I’ll leave room for the possibility that Ratko Mladic did go ahead and draw a finger across his throat toward the professional victim who claimed he did so last Wednesday May 16th, figuring he might as well since the media mistakenly had him doing it last year anyway. (In a case of the AP misreporting itself about a Bosnian woman who’d made the gesture toward Mladic.)

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Let’s say a gang of terrorists or drug lords or something broke into an American dorm full of Olympic athletes, kidnapped and murdered them.

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It’s like a forest fire – you may think it’s out, but a smoldering ember can reignite it at any time and create unimaginable havoc.

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OK, so Washington’s envoy to Israel told the Jews there that the “U.S. has plans in place to attack Iran if necessary to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons,” Associated Press reported.

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Someone got their wires crossed and started sending me stuff from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the pro-Arab answer to the Anti-Defamation League.

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     In a review of Show Me A Story:  Why Picture Books Matter (WSJ 5/12/12), Meghan Cox Gurdon quotes from some of the interviewees who are subjects in Leonard Marcus’ anthology of famous illustrators.  Maurice Sendak, probably the most admired children’s book author since Dr. Seuss had this to say about the grotesque (Gurdon’s word) aunts and uncles who visited his family when he was a child,  “God knows most of the people who came there were pigs.”  He then goes on to explain that the day of his own Bar-Mitzvah was also the day his father collapsed with the news that other members of his family had been killed in the holocaust:  “I remember my father falling down, and me in my little suit all ready to go, and the rage that was stirred in me by these dead Jews who constantly infiltrated our lives and made us miserable.”  We’re reading the words of an adult recapturing the emotion not of a 5 year old Little Lord Fauntleroy, but of a 13 year old adolescent son of hard-working immigrants.  It’s hard not to remember that he was the same age as another teenager who penned her own emotional reaction to far more serious deprivation in the posthumously published Diary of Anne Frank.

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Over the past few months, the Obama campaign team and the Left have dropped the following issues into the national debate and let them explode like political IEDs:

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When is a Jew not a Jew?

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Claire Squires had been a healthy 30 year-old woman when she died less than a mile from the finish of the London Marathon two weeks ago. Her death has caused an outpouring of grief around the world and prompted more than £1m in donations to charity. This is laudable but what is unusual, is that even at this point after the tragedy, no cause of death has been announced. She is the 11th person to die in the London Marathon since 1990 - the others have all been male, ranging in age from 22 to 59. Most deaths in marathoners are due to cardiovascular causes, primarily in middle age men with preexisting heart diease. Claire was likely an outlier, having previously run a marathon in under four hours and successfully climbed Mount Kilimanjaro last year. Heart disease as the cause of her death, while possible, would be quite unusual.

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     Two obituaries are prominently featured in the Times today (May 1).  The first is for Ben Zion Netanyahu who is headlined as a “hawkish scholar,” an oxymoron that conjures up first fights in the library stacks; the second is for Fred Hakim, a Times Square hot dog vendor whose selection to share the page seems motivated less by the significance of the deceased than by an attempt to offset the importance of his page-mate’s accomplishments.  Both articles feature pictures of a smiling father entwined with a smiling son.  Can you see the editors deciding on their choices?  “Let’s commemorate the man who penned a 1,300 page history of the Spanish Inquisition, was editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica, the Encyclopedia Judaica and The World History of the Jewish People, the father of the current prime minister of Israel (whom we don’t like) and to balance that, let’s highlight the guy who sold hot dogs and knishes in a seedy 7 seat luncheonette on Times Square.  Or maybe the editors saw equivalencies between the two men -  after all, Hakim was a gym teacher at the Murray Bergtraum High School in lower Manhattan and Netanyahu taught at Cornell, another New York school.  Or perhaps it was a case of free association -  say the names Ben Zion and Netanyahu quickly 3 times, click your heels and what comes to mind  is Hebrew National - a famous hot dog and a perfect segue.

