Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Sarah Palin, Neocon Messiah
Judge them by their enemies. More evidence that Barack Obama might be shaping up as a good president is that Norman Podhoretz hates him so much. In a Wall Street Journal column Monday the guru of the neoconservatives declared: "I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama."
I know that does not properly address all of the serious questions raised about the Obama presidency by progressives, myself included, and as of today we must now add offshore oil drilling to the list. But it is somewhat reassuring that the surviving father of the neocon movement should be left so totally unglued. He is joined in this embrace of the Palin rage by Bill Kristol, whose late father, Irving, was Podhoretz's comrade in the long march from the far left to the far right. That shift brought the neoconservatives to the pinnacle of power in the Bush administration before they flamed out over the distortions of fact and logic they peddled as justification for the invasion of Iraq.
Among other things-and this was particularly important for Podhoretz, who for 35 years had edited Commentary, a leading journal in the Jewish community-the elimination of Saddam Hussein was supposed to leave Israel more secure. Instead, just the opposite has occurred as a consequence of the vastly increased power of Iran in the region thanks to the elimination of its most feared local adversary. Any effort to contain the power of Iran has been compromised by the leading role of the disciples of the Iranian ayatollahs in the politics of Iraq.
Obama had opposed that war, but he has certainly done his bit to carry on the Bush policy and has furthered it in Afghanistan as well. There is no sign of Obama abandoning those failed adventures, and his fitful efforts to contain Iran while negotiating a much needed settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict are quite consistent with those of previous administrations. Indeed, the U.S. policy agenda for the region seems to be set by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who, as her warm reception at the recent AIPAC conference indicates, has long been regarded as a fervent friend of Israel.
Indeed, from health care, the banking bailout and on to Mideast peace, it is difficult to find a single policy proposal from Obama that Bill and Hillary Clinton had not both previously embraced. So why the particularly strident animus toward Obama? The answer lies in that fear so common to the tea party core-that Obama is a false prophet leading the good God-fearing folk astray. Since Podhoretz claims to be writing out of the Jewish tradition he does not embrace the possibility of Obama being the Antichrist, but his language is as descriptively bizarre.
In a WSJ article from last September headlined "Why Are Jews Liberals?" which is also the title of his latest book, Podhoretz complained bitterly, "One of the most extraordinary features of Barack Obama's victory over John McCain was his capture of 78% of the Jewish vote." What followed was a self-hating tirade against his own: "Jews are by far the most liberal of any group in America." In support of that view he quotes the sociologist Nathan Glazer, who argued that Jews, as opposed to any other immigrant group in America, have ignored their improving economic status and instead consistently supported "increased government spending, expanded benefits to the poor and lower classes, greater regulations on business, and the power of organized labor."
What a great testament to the enduring decency of Jewish values that they have proved so capable of embracing social goals that transcend narrow class interest. What a wonderful refutation of historical anti-Semitism that Jews so consistently ignore personal economic gain to serve the larger good. Not so in the eyes of Podhoretz, who was immensely disappointed that the commitment of Jews to those enlightened views did not dissipate with the nomination of Obama but rather increased somewhat.
He bemoans the fact that the vast majority of Jews did not share his fear that Obama was too liberal or anti-Israel, but instead of chalking that up to an honest disagreement he invokes the language of the devil's deception: "I am hoping against hope that the exposure of Mr. Obama as a false messiah will at last open the eyes of my fellow Jews to the correlative falsity of the political creed he so perfectly personifies and to which they have for so long been so misguidedly loyal."
So what does that make Sarah Palin-the true messiah?
- Posted in
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
97 Comments so far
Show AllI think only people who take Sarah Palin and baggars seriously are Obamabots and Dem party kool-Aid drinkers.
Obamabots and Dem party kool-Aid drinkers love to be defined by Palin's followers and tea baggars so that they can stoop down to the baggars' level and get to blame baggars.
"the elimination of Saddam Hussein was supposed to leave Israel more secure. Instead, just the opposite has occurred as a consequence of the vastly increased power of Iran "
Sorry Robert Scheer, but if Israel is less secure it's because of its own deplorable and illegal actions, not because of Iran who isn't actually threatening anyone.
