http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3705&P+Auto+1=
Some of Barack Obama’s best friends are Jews. He says so himself. (Who knew?) The Poles, not so much.
Mr. Obama is afflicted with golden tongue disease (croesus tungitus, in the medical dictionaries), common to those with an eloquent tongue, particularly if the tongue is forked and bleeds around the edges. The tongue is sometimes set off and running before the brain is fully engaged. In the president’s case, the disease is probably terminal.
The president and his croesus tungitus have had a rough week. First he offended the Polish government with a reference to “Polish death camps” instead of saying “Nazi death camps in Poland,” and then he offended facts, reality and 20 American Conservative rabbis with his assertions that he is, too, a good friend of Israel, because he knows more about Judaism than any president before him, and besides, some of his best friends are Jews.
Speakers afflicted with a golden tongue (usually of fool’s gold) squirm into trouble because they think they can say anything and the audiences will swoon no matter how foolish and absurd the message. Many times the man with the golden tongue is correct, and therein lies the trap in the rap. Sometimes the babble for the rabble doesn’t make anybody swoon.
The president expected the 20 rabbis to swoon on cue, either from the unalloyed joy of being in the presence of the long-awaited messiah, or from something he said. Because his brain was not fully engaged, he pandered with the oldest cliché in the repertoire of ecumenical panderers. This, alas, was not an audience as gullible as the president thought it was.
Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, reported that Mr. Obama boasted to the assembled rabbis that he knows “more about Judaism” because he reads a lot, talks a lot and even, sometimes, listens a lot. When you’re sitting around with your pals from the old community-organizing days in Chicago, the lights dim and the second or third bottle of wine lending a mellow tone to the evening, the conversation will naturally turn to theology, and to Moses and Lot, Jeremiah, Joshua, Nehemiah, Micah, Isaiah and all those old dead Jewish guys.