Abrabanel: Musings on the Jewish condition

Unbelievable:

The brief stab at the Republican presidential and vice-presidential nominees occurred during a scene when characters Brian (an anthropomorphic dog), Mort (a Rhode Island pharmacist) and Stewie (a super-intelligent toddler) beat up three Nazi officers, in order to steal their uniforms.

“Hey, there’s something on here,” Stewie remarked during the segment, as he noticed an anachronistic McCain/Palin campaign button on his disguise’s lapel. “Huh, that’s weird.”

The show’s creator and the voice behind Brian and Stewie, Seth MacFarlane, is a supporter of McCain’s Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, having donated $2,300 to Obama’s presidential campaign between 2007 and 2008 and tens of thousands to other Democratic causes since 2005.

That’s the gist of an Islamic Republic News Agency report that claims “US Congressmen have made a request to Iranian parliament to hold negotiations with Iranian counterparts.”

After announcing the secret letter – without giving the congressmen’s names – an Iranian parliament spokesman decided to play hard-to-get:

“Due decision will be made in this connection,” the spokesman told IRNA adding that the number of the signatories of the letter is confidential.

The MP added that the request was handed over to Iranian MPs who had attended the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank held in Washington DC on October 13.

Kohkan said that Majlis representatives would consider the request and will make “final decision” about it. “We are not in a hurry to answer the request for the moment,” Kohkan added.

The report, which leaves something to be desired grammar-wise, quickly gets to the point: these unnamed congressmen are allegedly less averse to Iranian aggression than the current American administration:

Meanwhile, Chairman of Parliament Commission on National Security and Foreign Policy Alaeddin Boroujerdi said that the context of the letter is not in concord with the current approach of the US Administration.

He said that the context of the letter does not keep up with the current policy of the United States, highlighting the US anti-Iran propaganda and hostility.

This cute mini-profile of American Communism begins:

A rare bird in the political world, the US Communist Party is feeling rather smug in these days of capitalist turmoil.

The Communists’ view on the election:

There is no communist running for the White House and the Communist Party does not endorse Democrat Barack Obama.

Yet many staff here wore his picture on lapel buttons, while Republican John McCain was relegated to a box of tissues — the tissues being pulled through his mouth.

Incidentally, LittleGreenFootballs helpfully points out that the party’s website does, in fact, endorse Obama. (We’re not going to hold that against him, but it’s a silly mistake for AFP to make.)

After stumbling over the ‘Israeli generals support Obama’ video, the JCER told the New York Times today that just 100 people went to Florida for their ‘Great Schlep’ to convince those brain-addled racist Jewish grandparents to get with the program.

We never understood the point of this campaign, which seems to us will insult more Jews than it inspires. But now we also discover it didn’t exactly inspire anyone. That figure of 100, after all, comes from the organizer.

The New York Times has a short but fun slide show of Jewish-themed campaign buttons from recent elections. It’s cute.

Representative Tom Tancredo last week presented HR 6975 to the House floor, a bill “To require aliens to attest that they will not advocate installing a Sharia law system in the United States as a condition for admission, and for other purposes.”

We understand the fear of sharia law, particularly in the context of the culture war in Europe over Muslim immigration, but we don’t understand the purpose of the bill.

If it’s about preventing any sharia-based lifestyles from taking place in America, it will fail. Those who wish to live through sharia can do so privately, through arbitration courts similar to the batey din that decide religious personal status issues for Jews. And why shouldn’t they?

If it’s about preventing a coup that replaces the Constitution with the Quran, we have to wonder if Tancredo, an obsessive campaigner on immigration issues, really believes this is a threat.

Hat tip: reason magazine.

Allegedly, Iran’s violent, messianic regime is a threat to the West, its terror organizations a threat to Jewish communities worldwide. According to every Jewish organization that fund-raises, this is an existential threat.

So why, one wonders, is the upcoming anti-Ahmadinejad rally in New York drawing so much partisan bickering? First the Conference of Presidents invites Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton – assuming, apparently, that this is the bipartisan thing to do. Then Hillary cancels on them, assuming that appearing together before the election could seem to be legitimizing the candidacy of Palin. Then the National Jewish Democratic Council calls on Jewish groups to cancel the appearance of Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

Maybe this isn’t so crazy… six weeks before an election everything else is meaningless. But let’s not be fooled next time Jewish activists talk about the importance of the Iranian threat. When something real is at stake – for political Jews, elections are more important than fundraising – Iran becomes just one card in a larger deck.