Sioux Rose
It's time to define the two-party schizophrenia as a clinical disorder given that BOTH represent the EXACT same interests! For Scheer to bellow on about all the things Obama has done, or not done, that follow the SCRIPT of his predecessor (and those pseudo-democrats, the Clintons) and then use the alleged adversaries as "proof" that there really are two viable political teams playing ball must qualify as a disease, since so many otherwise intelligent self-professed liberals and progressives share this perceptual disorder!
Dang! I am so tired of the nonsensical logic that because a right wing bloviator hates a specific politician, that that alone qualifies as cause to see the light, or angelic halo surrounding this individual.
Sports like football are essentially worshipped in the U.S. And the intensity of identifying with one's favored team works its way into the political arena. This helps to explain why there is such an obvious blindspot (on the part of so many established writers) when it comes to their ability to separate the wheat from the chaff with respect to ACTUAL policy decisions. Instead, some of our would-be great thinkers get caught up in analyzing the "play by play," the "he said/she said" and deprive the public of the more meaningful analysis of those agendas being furthered while the sports fans sit in the stands and root for their hopeful winning team, not understanding a whit of what's going on. (Marvin Gaye sang about THIS 30 years ago!)
Well-said, Sioux Rose
I've been watching the behaviors for many years now of the so-called 2 parties. (I agree, it's pure delusion.) It seems to me that the closer a pseudo-Democratic politician or president is to being a hard core Republican, the more venom he or she gets from the Repukican side. The more Clinton and Obama played or plays the Repukican game, the more they are detested by those Repukes. It's like the Repukes know they are the same, and they hate it. Self-hate!
"he closer a pseudo-Democratic politician or president is to being a hard core Republican, the more venom he or she gets from the Repukican side."
That is how they frame things. Contrast! Make one side look eviler - lesser of two evils!
Are progressives going to fall for this again? Did they learn nothing from Obama?
You can fool most of the people, most of the time.
"Whenever we compromised, we lost." the Arch Druid, David Brower
Sioux Rose
TRUTH: Your observation makes perfect sense in this upside-down world brought to us by the moral likes of Karl Rove and his cast of rightwing radio shock jocks!
Just as the CIA uses a premise known as "Plausible Deniability," the corporatists establish something that operates along the same lines. It works like this: with so much vitriol FROM the right aimed at a politician who essentially marches to their very own drumbeat, the public is left with the illusion that it could not be POSSIBLE that the politician was actually cooperating with what appears to be his overt enemies! This presents a perceptual twist along the lines of cartesian dualism, or a collective mass psychosis.(Focus is placed on the drama, not the programs, agendas, and protocols being pursued.) And this inverted mindset is nurtured by a mainstream media (added to Hollywood along with the big sporting events) that intentionally inculcates acceptance for ideas like torture, simplistic good guys/bad guys narratives, terrorism, frames that only allow for winners/losers, and then the king of false witness: using the very name (and alleged endorsement) of the preferred Judeo-Christian deity, as basis for repugnant, unlawful policies.
As has been reported, the evangelical influence over the U.S. air force leads many young persons whose ideas have not yet been shaped by genuine worldly experience to presume they are targeting others (enemies) via distant drone warfare so as prove their fealty to God. It hardly seems possible that the same sort of propaganda that got soldiers to march in the crusades has been dusted off and refitted to suit 21st century abuses of power (and crimes against humanity) on a grand scale.
Time seems to be unraveling... like a great tidal wave rolling under itself. I hope it is doing this to gather the momentum to thrust forward in that progressive wave we all are working for, and envisioning.
Sioux Rose
JILL: Thank you for the acknowledgement. I look forward to your posts. The times we're living in are surreal, to say the least.
TOM JOAD: Thank you for supporting the sports thesis. I think it's an incredibly powerful and seductive subliminal that influences more minds (and their species of analysis) than most acknowledge or would care to admit. A new opiate of the peoples!
Excellent points!
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The louder and more prevalent the right wingnuts are in attacking Obama, the more progressives will gather to protect him. The duopoly plays along with the scam because it serves both parties and ultimately the US empire's agenda.
Remember how terrifying Bush was. "We must defeat the evil Republicans!" and so they got Obama, who has followed in Bush's footsteps almost entirely.
I'll put it to you this way: They fell in love with Bush, only he wears a different skin!
Please tell me people aren't this dumb.
Sioux Rose
RVR & SPARKLE: Thank you for your gracious acknowledgements.