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Six-term incumbent Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar is facing off in a close race against upstart challenger Richard Mourdock, the state treasurer, who is, according to one news site “running to Lugar’s right with tea-party backing.”

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If you haven’t seen Footnote yet, you should;  it’s a movie that lends itself to the type of discussion and explication that’s usually reserved for significant literary works.  If you haven’t seen it and intend to, please don’t read this article - you should come to your own conclusions before reading mine.  Half the fun of this movie is trying to solve a puzzle for which there are many clues and allusions;  your conclusion depends upon how you interpret those and it’s fitting in a movie that has the Talmud at its core, that there will always be another point of view.

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     Here are a few of the topics that have been covered or reviewed in the New York Times during the past week:  mothers of autistic children finding it difficult to date;  brides resorting to gastric feeding tubes in order to lose weight before the wedding;  mothers being too harsh on each other’s parenting techniques;  mothers monopolizing the role of parenting, rendering fathers irrelevant;  breast-feeding mothers relinquishing their sexuality to their maternal desires.  It certainly seems that as women have risen to occupy the highest echelons of professional accomplishment, we are increasingly being force-fed a diet of whining and junk food for the mind.  It used to be that these subjects were relegated to women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal or Ms, much as celebrity news was once confined to movie magazines or pulps like People, Us and their spinoffs.  Today, even the Wall Street Journal has its equivalent of Page Six, not to mention its real estate porn page featuring the week’s most exorbitant sale.

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I was barely finished with my recent blog “A Tired Script: Tampa Terrorist from Pro-American Kosovo,” which asked journalists to notice their own words about Albanians loving us because we bombed their turf rivals, and mocked their rote exercise of inserting the requisite Albanian-pro-Americanism paragraph in articles about the latest Albanian terrorist. I was barely finished writing it when I happened upon the March issue of Newsmax magazine at the house of a relative who has since promised to cancel his subscription.

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As more and more details emerge about the Colombian adventure of several members of the Secret Service, the story keeps getting raunchier…and more outrageous.

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     In an article referencing the anomie of young people like Henry Wachtel, the teenager who beat his mother to death last week, Ginia Bellafante suggests that it’s impossible “to view Mr. Wachtel’s tragedy apart from the life that the film suggests - one in which parents are absent, opportunities seem meager and the resulting freedoms feel joyless in the wake of so much anxiety about a precarious future.”  (NYTimes 4/15/12  The film is “Our Time,” a cinema verite short in which Henry Wachtel had a leading role.  It appeared at the Cannes Film Festival last year and deals with middle class teens in New York who are not part of the affluent life style and high achievement of kids prominently in view in this city of 1 percenters.  As I read this article, I thought back to previous generations of teenagers - immigrants who came to this country without the language or the means to survive - who not only survived but excelled;  teenagers who got drafted into the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War - some never to return, some to return as physical or mental basket cases, many of whom overcame their crippling disabilities to resume their lives or bravely create new ones.  I thought of the words “so much anxiety” to describe kids who have a roof over their heads, a means of support, educational opportunities, no draft in sight and in Henry’s case, a mother who lived with and cared for him.

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President Obama’s entire political career has been based on smoke and mirrors, finely spun imagery, and fantasyland projections. Governing, however, has been a rude awakening—for him and for us. Reality has a way of intruding uninvited and upsetting the most delicately arranged illusion.

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As the Syrian government continues slaughtering its own people by the thousands, the Islamists solidify their grip on Egypt and other parts of the Arab world and Iran continues its race for a nuke while threatening to annihilate the Jews, a debate over a house in Hebron is making news.

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For decades, the Left has been accusing Republican presidents of carrying out “imperial” presidencies. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush…they were all accused of abusing their power and trampling the other two co-equal branches of government. That, of course, was not true, but when did the truth ever stop the Left?

