain power. That fluidity-- considered raw opportunism by some-- is once again at play in Tuesday’s elections, analysts say.

...Although Netanyahu’s rightist Likud party has long been the country’s dominant political force, its main rival-- the new centrist Blue and White party, spearheaded by former military chief Benny Gantz-- has also been polling strongly throughout the campaign.

The final preelection polls, released Friday, showed Blue and White with a slight lead over Likud, but also suggested that a bloc of right-wing parties would be better positioned than the centrists to form Israel’s next government.

Experts urged caution. “The polls are simply not right,” said Hebrew University’s Hazan. “The only thing we know is that in every Israeli election, we get a surprise.”

Camil Fuchs, the veteran pollster for the Haaretz newspaper, said this was the most difficult election to predict since 1996, when Netanyahu first came to power.

He served for three years, then returned to office in the spring of 2009 and has held the job ever since, surviving four elections.

Israeli politics are rarely a pretty sight, but this campaign has been distinctive for its divisive tone. In the final days before the vote, a Likud video highlighted a shaky interview performance by Gantz, sarcastically captioning wild-eyed shots of him as “completely stable.” That was reminiscent of an election-day video in 2015, when Netanyahu warned of Israeli Arab voters turning out “in droves” to support his rivals.

Gantz, in turn, has hammered Netanyahu as fatally tainted by the graft scandals for which he faces imminent indictment. The whiff of scandal has for years been a constant in Netanyahu’s public life, but only now is he facing what appears to be genuine legal peril.

...Israeli analysts believe that if granted a winning hand at the polls, Netanyahu will attempt to establish a new coalition with politically weak extremist parties who will help pass a law granting him immunity from prosecution as long as he remains prime minister.

In February, Netanyahu brokered a deal between three extreme right-wing parties that include candidates advocating Jewish supremacy. But if he tries to bring them into any new government, he could face a rebellion in the Likud ranks.

“I am afraid we’ll awaken Wednesday morning with Bibi in place, with a very, very, very, very right-wing government,” said Christoph Schmidt, a philosophy professor at Hebrew University.

Here's one; meet the Ron Paul of Israel:



Yesterday, writing for New York, Abraham Riesman, asked a question that is client for anyone growing up with Israel. I, for example, was born 71 years ago, just like Israel, when it was both socialist and idealistic. Whatever Happened To The Israel Left? "On April 9... Israeli citizens will swarm the polls for a pivotal national election that will determine the makeup of their Parliament and, as a result, who will be their prime minister. Meanwhile, 5 million–odd Palestinians who are directly or indirectly governed by Israeli military law will get no opportunity to select the people who make the ultimate decisions about their lives, deaths, status, and future. More than 5 million Jews dwell between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, forming a majority alongside a Palestinian minority within Israel’s U.N.-recognized borders-- but who are now also forming a growing and politically ascendant minority in the Palestinian-dense West Bank, which Israel occupies and allows (in some cases encourages) Jewish settling of, in defiance of international law. Jewish settlers of the West Bank can vote in Israeli elections, but Palestinians there cannot, nor can those of the blockaded Gaza Strip, another Palestinian territory Israel first captured during a 1967 war. The roughly 1.6 million Palestinians in the territory of Israel proper can vote, but live with well-documented legal inequality. In American politics, this state of affairs is inevitably discussed when the country comes up. As the recent fracas over Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s criticisms of pro-Israel lobbying demonstrated, the policy agenda of the Israeli government is a specter that howls ever louder while it haunts the Jewish state’s superpower patron."

And yet, surreally enough, the Palestinian Question has been all but unuttured in the tiny nation’s election season. The race has been brutal, dirty, and largely focused on voters’ personal feelings about the Likud Party’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the allegedly corrupt prime minister who has been in power for the last decade. But neither he nor the political novice leading the charge against him, retired general Benny Gantz, is willing to even entertain following through on Israel’s occasional promise to permit the West Bank and Gaza to form an independent Palestinian state. Gantz is characterizing himself and his cobbled-together party, Blue and White, as ideologically centrist and thus slightly to the left of the hard-right Netanyahu coalition, which has increasingly pushed for West Bank settlements, ethnic division, and religious orthodoxy.

The two men are a nanometer away from one another in the polls, and while Netanyahu runs ads suggesting a Gantz victory would end Netanyahu’s ten-odd years of forcefully repressing Palestinian violence, Gantz boasts of how he bombed sections of Gaza “back to the Stone Age.” Leading Netanyahu allies openly speak of formally annexing parts of the West Bank, a proposal that once was beyond the pale in mainstream discourse. A viciously racist political party whose leaders have called for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel deemed disloyal has been offered provisional membership in a Netanyahu coalition. Meanwhile, “leftist” has become a potent slur applied even to centrists like Gantz and his party mate Yair Lapid, and the failures of past stabs at peace have led progressive candidates to shove their anti-occupation messages to the side.

...Today’s Israel is one that has largely embraced Donald Trump, a man whom American Jewry voted against at a rate of roughly 80 percent and who many of them believe is himself an anti-Semite. Horror about recent state violence against Gazans has spurred the growth in stature of stridently anti-occupation Jewish groups like IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Jewish Solidarity Caucus. American universities-- which Jews are disproportionately likely to attend-- are hotbeds of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to ensure Palestinian rights through international ostracization of Israel and its inhabitants. As this younger generation enters the spotlight, we stand at the verge of one of the greatest schisms in the millennia-long history of the Jewish people.