I lived in Denver in Sept. 2001. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there was this sports-like fervor with cars adorned with two plastic flags: one was the US flag and the other was the Denver Broncos flag. The fervor against "the terrorists" had the surreal feel of fans rooting for a football team, as if these flag wavers didn't distinguish between a football team and our nation. It was all rah! rah! rah!--let's get the terrorists. It made me feel sick to my stomach.
Sioux Rose: the two party schizophrenia has become clear to me, finally. Republican and Democrat candidates will never get my vote. Positive socio/economic change will not be affected by those that serve the ruling class. Your sports/politics parallel is excellent. I once heard a sociologist lament that sports is nothing but something to give the average, American male something to talk about.
Don't be too hard on pro sports fans. The sports page of your average mainstream newspaper is the only section that is likely to be more true than false!
HA! So sadly true.
"Obama had opposed that war .."
It's embarrassing to have to point out the following to a journalist who was a founder of Ramparts?
Robert, Obama made a speech, appearing to oppose that war. After the speech promoted him to a Senate seat, Obama voted for, thus supported, the war. Talk is cheap and rhetoric is a tool of empire. I don't believe you're that naive.
Robert Sheer has a recent history of mistaking political rhetoric for actual facts. It may be age related. If so, sorry about that. He was once a good journalist.
Obama is merely the latest face of the duopoly which is the corporate party. Dems are barely feigning to do that which they used to do covertly and which the Repugs have always done overtly. The results are the same. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, nary a gnats ass difference between them as far as results go.
There are definitive differences between the bases of the two wings of the one corporate party, between the politicians, not so much.
I'd have thought that Obama's Oslo speech, combined with boots on the ground in optional wars, would have proved reassuring to the neocons. Guess Poddy's just upset that Obama is making a few ugly faces at Netinyahu at the moment. Surely he knows that AIPAC is on the job, and will be dictating the Obama administration's policies in the Middle East.
For a free download of invective useful to the left -- Words that Draw Blood -- go to www.lost-vocabulary.com.
As a famous 19th century British PM (either Disraeli or Gladstone, I forget) once said "No permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests". These are political words for the working class to live by.
Exactly.
I want to assume that Scheer was being facetious, Jill, although it's still a lame effort.
"Judge them by their enemies" sounds like a parody of Lao Tzu in the first place; it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Good points, thanks.
Actually, as others have suggested, and to borrow a term from a fellow CD commenter, Scheer suffers from acute subjunctivitis.
Jill, i am a fan of your posts.... ;-)
rita
Sarah Palin! The Retard for President Campaign 2012! (I should print this up as a bumper sticker.) This nation is even more stupid than I thought.
Much of the world would like to see the USA collapse in upon itself, with a further crashing of the economy, maybe a dose of hyperinflation, internal strife of Tea Party militias fighting state security forces, desertification of the Midwest, some earth quakes in California, more tornadoes and hurricanes, and bigger ones. Catastrophes like these might make the USA look inwards and bring its military forces home. President Palin would fit right in with that list of catastrophes that could befall the USA.
On the contrary. Much of the world sees the USA collapsing in upon itself, with its ignorance and egocentricity, its greed, arrogance, and sense of entitlement (because "God blessed America") and that same much of the world is dismayed that it will be effected adversely by the demise of this one, only, 21th Century Imperial Power.
This is a subtle, but significant perspective on the part of the US verses the rest of the world.
A Canadian woman was visiting her son in Wisconsin shortly after 9/11. They went to a football game where everyone sang God Bless America, after which she turned to her son and said "They don't know what they're asking."
100% pure unadulterated bullsh*t.
Moreover, the twisted logic of this piece just points toward how outstanding a channel for the neoconservative pogram our largely intellectually vapid Bam turned out to be.
If Sarah Palin, as the next dummy in line, is actually going to be a BETTER channel for the neocon pogram, I hate to consider such an escalation will entail...
Perhaps in his next post, Scheer will can the gratuitous spin doctoring and let us in on his thoughts on this critical matter in the life of the US as a nation.
He might also inform us on what it is exactly about Bam that is supposed to inhibit this escalation in the years ahead--because, honestly, I simply fail to see it.
Frankly, if Palin WERE elected in 2012--an outcome I find unlikely but, okay, I'll play along-- most likely the tea baggers would shut up and go home, smugly satisfied with their big "victory."
