A mind may be a difficult thing to change…
…but Obama’s performance as president seems to be encouraging the ranks of the Republican Jewish Coalition to swell, making the term “Jewish Republican” seem a bit less of an oxymoron.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. And became a Republican because of Jimmy Carter in 1980. I think we’ll be hearing similar stories about Obama over the next three decdades.
Were Jews just ignoring the facts?
1. Trinity United Church, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, blamed America for supporting Israeli “state terrorism against Palestinians” and supporting Zionism.
2. BO friendships with anti-Israel activists like Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abunimah. Khalidi.
3. Supported during his presidential campaign the so-called Arab Peace Initiative.
4. Several anti-Israeli senior campaign advisors, including Obama campaign senior staffer and foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, who argued in April 2002 that the U.S. should stop financially supporting Israel’s military and instead invest in a Palestinian state with U.S. forces on the ground to protect it from genocide by Israel.
– Zbigniew Brzezinski was yet another Obama campaign adviser well known for his hostility to Israel as well as for his defense of the John Mearsheimer-Stephen Walt assault on the pro-Israel lobby.
His UN speech supporting linkage of U.S. support for Israel’s security to Israeli concession to the Palestinians; his comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of Jews in his June 2009 Cairo speech….etc, etc.
All this was known before the 2008 election….
Pablo: As I’ve said, a mind is a difficult thing to change. And the desire to believe something often leads people to ignore evidence that is obvious.
Jews have been Democrats for so long, and so much cultural foliage has grown up around that condition. I think in the backs of their minds, many urban Jews think that being a Republican means you can’t be interested in the arts, wear black, eat sophisticated food. The aesthetic component is very powerful. And the social credit you get for being “enlightened” is even more important.
So I think a lot of them are just hunkering down, waiting for all this to pass. They may signal one another with a raised eyebrow, a shrug, when the subject of Obama comes up. But that’s private, intimate. They’re not about to become REPUBLICANS, for God’s sake!
neo: This book makes your point beautifully!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Bloom-t.html?ref=books
Pablo, yes Jews are ignoring the facts, (that sounds better than just plain stupid). Part of the problem is a large number of aged who still think in terms of Roosevelt Truman and those Republicans in their exclusive clubs. Others were raised by those and went to lefty indoctrination centers, others are fat, happy and superficial. An indeterminate small percentage are genuine lefty creeps who should not even be in the country. Then there is pure habit; there are a number of counties in the US whose voting patterns were developed about the time of the Civil War. Jewish voting habits were formed after they got off the boats in NYC and Boston between 1880 and 1925, when Democrats and not Republicans welcomed them
. Note the old Jewish community of Charleston, SC, that dates from before the Civil War has a different voting tradition. I heard they are die-hard secessionist.
The good news is that scientists have discovered that even amoebas, those single cell organisms that cause illness, can be taught, so there may be hope for the American Jewish community. All considered, given the realities of those items you mentioned, for the Jews to vote for Obama was just plain stupid.
A liberal’s mind is especially impervious to facts. 🙂
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604575282190930932412.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Yeah, well, as I say, all well and good but when the dems remind the liberal Jews that voting republican is agreeing with conservative Christians, they’ll revert.
The problem I believe, is that the many Jewish Americans do not share much in common with their brothers and sisters in Israel, if they did, not a one of them would have voted for Obama.
I guess maybe they are “Jewish in name only.”
I don’t know if so many people need to change their minds or if they just need to get up to speed on how great liberalism and the democrat party has morphed into bigoted control freaks.
Live and let live doesn’t reside with people who want to limit your salt intake people. Helllowwww!
I don’t get this. Why would you even care what other people wear, eat, or are interested in, much less let those considerations affect your voting habits?
For my part, I just want the government to carry out its legitimate, appointed tasks with reasonable efficiency, and then to leave people alone. Even if everyone else who wants the same things considers mud-wrestling high art, and Velveeta haute cuisine – I’ll still vote that way.
“Are you going to vote the way I do?”
