This past week’s The New Yorker blog offered a window into the liberal soul in it current state of ideological corruption, in which virtually all that remains is reactionary negativism. Chronicling his interviews with a group of Brooklyn bar flies at an Atlantic Avenue dive, The New Yorker’s John Cassidy pronounced that the Bachmann presidential campaign was tantamount to Nazism. According to a Cassidy, “From National Socialism to Poujadism to the Tea Party, the suggestion that the motherland needs reclaiming from alien forces has been central to populist right-wing movements.”
Today’s New York Daily News headline says it all:Â “President Barack Obama Back to New York to Speak at Rev. Al Sharpton National Action Network Bash.” Welcome to the 125th Street-Wall Street Alliance and the Sharpton-Soros Axis.
Amidst pervasive, and mostly justified, pessimism about a political settlement in the Middle East, one beacon stands out: Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Established before Israel was a country, Hadassah is a place where Arab doctors treat Jewish patients, and Jewish doctors treat Arab patients. As such, it is a living, functioning reminder that the values of the Hippocratic Oath are indeed transcendent.
Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have at least two things in common: a shared border and the apparent distinction of having rolled the President of the United States. Watching both men go to work on Barack Obama, you would never know that Israel and Egypt were the two largest recipients of American foreign aid. Both men have defied the president, and apparently with little cost.
What a bender. The government in Tunisia is gone. Hosni Mubarak teeters in Egypt. King Abdullah has sacked his government in Jordan. The Israelis are blind sided. It looks like the end of the world as we know it. But do we feel fine?
John McCain is back, and I gotta say whodathunkit and that guy is tough. No money and a smashed up organization are generally not a recipe for victory. Nor, is it clear that McCain can pull off New Hampshire. According to the latest Bloomberg/LA Times poll, McCain still lags. Yet, McCain may do it.
Today, New York is the Island at the center of the political universe. The headlines in the hometown newspapers say it all. Three New Yorkers stand on top of the heap of would-be presidents.
The proximity between the first hardball dustup of the 2008 campaign (Clinton - Obama - Geffen) and the sixteenth anniversary of Lee Atwater’s death crystallizes something. Former President Bill Clinton is the Democrat’s incarnation of the GOP’s master of smash mouth politics, Lee Atwater. Clinton’s observation that “Your opponent can’t talk when he has your fist in his mouth” could have been uttered by Atwater himself.
2007 is here and so is the presidential cattle show. Already, the weakest of knee and bladder have departed from the field — Frist, Feingold, Bayh. And yet there is still enough beef on the hoof, boundless ambition, and tabloid tales to make 2008 a standout cycle in the making.
On election night there will be multiple stories. The Democrats win the House. The Democrats win the Senate (maybe). Tennessee elects Harold Ford to the U.S. Senate (maybe). Hillary Clinton wins big, but Eliot Spitzer does even better. Ned Lamont loses, and Geoerge Soros and Moveon.Org are reminded that culture counts. Congressman Mike Pence of Indiana emerges as a leading choice for House Minority Leader.
