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David Harsanyi comments on a controversy in the Denver Jewish community.
As a Jew, I’m often asked why my fellow tribesmen are so predictably left-wing. And since we Jews are in constant telepathic contact, I can answer the question. For Jews, liberalism isn’t an ideological choice; it’s a spiritual stand-in. The religion of the average American Jew is liberalism.
So when we talk about the “Jewish community,” we mean a rock-ribbed flank of the Democratic Party. When a spokesperson from a national organization lectures us about “core Jewish values,” he is referring to secular left-wing orthodoxy. …
…Now, I wouldn’t have much problem with boycotts or ignoring Bible thumpers, but philosophical diversity and consistent indignation are evidently not Jewish “values.”
Where, for instance, are complaints from the 80 percent of American Jews who support a president who actively pressures Israel into agreements that threaten her existence, and at the same time bows to robed princes and pleads for the friendship of the most illiberal nations in the world?
Where were calls for boycotts of the Democratic National Convention, where among other Jew-friendly participants like Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson, the gregarious Al Sharpton mingled with the Jewish core values crowd…
George Will reviews a new book on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s letters, and shares some excerpts.
…”Everyone,” Moynihan liked to say, “is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Now, thanks to Steven Weisman’s meticulous editing of “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary,” everybody is entitled to Moynihan’s opinions. Some tidbits from the feast:
By 1966, the civil rights movement’s task was to become “a protest movement against situations rather than statutes” — to change from upholding legal rights in the South to addressing problems of class in the North.
…The 1972 presidential campaign “was a routine exercise: Republican moralism, Democratic hysteria, voter indifference.” …
P.J. O’Rourke is interviewed in the NY Post about his new book and more.
…”Long before I was ever a war correspondent, my first experience with pieces of dead bodies — was at LaGuardia. It was Christmas 1975, and I was upstairs when the bomb went off in the locker on the level below. Killed 11 people. The presumption was that it was Puerto Rican nationalists. They were the bombers of the day.
“So I’m sitting at the bar at LaGuardia, waiting for my plane. Ka-WAMMMM! I had just ordered a Jack Daniels on the rocks. Bartender turns to me, says, ‘You want to make that a double?’ Swear to God.”
So O’Rourke, whose cousin lived a couple of blocks from the West 11th Street townhouse where several members of the Weather Underground accidentally blew themselves up in 1970 and whose girlfriend was in the crowd when National Guardsmen killed five student protesters at Kent State two months later, is amused by chatter about “polarization” today. “Bull – - – -,” he says. “Anyone who lived through the Civil Rights era knows this is nothing compared to the polarization — anger, hatred, murder — that went on then. Or to take a better example, 1860. That’s polarized. This is arguing.”
O’Rourke, the reformed ex-radical, editor of National Lampoon during the “Animal House” era, war correspondent and, lately, target of what he calls “ass cancer,” continues the anti-statist argument in his new book, “Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards” (Atlantic Monthly Press). References to Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith (to whose “Wealth of Nations” he once devoted an entire volume) prove O’Rourke can do the philosophical heavy lifting — yet make it all float on a fluffy cloud of wit. …
Rob Long, in the National Review, writes witty commentary on the pessimism of the Green fascists. Since the left wants the government out of the bedroom, we want the creeps out of our bathrooms.
…To an environmental bureaucrat, the world looks better when it’s dingier. Bright lights are too festive. Powerful showerheads are too luxurious. To maintain the proper downcast attitude, they want to make sure we’re all a little less comfortable.
It’s all about less with them. As far as the environmental movement is concerned, we’re running out of everything — polar icecaps, sea turtles, crude oil — and the trick is to cut our appetites down to size, to stop wanting to stand under a gushing showerhead in a bright morning bathroom and think, I can handle what’s coming at me today.
It’s not about showerheads and wattage. It’s about optimism. Either you think a more prosperous world is a good thing — that prosperity and ingenuity can solve most of our pressing problems — or you don’t. Either you think that being able to afford an expensive showerhead is a component of a complicated web of incentives designed to inspire the next Thomas Edison to invent something useful — like, say, a battery-powered car or a brighter energy-saving light bulb — or you think that we’re done, we’ve invented everything already and we need to divvy up a shrinking pie. For the Left, there are no light-bulb moments in the future. …
In Media-ite, we learn Fox News is happy to be living rent-free inside the president’s head.
News Corp’s recent donation to the Republican Governors Association given editorial positions at, in particular, Fox News certainly turned heads among Democrats and gave President Obama even more fodder to challenge the company. Yet in light of all the criticism, it seems that the only thing they’re surprised about at Fox News is that the president cares about them at all.
Speaking with an unnamed executive while researching the motivations behind News Corps’ donation, The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg mined a gemstone of a quote that expresses something quite far from the fear or concern a news organization in any other country would feel when the current White House administration is so preoccupied with what’s going in within:
An executive at Fox News who agreed to be interviewed on the condition of anonymity expressed “astonishment” over Mr. Obama’s focus on the network. “We are so in his head,” he said. “Can you believe with all the other things going on in this world he’s preoccupied with Fox News?” …
Scott Adams takes a perverse view of things.
One way of imagining the future is that you and I, the so-called current generation, will selfishly party until we die, leaving to our children nothing but crushing debt, a boiling turd of a planet, and various Apple products. The problem with this analysis is that young adults have most of the guns and muscles. So isn’t the younger generation complicit in stealing from itself? …
Last, to close out our night of humor, we have an article from the Jerusalem Post about Nancy Pelosi’s claim she will continue to be speaker of the house.
… In the weekly briefing, Pelosi said that she believes the Democrats have a chance to retain their congressional majority. A week before, speaking to a women’s group in New York, Pelosi said that she “fully expects to be speaker of the House five weeks from now,” the paper reported. …