“Not so fast. What did you order for lunch?”
This is awesome.
Source: http://www.weeklystandard.com/
In an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, President Obama said this:
I was down there a month ago, before most of these talking heads were even paying attention to the gulf. A month ago I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain talking about what a potential crisis this could be. And I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar; we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.
What is one to make of this moment of (comic) high drama from the (previously) no-drama Obama?
Let’s go sentence by sentence:
1. “I was down there a month ago, before most of these talking heads were even paying attention to the gulf.”
Not so. Obama went to the Gulf on May 2. By then, the spill had been mentioned six different nights on CNN’s Situation Room. The panel on Fox’s Special Report had discussed it twice.
And even if this were true: Does Obama really think a president gets credit for being more on top of things than talking heads?
2. “A month ago I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain talking about what a potential crisis this could be.”
“In the rain” is the operative phrase here. The president stood out in the rain! What a man!
3. “And I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar; we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”
Guess the criticism of him as a professor and seminar leader has gotten to him. But his pseudo-macho defense of “talking to experts” is itself professorial: He talks to experts so he’ll “know whose ass to kick.” Real men don’t need experts to tell them whose asses to kick. And real presidents aren’t so thin-skinned and self-pitying.
Sorry all. Pretend like the above was posted under the Ass Kicking topic…a senior moment enhanced by after work PBRs.
I suspect one driver of leftist viewpoints is the notion that those viewpoints should be right, a notion that gradually metastasizes into those viewpoints must be right.
Scientists sometimes fall prey to this phenomenon, the refusal to accept that a beautiful hypothesis has just been brutally dispatched by an inconvenient fact. How could such a beautiful idea be wrong?
I use to think Sammy Davis,Jr. was the ultimate minority, a black Jew. Then I became a Jewish Republican trial lawyer. That’s a minority!!
“”I suspect one driver of leftist viewpoints is the notion that those viewpoints should be right””
They would be right if govt handouts made appreciative and more responsible people, and appeasing enemies made them friends.
The times they are a changin.
Saturday I went to a rally at the Israeli Consulate. It was very upbeat and when speakers mentioned “our Christian supporters” or “Christian brothers” a very loud cheer would erupt. This is something new.
I hope that the Christian community has subordinated their evangelistic efforts to one of just plain support. Which, from the Jewish point is the real “good news,” since more and more Christians are renouncing the theology that Christians replaced Jews as a chosen people.
A mind is a hard thing to change but it does happen. The sholarly movement which has repudiated “higher criticism” necessarily investigated the Hebrew prophets and Torah. A new grassroots sect of Christianity is emerging which places the chosen people back at the center of God’s plans.
Correction: The Israel rally was on Sunday.
Military historian B.H. Liddell Hart said, “The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is getting an old one out.”
I think that is true for lots of people, me for one.
we eat organic food; work in the arts; wear black (hey, best way to take off ten pounds instantly); like walking-neighborhoods.
All this means is that everywhere we go people would kill us if they knew whom we vote for. Or maybe not. Those people I’ve come to trust often confess at least doubts, and often as deep an “undercover” political persona as we have.
I have a similar story to commentator “kaba”: I was a Democrat all of my life, and I voted for President Carter in 1976. I then became a Libertarian and rarely voted for any Democrats since then. (Never for any high ranking office.) I never joined the GOP, but I worked for several GOP candidates.
I never really left the Democratic party: they left me when they went insane.
I hope that many young people will wake up to the cold hard reality: “progressive” policies just don’t work.
As for the idea of Jewish Republicans: now that’s change we can believe in. [Heh.]
Tell me about it, Portia!
I read something interesting (not original w/me) that I would like your opinion on please … Hilary told us that we could not call BHO at 3:00 am because of his inexperience. Now it looks like we can’t call him at 3:00 pm. Is it that the current President has never actually held a job, or is it something more? Some deep problem like personality disorder that the US bought and now has buyer remorse?
Thanx,
Fr.Bill