It is entirely possible that re-electing Obama is worse for the future of the US (and the world)-- especially if Rupert Murdoch at Fox News is going to have the baggers in the streets doing the public dirty work for Podhoretz and his ilk, pushing Bam to the right on every issue that "happens" to "come up."
"In a Wall Street Journal column Monday the guru of the neoconservatives declared: "I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.""
Like it matters.
quidittas i totally agree!
"Judge them by their enemies."
No.
So many political mistakes get generated by this kind of sloppy thinking that I am brought to wonder whether most political errors are of this kind.
"Strichnine's poisonous, so I had better slug back some hemlock."
Do not EVER judge them by their enemies.
..
"More evidence that Barack Obama might be shaping up as a good president . . ."
What was the first piece of evidence?
I can only hope these are rhetorical games. At any rate, I'm tired of playing.
"I can only hope these are rhetorical games. At any rate, I'm tired of playing."
Me too, if the left doesn't *do* something soon like a general strike, I quit and start writing poetry and songs, life's too short for this stale gum chewing rhetoric. Rehashing a tired dead horse argument like whether Obama is good because Krystal is bad is baby talk. Goo, goo, goo ga choo...
The con artists and spin doctors reveal the real truth of their disinformation program with this single sentence;
"More evidence that Barack Obama might be shaping up as a good president is that Norman Podhoretz hates him so much."
The corporations who are the true masters of the two parties want you "believe" that Obama is good because the bad guys hate him. They don't want you to look at what he is "doing", that is continuing the corporate agenda which is war profiteering, stealing other countries resources, robbing the U.S. Treasury and bringing in the "New World Order". Check this out people;www.theamericansheeple.com
If the former Alaskan half-governor is the Neocon Messiah, then if anyone cares about the state of our nation and its future, those persons should make Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine" a must read to find out what disaster capitalism is, because that's exactly where we could expect to be led.
To everyone who posts here: Thank you. Your comments are frequently much more enlightening than the articles.
hamster, so true.
Sarah Palin will become a footnote in 10 years. I really don't see the threat. She's a disaster who is too much of a nitwit to see that everyone's laughing at her aside from her fanbase of nitwits.
I can see a talking heads VH-1 program now...
"Hey, remember the 2000's? Remember Sarah Palin?"
"However there is a Ron Paul/Libertarian faction who is a potential ally to us on the left."
I dunno man, I have said before that the Libertarians are hiding radical and dangerous free market principles underneath all that talk of legalizing pot and personal freedoms.
Libertarians=Republicans with a penchant for Hedonism and perhaps isolationism.
My problem is that the Left often gets mired in nasty identity politics and displays that elitism towards ordinary people in general, not just those who are political. Insulated academics aren't going to defeat the Satanic elites.
If Barack Obama isn't a Zionist, I'm a Venusian.
One other thing, I really dislike the whole What Group Is More Liberal Than Who Olympics. Aren't most Americans left-leaning, radical even in terms of what they want?
Did he say Obama is "shaping up to be a good President"?
So much for the theory that progressives are smart.
ditto
The right-wing venom and hatred for Obama---their labeling him a socialist etc., is designed to move our politics further and further to the right. If you take a centrist and convince everyone he's a radical lefty, then our politics has shifted to the right. Same thing with the constant portrayal of our media as liberal. Obama is a centrist---who got elected by masquerading as a left-wing progressive.
"Obama is a centrist" - What planet are YOU living on??? When I was growing up, we called people like Obama 'fascists' - and joined the Russians and the rest of the civilized world to fight them. Stalin and Hitler would have drooled over Obama's power - and corruption. What a sick description - 'centrist' - yeah, like Hitler.
May people think that Obama is a secret muslim, but now we know that he is a jew because he celebrated a passover seder at the white house a few days ago. No wonder Scheer is apologetic for O.
In case you don't realize that passover was a genocidal, infanticidal act of terror against the arab egyptians by a jewish god and his hit-man angel then you should read Exodus chapter 12.
That O would blunder into this foolish act will prove to the muslims that his egyptian speech about reaching out to muslims was just his usual hot air.
O has turned his "barack" on nearly everything he originally said that he stood for.
“…Podhoretz’s comrade in the long march from the far left to the far right.”
What planet is Mr Scheer living on? Norman Podhoretz was a petty-bourgeois liberal whose most ‘extreme left-wing’ piece was the 1963 essay, “My Negro Problem — And Ours.”
Mr Podhoretz has just grown OLD — mentally as well as physically!