...What I found in the Israeli left was not a unified movement. Rather, it was a collection of individuals who are motivated less by optimism that things can change than by what you might call inertia or you might call moral compulsion. I was particularly fascinated by the Zionists among them, who see the way the global left is turning on them and bristle at being held responsible for the failings of the people in power against whom they rail. Above all else, those liberal Zionists are people who, however calm they may appear on the exterior, are panicked about what might happen were they to give up their progressivism or their patriotism. You can argue that they’re complicit, that Zionism is bankrupt, that they had their chance and blew it. But it’s hard to fight the feeling that far worse things lie ahead should they lose even one inch to their opponents on Israel’s reactionary right.

...“The Israeli left is nonexistent,” West Bank Palestinian author and activist Tareq Baconi tells me in a café during a torrential Ramallah downpour. “I cannot see what kind of reality could change that, or what kind of event would change that reality. There could be something that I don’t foresee, but unless something major happens, I don’t see how the Israeli political Establishment in the system can viably produce a Palestinian state or has any interest in producing a Palestinian state. What I think will happen is that we will have differences of how the occupation is managed.”

“I think the real game-changer is what happens abroad,” says Amjad Iraqi, a writer, activist, and Palestinian citizen of Israel, over cups of water on a hot day in the coastal, ethnically mixed Israeli city of Haifa. “At the moment, the only real resistance is coming from outside, the only resistance that the Israeli political leadership is really taking into account.”

To be sure, BDS promoters have seized the attention of the Israeli political Establishment and its backers in America. Indeed, the movement is perhaps their primary bête noire these days. Members of pro-BDS organizations have been barred from entering the Jewish state. The speeches at last month’s annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference were littered with BDS denunciations. Israel advocates regularly raise money in the name of combating BDS. An entire new wing of the Israeli government, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, has devoted itself to attacking BDS efforts around the world. Even left-wing Israeli politicians decry BDS on the grounds that it delegitimizes Israel and undermines the belief that the country has a right to exist as Jewish state. But no matter: Most of the Palestinians I spoke to didn’t much care what Israeli progressives had to say, anyway.

...This is the basis of the increasingly repeated argument in American leftist discourse that Israeli progressives are too comfortable with the oppression of Palestinians and that, even worse, their progressivism is making that oppression palatable-- that Israeli lefties’ talk and small victories on matters of human rights allow the international community to sleep soundly without demanding the outright demolition of unjust sociopolitical structures. However, there is already a hard core of domestic Israeli radicals who don’t need reminding about the injustice and actually support making their home country a pariah. For them, they live in a nation gone wrong.

“Jewish supremacy is the only organizer or unifier of the Jewish society in Israel today,” says Orly Noy, an Iranian-Jewish writer, translator, and politician from the ostracized pro-Palestinian party Balad, over cigarettes outside a Jerusalem café. “That is the only thing. Nothing else. We are divided in every single parameter that you can think of except for this. I mean, 99.9 percent of the Jews in Israel deeply believe in the concept of Jewish supremacy. They won’t always define it in such a term. You believe inherently, without questioning it, that we should have extra national rights in this land. Of course, it is our”-- that is, she and her small cadre of allies-- “political obligation to continue speaking with the Jewish society in Israel. That’s the political and the moral thing to do. But I don’t have any hope that the change will come through the Jewish society itself.”

Noy balks on the question of whether or not she’d like to see a “two-state solution” (the creation of a separate Palestinian state in some combination of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem) or a “one-state solution” (a single, Palestinian-majority state comprised of all the territories that Israel now exists in or controls). However, she emphasizes that Israeli Jews are already a minority in the lands of their extended sovereignty and sees catastrophe on the horizon if that is not reckoned with. “I do want to see a Jewish national existence here that will be sustainable,” she tells me. “And we are so blinded by the power now that Jews don’t even … It’s such a hypothetical question that it doesn’t even exist. But it will be very relevant pretty soon. We need to start thinking about these questions.”

[The] bifurcated-- some might say oxymoronic-- desire to both defend Israel and instill it with progressive values alienates detractors on the left and the right. Liberal Zionism’s champions are people who, for the most part, are fully aware of how desperately hard it is to move the Israeli agenda in a leftward direction right now, especially on the Palestinian Question. “Occupation, for Israel, is …” begins Ran Cohen, founder of an activist collective called the Democratic Bloc, speaking in a sparse conference room in Tel Aviv. “For most Israelis, it’s boring. It’s boring! It’s old news. They’re not aware of what’s going on. They are tired of hearing about settlements. The attempt to connect the occupation with poverty, or with issues of economical issues and so on, succeeded in a very minor way, as I see it. We need to reinvent ourselves and the discourse.” Nevertheless, Cohen still dreams of a future where Jewishness and democracy go hand in hand: “The Jewish nation is not afraid of a long wait,” he says with a smile. “I don’t want to give up.”

Of course, the leftist counterargument here is that Cohen’s ability to wait is a luxury while, say, the nearly 2 million blockaded Gazans just a few miles south seethe in an open-air prison that is predicted to become unlivable by the end of next year. The nonstop moral crises mean gradualism loses a significant amount of its appeal in discussions of the region. Plus, there’s the question of what, exactly, liberal Zionism’s beloved two-state solution could even look like.

It would be tremendously difficult and politically costly to order a mass evacuation of any parts of the West Bank. What’s more, Israeli Jews understandably lose sleep over the idea of a Palestinian state that could arm itself against Israel. They see how Israel pulled its troops and settlements out of the interior of Gaza in 2005 and was eventually faced with a government there controlled by the militant Islamist party Hamas (though that story is much more complicated than it may seem), which has repeatedly fired rockets into Israel. They think such things could happen in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, too. Historically, even when Israeli governments have made overtures about allowing the creation of a Palestinian state, they usually come with enormous caveats like full demilitarization of that new state, territorial carve-ups that allow Jewish settlements to remain in seas of Palestinian territory, and a permanent Israeli military presence on the theoretical country’s border with Jordan. And yet, even that sort of “state-minus,” as Netanyahu has memorably called it, is too much for many of today’s Israeli voters to feel safe with.