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You probably don’t know this, but the other day, a terrorist snuck into a Jewish neighborhood in Israel and attacked a 13-year-old boy with an axe, killing him,

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     There’s nothing revelatory about the fact that contemporary Judaism keeps drifting towards the notion that this is primarily a religion about social justice with its tikkun olam banner now more significant than the Magen David.  In fact, for a growing number of Jews, Judaism is really the opportunity to celebrate liberalism with Jewish food and ceremony - in that order.  Passover, which begins next week, is viewed as an ecumenical occasion to talk about slavery and disenfranchisement throughout the world, from the gravest examples to the most petty.  There’s a seat at the seder for everyone who has a gripe and a Haggadah to match it.

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They’re at it again, the Jew-haters of the world, this time calling upon their minions to take physically to the streets of Israel to try and provoke a deadly confrontation for which they can blame the Jews.

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     Twenty-five years ago, the Reverend Al Sharpton jumped headfirst into the public spotlight to defend a black teenager who accused six white men of repeatedly raping her and smearing her body with dog feces and racial slurs.  Even after a grand jury found that Tawana Brawley had concocted an elaborate hoax to deflect punishment by her murderous step-father, Sharpton refused to concede that the truth made any difference.  What was important to him then was race-mongering and getting the maximum media play from his histrionic agit-prop.  Now, a generation later, he has found another opportunity to foment racial unrest in the case of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager who was killed in Florida by a mixed race Hispanic man serving as a neighborhood watchman.

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All the signs are there, yet way too much of the West is either ignoring them, denying them or, worse, are fine with them and where they’re leading.

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Who was the greatest American military commander of the 20th Century? Was it World War I General Blackjack Pershing or either of the two popular World War II biopic generals, George Patton or Douglas MacArthur? How about George Marshall, a superb leader of the war effort in World War II, but one whose role was more coordination and delegation than command? If the answer depends on military accomplishment alone, then it is unquestionably General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II and coincidentally the 34th President of the United States.

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A&E’s “Dog the Bounty Hunter” returns this week after a month’s hiatus. But it was that last episode before the hiatus that I can’t get out of my mind. Imagine the surreality of stumbling onto the show whose star Duane Chapman in 2007 was caught dissuading his son from bringing around his black girlfriend and other “n—–s” — and finding oneself being lectured by the Dog to “not discriminate against anybody and it’s about time that we became leaders of that in America.”

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President Obama has launched his re-election effort. He’s kicking it off with no official governing business today; instead he’s spending the day at campaign and fundraising events. Five of them, to be exact.

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Today, the agent for Peyton Manning was instructed to open negotiations with the Denver Broncos for the purpose of signing the quarterback to a multi-year deal that could be worth $60 million dollars. On the surface, John Elway, the general manager of the Broncos looks like a genius here. Manning is a lock for the NFL Hall of Fame. He is known for bringing his former team, the Indianapolis Colts, to nine straight playoff appearances and a Super Bowl victory. He is an 11-time Pro Bowler and has won the MVP award four times. Denver is incredibly blessed to have this champion except for the elephant in the living room. A very BIG elephant.

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Michelle Obama has been busy getting her organic garden ready for the spring and summer, pushing her “Let’s Move” exercise campaign, and seating herself next to George Clooney at last night’s state dinner for British Prime Minister David Cameron.

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A maxim says, “Dance with the one that brung you.”  For half-a-century, Democrats have waltzed with leftist pressure groups, bowing and bartering.  By contrast, till George W. Bush the Republican dance card featured Americanism v. tribalism, general v/ special interest, and melting pot v. manic pluralism.

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Over the past few weeks, Team Obama and the Democrats have been letting out a collective sigh of relief, excited that the worst politically may be behind them and that better days were ahead: an improving economy and with it, sunnier re-election chances for Obama.

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The National Football League faces an oncoming spate of lawsuits by former players over traumatic brain injuries. Class-action suits filed in several states have already been consolidated to a federal court in Philadelphia and more suits by former players suits are certain to follow. Meanwhile, the recent revelation that teams unofficially paid bounties to defensive players, offering large sums of money for “cartoff” and “knockout” injuries that removed opponents from games comes at a bad time, suggesting the NFL has condoned deliberate violence and downplayed the long-term consequences.

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