THE SULTAN’S WEEKLY ROUNDUP
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Friday Afternoon Roundup – As the Leaves Turn, So Do the DemocratsPosted: 15 Oct 2010 02:48 PM PDTAfter the euphoria died down, the oceans sank and the confetti was gathered up, we’re back to Democratic incumbents in conservative states running away from any association with liberalism, toting their rifles, putting holes in cap and trade, and mocking Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco hippies.The magic is gone, and the Obama Umbrella is full of holes. Turning Obama into the messiah was supposed to provide unlimited cover for the left’s agenda. But the charisma has faded, and as the leaves turn, so do the Democrats.Suddenly Democratic incumbents are making commercials that look more right wing, than most Republican commercials. How many Republicans running for Congress are shooting Cap and Trade full of holes? How many are hippie bashing? Of course it’s all fake. But what it reveals is that the country is more right, than it is left.That despite Obama’s rise to power, America is basically conservative. And without the bible and gun folk that Obama sneered at during his campaign, the Democrats are nothing but a rump party.As much as the media projects a dysfunctional America, the real America is still there, and even Democrats find they have to pay tribute to it, as false as their tributes may be.While some liberal candidates in endangered elections go for their guns, others go for their Jewishness.Barney Frank who had announced that he was ashamed to be a Jew after Israeli soldiers defended themselves against Islamist flotilla thugs, is now marketing a book, “Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman.”So apparently Barney Frank is only ashamed to be Jewish, when it’s not an election. The Marblehead JCC has shown how non-partisan it is by inviting Frank to be the, and I’m quoting here, “the second headliner in the JCC’s prestigious literary series” for Jewish Book Month. This is the worst misuse of the words “prestigious literary” since they were applied to anything written by Barack Obama.To be fair, the other author at the JCC’s Jewish Book Month is Lou Gossett Jr with his own biography. Which is at least a fair argument that Marblehead JCC’s Jewish Book Month should be probably be renamed to “Famous Non-Jewish people hawking biographies about themselves”.Meanwhile the New York Daily News has broken a major scandal. Republican candidate for Governor, Carl Paladino, is a hypocrite for not discriminating against gay people. That’s right, Paladino took “gay cash”, by which the newspaper means, that he rented property ten years ago in buildings he owned to two gay bars.Let’s put aside that had Paladino not rented space to gay bars, because of his opposition to homosexuality… he would have been breaking the law. Major newspapers are so deep in the pocket of the Cuomo campaign that they are running “exposes” that make absolutely no sense to anyone with a functioning brain.Is the news that Paladino did business with gay people a scandal now? And if so how exactly is it a scandal? And what exactly do they propose that he should have done instead. Discriminated against them? Refused their checks and let them use his space for free? The Daily News and the other papers recirculating this nonsense have no rational answer. Because there isn’t one.This is what happens when you outsource your reporting to the Cuomo campaign.Andrew Cuomo slimed Patterson out of the race, by playing the Iago game, sending his trolls to whisper in the media’s ears. And the media is still playing the same game now. Once the Daily News outsourced its front page to the Cuomo campaign, it lost any and all pretense of credibility. And so we get stories about Paladino’s “gay cash” (What is “gay cash” anyway?) as media outlets.So far we’ve learned that Paladino rented space to gay bars, that his nephew is gay and that his son may have run a gay bar, that eventually became a regular bar, at one point. But does anyone of that remotely address anything meaningful? These aren’t even scandals. They’re just life.Paladino has since made a statement in which he said, “The portrayal of me as anti-gay is inconsistent with my lifelong beliefs and actions and my prior history as a father, employer and friend to many in the gay and lesbian community.” Obviously it’s boilerplate stuff. But it also highlights media dysfunctionality, which has them trying to prove that Paladino has “gay associations”, like some kind of bizarre reverse Marxism.That doesn’t make much sense from a reporting perspective. Paladino renting space to gay bars or having a gay nephew isn’t proof of hypocrisy, but it is handy material for the Cuomo campaign, which is actually playing a whole other football game, by trying to tarnish Paladino with values voters. That flips over the media’s coverage into the homophobic column (not exactly a first, considering the precedents with Larry Craig.) And so the leaves turn.Meanwhile Greece’s health care system is imploding.
Money has to be saved somewhere. Greece has been stumbling out of the nationalized health care game. Because there’s no money.And when there’s no money, sooner or later the entitlements have to be cut. It’ll take longer for it to happen here, but if we can imagine a static Obamaesque regime running for 20 years, we’d end up in the same place too.With the upcoming election, some Jewish bloggers are looking at some of the more radically pro-terrorist and anti-Israel congressmen who are endangered.Boker Tov Boulder has a list up at “Cleaning the House” |
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