On top of all that, there’s the fact that the Palestinians are divided between Hamas in Gaza and the late Arafat’s Fatah movement in the West Bank, meaning there’s no credibly unified Palestinian entity to do business with. With the expansion of the Israeli settlement project, we’ve entered a de facto and wholly unequal one-state reality for the time being. The status quo has made it increasingly standard among international lefties to declare the two-state solution dead. They are joined in this by right-wing expansionists. The debate among those two extremes is simply about whether the single state should be democratic or definitionally Jewish-- i.e. whether Palestinians there should be granted the vote and other political rights. A plurality of Israeli citizens still want a two-state solution, but polls show a majority of them grimly conceding that such a deal isn’t viable right now.

It is against this backdrop that we must ask: What on earth can Israel’s Zionist lefties accomplish? I posed this question to every one of them that I met and was struck by a subtle philosophical bifurcation that has bedeviled Zionism since at least the establishment of Israel: the difference between individual rights and national rights. The former are things like free movement, legal redress, and freedom from physical abuse; the latter include self-determination for identity populations and peace between said populations. Most of the left-leaning Zionist activists I spoke to were excited to talk about the ways they are pushing for individual rights, be they for people of Israel or those of the West Bank and Gaza. I spoke to human-rights lawyers and NGO workers who tout their accomplishments in saving and changing the lives of individuals and families. They think they can keep that up in the future.

Trouble is, you can make the argument that the pursuit of individual rights is merely a way to make the deprivation of national rights for Palestinians in the occupied territories tolerable enough that it can persist. This is where those accusations of making the system palatable come in. Even when the Zionist lefties I spoke to were polite, it was clear that they truly hate being lectured by outsiders about whether their work perpetuates occupation and repression. I sit in the Tel Aviv offices of the U.S.-based “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization J Street and watch as a gathering of Israeli lefties from various allied organizations grows increasingly incensed over the stigma attached to their work by international leftists.

The last poll before voting begins

April 9 will not be a good day for the Jews and Palestinians between the river and the sea who want to see human rights flourish in the land they both call home. Perhaps Netanyahu will be unseated, perhaps not. Perhaps his unseating would be a good thing for the cause, perhaps not. I keep coming back to the words of a man hardly associated with the Middle East. As I wandered the streets of Tel Aviv on my final day there, I was surprised to find myself ruminating on Langston Hughes’s 1935 poem about the compromised society to which I’d be flying in a few hours, Let America Be America Again. Rolling Zionism around in my mind, I thought of Hughes’s lines about how America’s hypocritical slogans of liberty had been used in the service of destruction and oppression. And yet, he believed that those dreams, if reclaimed and actually lived up to, could still be put into the service of liberation:

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be-- the land where every man is free.

And:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

So, too, is it with liberal Zionism in the Holy Land. For many people, Israel never was Israel. The dream has, in so many ways, been a nightmare. But as a Jew, I believe I am obligated to yearn for the messianic age, when all the world will be redeemed. That will mean the creation of a Land of Israel that uplifts rather than burdens. I look at liberal Zionism and am inspired by the rhetoric of balancing Jewish self-protection with human rights and democratic liberties. At the very least, I see how hard they are pushing to be the last line of defense against greater bigotry and deprivation of rights. I can only hope that Israel’s liberal Zionism will somehow be repurposed, reimagined in a way that recognizes its predecessor’s audacious achievements while abandoning its deficiencies. That true solidarity with Palestinian liberation can be found among Israeli patriots. That thesis and antithesis will, in defiance of doubt, become synthesis. That the Zion that never has been yet is the Zion that will be.

Trumpanzee's Jews Aren't Anything Like Normal Jews

I wonder if all the vehement anti-Semitism on display from a newly empowered fascist movement-- they call it "alt-right" these days-- is making the modern day Bugsy Siegal-- Vegas mob boss Sheldon Adelson-- just a little nervous. If the Steve Bannon wing of the Republican power ever gains ultimate power, I'm sure there's a gas chamber that even someone as grossly rotund as Adelson can be stuffed into. Maybe that's why he's getting a little nervous about the fascist campaign to demonize H.R. McMaster. Normal people don't hear much about it, but the Bannon vs McMaster brawl is center stage in the fever swamps of the far right and inside TrumpWorld. Adelson weighing in is a big deal since he routinely funnels millions of dollars annually into the Republican Party from the Mafia, from interests in China and from interests in Israel.

Writing for Axios yesterday, Jonathan Swan reported that the virulently anti-union billionaire "has disavowed a campaign against National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, which is being pushed by a group Adelson funds, the Zionist Organization of America. Andy Abboud, who represents Adelson, tells me: 'Sheldon Adelson has nothing to do with the ZOA campaign against McMaster. Had no knowledge of it. And has provided zero support, and is perfectly comfortable with the role that McMaster is playing.'"

Since then Adelson has updated his position with a telephone clarification to Axios which emphasizes that Adelson doesn't know McMaster and hasn't developed an opinion about him. Adelson doesn't want his intervention to be interpreted as a political endorsement; but rather that he has had nothing to do with, and doesn't support, the campaign against McMaster.

This is of interest and some import because Adelson is one of the biggest financial contributors "in Republican politics, and his influence over national security and Israel-related matters is substantial. His is a voice listened to by President Trump and other senior White House officials like Jared Kushner." Not by serious policy experts, of course, but by grifters like Trump and Kushner. Zionist Organization of America represents the far right of Israeli politics in America and the Adelsons give them immense sums of money. Somewhat ironically, they have thrown their lot in with the alt-right, the center of American anti-Semitism and their completely deranged crackpot president, Mort Klein, is about one step away from buying a tiki torch and waving a swastika banner at shuel. Klein is very tight with Trump's neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who accuses McMaster of being "soft on Israel and unserious about the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. He's called for Trump to 'reassign' McMaster 'to another position where he can do no further harm on these critical national security issues.' Klein is increasingly isolated in his opposition to McMaster. His only senior ally inside the White House is Bannon; the rest of the senior staff has united in disgust at the outside campaign against McMaster. David Friedman, Trump's staunchly pro-Israel ambassador, is vouching for McMaster, though he was unable to convince Klein."