Take, for example, this Orwellian logic from the NJDC:

Monday’s protest against Ahmadinejad is too important to be tainted by partisanship. Unfortunately, the campaign of Senator John McCain is much more interested in scoring political points than insuring there is bipartisan solidarity around the anti- Ahmadinejad efforts. Therefore, we call upon the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations to withdraw the invitation to Governor Sarah Palin and we applaud Senator Hillary Clinton’s decision to not attend the rally after the attendance of Palin was announced.

So: because the Ahmadinejad rally is too important for partisanship, we applaud Hillary for withdrawing and reject the conference organizer’s decision to invite, um, the Republican.

There’s something fascinating in watching the effect Sarah Palin has had on the American media. It isn’t so much the rabid criticism – reaching to her daughter’s pregnancy, her “porn actress” looks, the bizarre accusation of neglectful child-rearing because a mother has sought high office – as the sheer blinding obviousness of it all. Palin hasn’t faced a subtle shift in tone or language, but a political gang rape. That’s a violent analogy, but one that flows naturally from the obsessive abuse we’ve witnessed over the past two weeks.

And it must be said: she has responded with a strength and cool-headed assurance we’ve grown to expect from, well, Obama.

That’s why we loved Saturday’s Charles Krauthammer column about the much-discussed Charlie Gibson interview with the Republican VP nominee. The scene, as described by The New York Times:

“At times visibly nervous . . . Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed her that it meant the right of ‘anticipatory self-defense.’ “

(Yes, this is from the same NYT that mistakenly reported, on page 1, that Palin had been a member of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party.)

Krauthammer is wonderful in attacking not the tone, but the substance and intellectual ineptness of Gibson. The “Bush doctrine,” notes Krauthammer, who might be the first person to use the term back in 2001, has meant four completely different ideas during the Bush presidency, from a kind of new-isolationism, to a post-9/11 “with us or against us” policy vision, to Gibson’s “anticipatory self-defense” to the most recent, “the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world.”

Gibson laid a semantic trap for Palin rather than ask a direct, substantive question. Worse, he probably isn’t sharp enough to realize that, actually, he was wrong on the definition of the “Bush doctrine.”

Krauthammer finishes in master style:

Yes, Sarah Palin didn’t know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn’t pretend to know — while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and “sounding like an impatient teacher,” as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes’ reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.

This from today’s NBC First-Read. Tie game:

A Tie Ballgame: Major news organizations released three new national polls yesterday, and they all signaled the same thing: After the party conventions and VP picks, this presidential race is pretty much tied. The Washington Post/ABC poll had Obama up one point among registered voters (47%-46%). A CBS survey had McCain ahead by two (46%-44%). And CNN/Time had the race deadlocked at 48%-48%. …

The bad news for Team Obama is that this tied race is occurring in a pro-Democrat political environment, and skittish Democrats — who haven’t won the White House since 1996 — are going to wring their hands over any piece of bad news, which is never good for morale. The good news for them: In 2004, John Kerry found himself behind after the GOP convention by a significant margin, and he had to use three strong debate performances just to pull within striking distance. It doesn’t look like that will be the case for Obama and the Democrats this year.

McCain did choose a woman, as we were told he would, but not the one we thought was the front-running contender. Sarah Palin, we believed, was too inexperienced, too new, too provincial. After a few years in small-town Alaskan politics, she catapulted to the governor’s mansion in 2006, where she’s served no more than two years before McCain chose her for his VP this week. If it’s at all possible, she’s even less experienced than Obama.

Then there’s the personal story: mother of five, the youngest child, Trig, with Down’s Syndrome, the oldest son, Track, serving in a US Army infantry brigade that will deploy to Iraq in a month.

Her degree is from the University of Idaho, as opposed to the East Coast credentials of the opposition. She likes hunting and fishing.

At left, Palin looking like any hometown girl on her way to the gym. But she’s not. This picture is of a governor visiting her state’s National Guardsmen in Kuwait. Human touch, anyone?