In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I mentioned David Gelernter, a Yale professor of computer science, Orthodox Jew, and Republican yesterday as someone I've followed in the past for his views on America and Israel. So far, I haven't found much from him on the current situation, but he wrote a 2006 essay that bears on the problem, Why do so many American Jews hate the president who stands by Israel? Here's his key point: For those who continue to insist on voting Democratic, the future is written in a recent column by Richard Cohen--who explains that the "greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake." Who advises Israel to "hunker down," while "waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else." It is hard to understand why Israel is a mistake if Switzerland isn't--or the United States, or any other nation or (for that matter) human being. Cohen himself is occupying space right now that s...

From the New York Post: Anti-Israel activists were heard chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” at a rally in a Michigan city recently dubbed the “jihad capital” of the US. The sick chants erupted at a rally Friday in Dearborn marking Al Quds Day, in which Muslims around the world denounce Israel, according to a video posted by the Middle East Media Research Institute. They came after Dearborn activist Tarek Bazzi ripped the US for supporting Israel — and told the crowd that “the chant ‘Death to Israel’ has become the most logical chant across the world today. My reaction to this is just a follow-on to the issue that came up in Sunday's post -- the objective of the current wave of anti-Semitism isn't just to wipe out Israel, it's to "globalize the intifada", in other words, to wipe out all Jews. Why does this project seem to resonate so widely? After all, the speaker in Dearborn quoted by the post claims “the chant ‘Death to Israel’ has become...

One question keeps pestering me. We have the most famous assessment of Joe's capabilities from Barack Obama -- "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to [mess] things up" -- but this piece from 2020 on the eve of Biden's nomination goes farther: Interviews with dozens of senior officials of the Obama-Biden administration painted a picture of eight years during which the president and vice president enjoyed a genuinely close personal relationship, built particularly around devotion to family, while at the same time many senior aides, sometimes tacitly encouraged by the president’s behavior, dismissed Biden as eccentric and a practitioner of an old, outmoded style of politics. “You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” said Jen Psaki, the former White House communications director. Young White House aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in comparison to the almost clerical Obama. They would chortle at how Biden, li...

John Hinderaker, whom I normally take as seriously as I take any other Ivy League Republican, actually raised an important point yesterday. First, he cited the Washington Free Beacon : A Rutgers University town hall descended into anarchy Thursday evening as anti-Israel students chanted demands to "globalize the intifada," hurled anti-Semitic insults at Jewish students, and forced the school's president to end the event early[.] Hinderaker then observes , “Globalize the intifada” means that no Jew should ever be able to live in safety, anywhere in the world. He cites shouts of "Go back home!" elsewhere in the story and asks, “Go back home”? Where might that be? Not Israel, evidently. Maybe, like the former “dean of the White House press corps,” Helen Thomas, they want Jews to go “back” to Germany and Poland. But they don’t want Jews here in the U.S., or in Israel. What strikes me in the current outbreak is that since the Holocaust, anti-Semitis...

I'm at a point in my life where I'm ready to make a decision I never thought I'd ever have to make. and that is abandoning the Democratic party. Like Ronald Reagan said, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me. . . . I think a lot of people in America are going through an assessment. Many Democrats, people who voted for Democrats, are now saying I can't vote for Kamala Harris, I can't vote for Joe Biden, but they're also saying I can't vote for Donald Trump. They're looking for a third alternative, and there may be some third alternatives. Bobby Kennedy has been very strongly supportive of Israel, and we don't know who the candidate for No Labels will be. He goes on to point out that the current election is likely to hinge on a few critical states, but . . . it will not be Michigan. It will not be the Muslims and the Arabs of Michigan. They will not determine the outcome of this election. Why? Because we wo...

Early in the history of this blog, I brought up the end-of-the-world oppurtunity presented by the notion that the Mayan calendar predicted everything would wrap on December 21, 2012. I said that if anyone believed that, their best option would be to run up their credit cards all that month, because they would never have to pay back the balance. As far as I know, whether people believed the world was going to end in 2012 or not, none of them ran up their credit cards thinking it would. However, what I did think was happening in the wake of the 2020 election was that Democrats, having swept into power on the thinnest of margins, began running up whatever political balance they could on the basis that they'd never have to pay anything back down the road. Last August, I reviewed this : [Speaker Pelosi] expected to enact the Great Reset agenda via a pair of infrastructure bills in 2021, getting it all done before the start of the 2022 election cycle, when by this point conven...

This morning, I saw this: On Tuesday, he had nothing at all on his public schedule. But, as I noted, he looked horrible at his healthcare remarks that he had to deliver on Wednesday and lost badly in a fight with the teleprompter. . . . Biden was late to the event which was supposed to be at 11 a.m. He kept Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the health care advocates who attended the even [sic] waiting for an hour before he bothered to appear. He didn't show up until around 12 p.m. And when he showed up finally, people noticed that he had CPAP strap marks still very evident on his face. He supposedly sleeps with a CPAP machine helping him because he has sleep apnea. But if he's showing up at that time with the straps still evident on his face, then one has to concluded it's very likely he overslept. Fox's Jesse Watters made this point. "If he has a creasy face at noon, he just got out of bed," Watters surmised. He wasn't up late or doing anythin...