David Frum noted on Twitter this morning that his rabbi had posted this comment (above) on his Facebook page. It's from a Charlottesville resident. Did Señor Trumpanzee think these were some of the "very fine people" marching around Friday and Saturday with Nazi and KKK symbols and waving "Elect Trump-Pence" signs? Virginia's governor certainly didn't think they were very fine.

As Emma Green pointed out for Atlantic readers yesterday, Trump's very fine Charlottesville marchers were obsessed with Jews. Trumpanzee can insist all he wants that the "Unite the Right" activities were about protecting their cultural heritage and the Robert E. Lee statue, but what does that have to do with "Jews will not replace us?" She wrote that "Marchers displayed swastikas on banners and shouted slogans like 'blood and soil,' a phrase drawn from Nazi ideology. 'This city is run by Jewish communists and criminal niggers,' one demonstrator told Vice News’ Elspeth Reeve during their march. As Jews prayed at a local synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, men dressed in fatigues carrying semi-automatic rifles stood across the street, according to the temple’s president. Nazi websites posted a call to burn their building. As a precautionary measure, congregants had removed their Torah scrolls and exited through the back of the building when they were done praying... [T]he connection between African Americans and Jews is clear. In the minds of white supremacists like David Duke, there is a straight line from anti-blackness to anti-Judaism. That logic is powerful and important. The durability of anti-Semitic tropes, and the ease with which they slide into all displays of bigotry, is a chilling reminder that the hatreds of our time rhyme with history and are easily channeled through timeless anti-Semitic canards... [T]he violence in Charlottesville was part of a broader political context. The fringe right is reacting to other political movements with nostalgia, Feld said-- a yearning for people, including minorities like Jews and blacks, to 'know their place.'"

And while normal people were horrified by Trump trying to equate Nazis and the Klan with those protesting Nazis and the Klan, actual Nazis and the Klan applauded their president. KKK leader David Duke tweeted his gratitude to Trump: "Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa." A Nazi leader (Tim Gionet) of the Unite the Right movement who goes by the nom de guerre "Baked Alaska" tweeted that "President Trump is right! One side had a permit to speak, one side charged with clubs & weapons! Look at the facts people." So that's their crazy world. All these people really, really deserve each other. But the country doesn't. I'm sensing an uptick in the number of Americans who now think Trump needs to be impeached.

AIPAC Agent Eliot Engel Goes After Obama Cabinet Pick As Being Too Anti-Israel

Engel's the Israeli agent in the middle

Before the House Democrats elected their ranking members, we started warning about the potential disaster of putting Zionist extremist Eliot Engel, whose loyalties are demonstrably more to the Likud Party in Israel than to the U.S.A., in as ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Engel, a New Dem and "Free" Trade cypher, was up against another Zionist, Brad Sherman, who isn't as extreme as Engel. House Democratic leadership, though, was intent on filling every position they could with New Dems-- while the Progressive Caucus dozed-- and Sherman was persuaded to withdraw from the race. The Democrats are now stuck with, for all intents and purposes, an Israeli spy as their spokesperson on the committee. And his first goal is to do AIPAC's dirty work against Obama's first choice for Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel. Like Susan Rice, Hagel is a flawed character, another figure DWT has been warning against-- not because he doesn't kiss AIPAC ass but because he was the originator of the computerized stealing of elections.

Obama is Obama and he isn't going to pick and good cabinet members, short of, perhaps keeping Hilda Solis on as Labor Secretary. So it's pointless in getting too emotionally invested in these fights between the insiders. Susan Rice and John Kerry are both equally what you might call useless tools of the Establishment conservative consensus. Hagel and Flournoy are equally useless... although... despite his flaws-- documented in that last link above-- Hagel does supposedly want to cut back on the power of the Military Industrial Complex. Supposedly.

Back to the hideous Engel. The House doesn't vote on the president's nominees but he's already sticking his nose into the process on behalf of Israel and AIPAC, claiming Hagel has an "endemic hostility towards Israel."

In an interview Friday taped for C-SPAN's Newsmakers, conducted jointly by The Cable and Politico, Engel said that Hagel's record on Israel and Iran make him a poor choice to lead the military. In particular, Engel said he was irked by Hagel's reference to the "Jewish lobby" in an interview with former official Aaron David Miller. (Miller supports Hagel's nomination.)

"I think that remark is troublesome, it's problematic. It shows at the very best a lack of sensitivity, at the very worst perhaps a prejudice. And I'm concerned about it, I'm concerned about the nomination," Engel said. "If I were doing the appointing, I would not appoint Chuck Hagel."

Engel, who represents the Bronx, Rockland, and Westchester, said he has been hearing a lot of opposition to the potential Hagel nomination from his constituents. He also said that Hagel's activities related to Israel, including his statements on Hamas and Israel's influence in Washington, show a pattern of "hostility."

"It seems there is some kind of an endemic hostility towards Israel and that's troublesome to me and troublesome to a lot of people," Engel said. "In the sensitive post of secretary of defense, those are warning bells. Those are red lights."

Obama should have the privilege of picking his own team, Engel said, but he predicted that Obama will pass over Hagel to avoid the controversy.

"I think [the president] knows that the Hagel nomination potentially is a problem," he said.

Engel said that former Pentagon official Michèle Flournoy would be a good potential secretary of defense. He also praised the president's Friday nomination of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) to be the next secretary of state.

And it isn't just the AIPAC-Jews in Congress like Engel, Lieberman and Chuck Schumer threatening to derail Hagel. The Republicans smell blood in the water and sense another opportunity to screw with Obama, who never seems to learn that when you give in to bullies-- the way he so shamelessly did by acceding to GOP demands that he name John Kerry Secretary of State, it never-- never-- mollifies them or makes them cooperative; it's only emboldens them. Like predators who have tasted warm blood, partisan obstructionists such as Lindsey Graham-- who have their own careerist agendas to worry about, most of which conflict with the well-being of the nation and are antithetical to American good governance and security-- are on the warpath over Hagel.

Yesterday, the sleazy little South Carolina closet queen was on his perch at Meet the Press hissing and warning menacingly that "a lot of Republicans are going to ask him hard questions. And I don't think he's going to get many Republicans votes... I like Chuck, but his positions I didn't really quite frankly know all of them, are really out of the mainstream and well to the left of the president. I think it would be a challenging nomination, but the hearings will matter, so Chuck will have a chance to defend himself.”

Obama's weak and naive leadership brings this on himself. He only feels getting tough when it comes to his own base. He's happy to use cutthroat tactics against progressives but he's the worst champion the left has ever had when it comes to standing up to the forces of plutocracy and the partisan, reactionary forces of the far right. And if you think he's ever going to change, you haven't been paying any attention.

Thanks To The Insane Citizens United Ruling, Sheldon Adelson Can Try To Buy The Presidency. We Need To Know More About Him

The Adelsons: bad news for America

What everyone already knows is that Sheldon Adelson and his wife are financing Newt Gingrich's bid for the White House and that he's an aggressively anti-Palestinian Zionist zealot and a cutthroat gambling-casino magnate with a lot of money. Fewer people know that he's the eighth richest man in America and the 16th richest worldwide. His current net worth is estimated at $21.5 billion. (By way of comparison... see that ".5" on the end of his net worth? Romney only has one half of that.) The son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Adelson was a door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman and a failed stockbroker.

He went to CCNY, a hotbed of socialism and progressive politics for first-generation Jewish Americans. When you think of CCNY you think of graduates like Nobel laureates Robert Hofstadter and Robert Hauptman, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, financiers Henry Morgenthau Sr. and Bernard Baruch, authors Sidney Hook, Paul Goodman, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Ira Gershwin, Paddy Chayefsky. Bill Graham, Edward G. Robinson, Daniel Schorr and Stanley Kubrick were alums-- as was Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground. Sheldon Adelson? He dropped out early-- to chase money. In the film Wall Street, though, Gordon Gekko was a CCNY grad.


Once Adelson got involved in casinos, he turned virulently anti-union and fanatically Republican. He didn't want to pay taxes and he didn't want to pay a fair wage to workers. Those are still motivating factors in his life-- and help explain, along with the Israel thing-- why he backs Gingrich, even more strongly than he once backed Tom DeLay and George Bush. He owns Israel Hayom, the biggest newspaper in Israel, which he gives away free in order to push out a virulently right-wing anti-peace agenda. Adelson is notorious for taking vengeance against anyone who challenges him. He successfully sued the Daily Mail in London for pointing out his "despicable business practices" and having "habitually and corruptly bought political favour." There are no publications in the U.S. willing to write about his extensive collaboration with organized crime. Yesterday Robert Reich tepidly asked his readers to take a look at who Sheldon Adelson is and what Gingrich promised him. Not very hard-hitting when looking into someone who has already contributed $11 million towards Gingrich's campaign.

The Adelsons are billionaires. They might decide to put in another $5 million or perhaps $20 million into Gingrich’s Super Pac. The point is, there’s no limit.

Do you know who Sheldon and Marian Adelson are? Do you know what Gingrich has promised them, or what they think they’ll get out of a Gingrich presidency? I don’t. But if Newt becomes President of the United States, they’ll be singularly responsible. And we better find out, because Newt will owe them big time.

Forget the Lincoln Bedroom. The Adelsons and their kids will have the run of the White House, including the Oval Office. Hey, they’ll take over the Old Executive Building next door and turn it into a casino.

Never before in the history of American politics has a single couple given more money to a single candidate and had a bigger impact-- all courtesy of the Supreme Court and its grotesque decisions that speech is money and corporations are people under the First Amendment.

Good points, but Adelson doesn't care about visiting the White House or turning the Old Executive Building into a casino. As a friend of mine who is connected to the Mossad told me last night, "Adelson wants to turn Iran into a glass ashtray. That's the reason he'll pour whatever he has to into Gingrich." Justin Elliott at Salon came a little closer than Reich did. "The Adelsons," he writes. "once pulled their money out of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) because of that group’s putative softness on the concept of a peace deal with Palestinians." He quotes the infamous and exhaustive 2008 New Yorker exposé on Adelson extensively. Like here:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was organizing a major conference in the United States, in an effort to re-start the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and her initiative had provoked consternation among many rightward-leaning American Jews and their Christian evangelical allies. … A short, rotund man, with sparse reddish hair and a pale countenance that colors when he is angered, Adelson protested to Bush that Rice was thinking of her legacy, not the President’s, and that she would ruin him if she continued to pursue this disastrous course. Then, as Adelson later told an acquaintance, Bush put one arm around his shoulder and another around that of his wife, Miriam, who was born in Israel, and said to her, “You tell your Prime Minister that I need to know what’s right for your people—because at the end of the day it’s going to be my policy, not Condi’s. But I can’t be more Catholic than the Pope.”

And he points out Gingrich's transformation on the subject of Israel. "Gingrich was as recently as 2005 praising the Palestinians, referring to 'their ancestral lands' in historic Palestine, and, amazingly, inveighing against 'the desire of some Israelis to use security as an excuse to grab more Palestinian land.' ... Gingrich even used the phrase Israeli 'land grab' in that 2005 essay... Fast forward to the current election cycle, of course, and Gingrich has veered way to the right, famously questioning the very peoplehood of the Palestinians and blasting calls to end Jewish settlements as a 'suicidal step' for Israel. (Adelson, by the way, personally praised Gingrich’s claim that the Palestinians are an 'invented people.')"

Hard to imagine that hard-core Southern racists and teabaggers who are flocking to Gingrich's banner could take a close look at what Adelson is and not recoil in horror. For that matter, what real American wouldn't?

Israel Is Not America, America Is Not Israel-- Tell Chuck Schumer And Jane Harman

Ken, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer and I all went to the same high school, James Madison. There were some Italians in the neighborhood too but this was the Jewishest-- in a non-Hassidic sense-- part of Brooklyn back then. We were inculcated with the idea that Israel's security came first and foremost and America was as great as the amount of security (and cash) it provided Israel. In those days the Democratic Party was 100% pro-Israel and the Republican Party had a whiff of unsavory typically right-wing anti-Semitism around it. Just yesterday I was reading about how Nixon dealt with his collapsing economy in Rick Perlstein's stupendous history book, Nixonland and came across a transcript of him blaming "the Jews" for his woes, as he often did.

It was meat prices driving inflation, Nixon decided, big supermarkets who refused to pass lower cattle prices on to consumers. "Kick the chain stores," he said in early February... I think you will find that chain stores who generally control these prices nationwide are primarily dominated by Jewish interests. These boys, of course, have every right to make all the money they want, but they have a notorious reputation in the trade for conspiracy."

Yes, he was stark raving mad; but because he was a president surrounded by sycophants... well whatever he said became a kind of "truth," especially in the Republican Party. Jews in Brooklyn were wary of right-wing parties to begin with-- that whole kerfuffle in Germany was still fresh in everyone's mind-- and the Republicans were just a few degrees away from everyone's greatest fears.

But things have changed dramatically since then. The Party of the Robber Barons has had to degrade itself by cobbling together a Grand Know Nothing coalition that includes southern religious fanatics whose sad, miserable lives revolve around waiting on Jesus' return, something that will be triggered when Israeli tanks roll into Damascus or some such interpretation of the screaming voices in their heads. Zionism somehow coexists with anti-Semitism as tenets of American right-wing orthodoxy. And on the Democratic side, there is a growing awareness that Palestinians are human beings too. I think the last time I counted there were around half a dozen Democratic members of Congress who had come to that conclusion. None are from Brooklyn-- and that includes one Brooklyn congressman who went on to the Senate and is casting longing eyes at Harry Reid's job as Democratic Senate Leader.

I don't know if Schumer still believes the Israel uber alles crap we were taught as children but I do know he isn't taking any chances with his hometown base. He blasted Obama yesterday for not being suitably Zionist enough. Playing to an indoctrinated Jewish-American and Israeli-American listening audience on a fanatic religious radio show hosted by Nachum Segal, Schumer was all about poutrage for how tough the Obama Administration has been towards Israeli rightist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. How dare they look out for America's interests! Schumer:

"I told the President, I told Rahm Emanuel and others in the administration that I thought the policy they took to try to bring about negotiations is counter-productive, because when you give the Palestinians hope that the United States will do its negotiating for them, they are not going to sit down and talk. Palestinians don’t really believe in a state of Israel, they, unlike a majority of Israelis, who have come to the conclusion that they can live with a 2-state solution to be determined by the parties, the majority of Palestinians are still very reluctant, and they need to be pushed to get there. If the U.S. says certain things and takes certain stands the Palestinians say, “Why should we negotiate?” So that’s bad and that should change and we are working on changing it. But the other two are very good, according to both the Israeli government and the Israeli military and the U.S. government. But we should make that known, why don’t they? I asked them to do just that, I said we should make it public because it will, at least, give people, who are supportive of Israel, Jew and non-Jew alike, a little bit of solace... Hillary Clinton called up Netanyahu and talked very tough to him, and worse they made it pubic through this spokesperson, a guy named Crowley.

And Crowley said something I have never heard before, which is, the relationship of Israel and the United States depends on the pace of the negotiations. That is terrible. That is the dagger because the relationship is much deeper than the disagreements on negotiations, and most Americans-- Democrat, Republican, Jew, non-Jew-- would feel that. So I called up Rahm Emanuel and I called up the White House and I said, 'If you don’t retract that statement you are going to hear me publicly blast you on this.'”

Is Schumer an American Senator or an Israeli Knesset member-- or an Evangelical lunatic from South Carolina?

This is the 2nd time I know of that Schumer has publicly crossed the line when it came to zealously blaming his own government and colleagues in delicate matters of US-Israel-Palestine policy.

During the third of three major efforts of the George W. Bush administration to get the recess appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton confirmed in the US Senate, Senator Schumer launched a passionate personal campaign to help Bolton succeed.

Schumer called many Democratic Senate colleagues and bluntly said, "A vote against John Bolton is a vote against Israel." ... Note to Senator Schumer: you have certainly unloaded a lot of blame on the White House today. I have done a quick lexis and Thomas search and have been unable to find a single instance in which you criticized the behavior of the Israeli government at any time on any issue.

I guess Schumer has chosen to lie down with some mighty strange dogs, but, like I said, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders also went to James Madison High. He has a far more equitable approach to how to achieve peace in the Middle East, one in the best interests of the U.S., as well as taking in the legitimate concerns of Israelis and Palestinians-- if not AIPAC and the Likud. Well, at least Schumer isn't spying for any foreign powers and stepping over the treason line, the way Jane Harman did.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Your Government Not at Work - Jane Harman Scandal
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

If you watched that video, you might be looking for a way to help replace Jane Harman with mainstream pro-America progressive Marcy Winograd. By all means-- be our guest!

Along similar lines, I got a letter this morning from J Street, an organization of American Jews not dedicated to expansionism and aggression.

A moving article in Haaretz this week by Carlo Strenger, entitled "Israel's leaders have forgotten Herzl's dream," challenged the "silent majority of liberal U.S. Jewry not to be afraid any longer to speak its mind."

Amen. We are not afraid.

And we won't be afraid even when enforcers like Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz try to intimidate our movement by attacking J Street in an article brimming with distortions and name-calling.

Dershowitz's article is a perfect example of what is wrong with the conversation in our community on Israel. Far too often J Street's opponents spend more time manufacturing what they wish J Street has said, rather than checking the facts and actually challenging the merits of our arguments.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street's Executive Director, fired back yesterday in the Huffington Post, calling out Dershowitz for his inability to mount any serious fact-based case to challenge J Street's assertions that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in the interests of Israel, the Palestinians, and the United States.

TPM took up the story as well-- and like DWT gets the Schumer connection. They point out the good news that almost no one takes Dershowitz seriously any more as another other than a raving propagandist.

The bad news is that the people who do take him seriously are filling my inbox (and maybe yours) with anonymous screeds about President Obama, the "selling out" of Israel, Iranians who would happily die in order to kill Jews, and the imminent loss of Jerusalem to Hamas.

...My guess is that [Dershowitz] despises J Street for precisely the reason younger Jews, members of Congress, frustrated Israelis, and the Obama administration welcome it. It represents a new kind of pro-Israel activism-- activism built on the premise that the best way Americans can help Israel achieve security is by using our influence to encourage our government to push hard for negotiations.

Dershowitz is old school (not in a good way). He thinks that Israel advocacy should be left to the organizations which, although nominally supportive of the two-state solution, would prefer the United States to advocate peace rhetorically but not do much of anything to make it happen.

He also would prefer that the White House, the media, and the Israeli government not engage with upstarts like J Street but rather stick with the tried-and-not-so-true leadership of the "American Israel..." this, and the "American Jewish..." that. The last thing he wants to see is a whole new generation of pro-Israel activists moving on up, especially if it is dedicated to ending a status quo that it considers bad for Israelis, Palestinians, and American interests.

The Big Loser In The Decision To Cut Charles Freeman Loose: Israel-- Or At Least Its Long Term Prospects

My grandparents-- on both sides-- were Jewish. That means Hitler would have considered me a Jew as well. On the other hand, I consider myself a Buddhist. As a Jewish boy in Brooklyn, I was indoctrinated, as all American Jews are, to think that Israel is something special and has to do with God. I let that go around the same time I realized there was no tooth fairy.

In 1991 Roland and I decided to spend a month in Egypt (and the wonderful story of our Egyptian adventure is yours for the reading at that link). Roland's not Jewish; he's from Maine and I don't think he had ever met any before me. He's not even Catholic or Christian. He's just a Mainer. But he wants to visit everyplace and there was no holding him back from seeing Jerusalem when we were so close. So we took a bus across the Sinai and the Negev and spent a few days in Israel.

A friend is getting married in a couple weeks and he and his wife were both born in Israel. I've been considering going for the wedding-- like two or three days in Israel and then maybe a week someplace else in the neighborhood... anyplace else-- like Syria or Jordan. I've been all over the world and there are few places I went to that I liked less than Israel. It sure didn't feel like coming home to me. In fact, other than a night we spent in Bethlehem on the West Bank the whole place gave me the creeps. The people were unfriendly and the vibe was really bad. I couldn't wait to leave and we flew off to Istanbul at the first opportunity. But until yesterday I really was considering going back for my friends' wedding. I've been going back and forth on it all week.

The final nail in the coffin of the whole idea of visiting Israel again was a courageous open letter I read in The Cable by the much maligned Charles Freeman upon his withdrawal as Obama's nominee to the National Intelligence Council chair. It made me cringe and it made me angry and it made me remember how pushy and obnoxious the people I met in Israel were. The people were as ill-mannered and self-centered as people in Hong Kong, another place I hope to avoid in the future. It's worth reading all of Ambassador Freeman's letter. I'll post a couple of key sentences:

I have concluded that the barrage of libelous distortions of my record would not cease upon my entry into office. The effort to smear me and to destroy my credibility would instead continue. I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country.

...The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government-- in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

I wish I could just point the finger at the wretched likes of neo-Con fanatics of highly dubious loyalty to my country-- like Bill Kristol, the hysterical and venal Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Marty Peretz, Israeli spy Steve Rosen, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Jonathan Chait-- or clueless Republican obstructionists in the thrall of the Israeli lobby, like Mark Kirk (R-IL), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Kit Bond (R-MO), and a gaggle of clucking right-wing senators who in another time and place could surely have worked as concentration camp guards. Unfortunately, it looks like Zionist Jewish politicians inside the Democratic Party, specifically Chuck Schumer, Rahm Emanuel, and creepy NY Congressman Steve Israel, were at least as responsible for pushing Freeman off the island as any Republicans or members of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party.

Andrew Sullivan has summed up nicely the tragedy of this whole thing:

Obama may bring change in many areas, but there is no possibility of change on the Israel-Palestine question. Having the kind of debate in America that they have in Israel, let alone Europe, on the way ahead in the Middle East is simply forbidden. Even if a president wants to have differing sources of advice on many questions, the Congress will prevent any actual, genuinely open debate on Israel. More to the point: the Obama peeps never defended Freeman. They were too scared. The fact that Obama blinked means no one else in Washington will ever dare to go through the hazing that Freeman endured. And so the chilling effect is as real as it is deliberate.

No More Excuses Available For Not Having A Republican Party Convention

The Republicans are going to try again. The ratings were so low last night-- like worse than when Rush Limbaugh had his cable TV show for a week and a half, that Nielsen decided not to publish the results. Meanwhile, Mark Sanford, everyone's first choice to replace Palin when she bows out of the race, has told CNN he doesn't want the job. Who would? They say they'll get their convention going today, "Who Is John McCain?" Night. They even have Bush speaking today (although via satellite, not in person)-- along with Holy Joe Lieberman and method actor Fred Thompson. (What happened to Rudy? They didn't approve of his new outfit?) So how's it going so far? Intrade now has a wagering proposition on whether Palin will be withdrawn as veep before election day. The bid/ask is now at 17/18-- not very attractive odds this morning. Worse yet, some of the very groups McCain had hoped to rally to his banner with her selection, are turning away from the GOP in greater numbers.

He has consolidated his support among hard-right evangelicals who would like to see the U.S. slow things down and get back into the 1950s... or 1350s. Right-wing Jews, always a tiny minority inside a tiny minority, on the other hand, are having some second thoughts. Ben Smith detects a backlash. "Some, on little evidence, paint her as a Buchanan acolyte; others accurately point out that she, unlike McCain, hails from the evangelical Christian wing of her party, which would like to see more overt displays of Christianity in the public square."

I don't personally know many Zionists who put Israel's well-being before America's the way Lieberman does. But I know one. And he knows many and he wrote to me this morning. We'll keep him anonymous by referring to him as "Eve." Eve, a severely brainwashed Fox News addict, is in contact with the whole network of Hillary supporters for McCain and with Zionists and self-proclaimed Mossad agents. "My Zionist friends and former Israeli intelligence community friends are (to my surprise) turning on McCain," he write to me this morning-- at 3:04 AM. (He's also a "recovering" drug addict.) He then shares an e-mail he asked me not to quote directly but claims that "the gist of the message is something you can use. I am astonished by this; this is a reflection of the entire community, this means that McCain picking Palin has caused him to lose both sides of the Jewish vote potentially!" Here's some commentary (cleaned up and made intelligible) from one of the supposed Mossad agents or ex-Mossad agent:

I am dismayed at McCain for picking a Woman with the credentials of Gov. Sarah Palin. Where was Her Background check?? Who screwed up???

Supposedly (she denies it) she was a backer of Pat Buchanan, a misreable Anti-Semite of the worst  order who respected the Monster Adolph Hitler of all people. When Buchanan went to Alaska she was wearing a Buchanan button (when he ran for President).

A point was brought up to me about several vacancies that will be happening on the Supreme Court in the next several Years. The Conservative supreme Court will overturn Roe vs Wade, which could very well deny a woman an abortion even through rape or incest.

Jews have never done well under extreme right wing governments anywhere. [I've been trying to explain this to Eve for 5 or 6 years but, like I said, he's addicted to Fox News and nothing penetrates. He's also a devoted follower of John Hagee.]

We, my friend, are caught in a dilemma. Who do we choose?? McCain has had cancer and survived. What would happen if for any reason Palin became President whose accomplishments include starting off the idederod Dog Race in Alaska. This is a TERRIBLE CHOICE FOR VP. With 5 children she could never handle the presidency and we would be in a terrible quandary.

The truth be told. What Biden has forgotten, she will NEVER know!!! As Governor of Alaska, she cannot handle her children, daughter Pregnent-Being forced to have the child-- what does the child have to say?? Does she want the baby?? Her Son has a record of drunk driving and who knows what else. I am telling you she cannot handle 5 kids and this!!

Of all the people he could have chosen, why her???. This brings up decision making? Is he (McCain) fit for the presidency? Let us see the developments and how the Republicans package her.

We must always question both parties, especially on the most recent developments. STAY TUNED.

This wasn't sent to Eve in secret code or anything and Eve's subject line was "Zionists and former Mossad agents turning against McCain because of Palin." But I think McCain has more to worry about than Zionists and the ex-Mossad agent community. USAToday just reported that two-thirds of Americans link him to the policies of the most detested president in American history.

They are "very" or "somewhat concerned" that John McCain "would pursue policies that are too similar to what George W. Bush has pursued" say 64% of those surveyed in the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll. Specifically, 47% fall in the "very concerned" category and 17% rate themselves "somewhat concerned."

Eventually these people are going to find out that his selection for a running mate, was a member of a fringe group of exrtremists advocating Alaskan secession, that despite her scripted anti-earmarks statements now that she's on the Straight Talk Express, she was a virtual earmark queen and an advocate for the Bridge To Nowhere that McCain has railed against in every speech he's made in the past 3 years.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin employed a lobbying firm to secure almost $27 million in federal earmarks for a town of 6,700 residents while she was its mayor...

And now people are referring to her embarrassingly messy personal life as a White Trash soap opera and calling her-- h/t Jane-- Sarah Springer.


Although the McCain camp has started hiding Sarah from public view-- and even from far right supporters like an irrate lunatic fringe Phyllis Schafly (who threatens that McCain's lobbyists don't "understand where the votes are coming from")-- Us Weekly features the entire sordid Palin drama on the cover of the issue that hits checkout stands across America starting tomorrow. Cover above; poll below:



And there's a far more disturbing poll just out-- at least from McCain's POV. Diageo just measured the Obama bounce and is showing a 9 point differential. Obama bounced up to 48% after his speech (as of today) and McCain is back in the 30s. In fact McCain only has the support of 33% of self-described independents.

UPDATE

And-- you knew it was coming-- now the ultimate White Trash newspaper has a Palin "exclusive."