---
Newt comments keep on coming: "Dick,
The only thing that matters is getting BHO out of office, I think a lot of people are there with us. I also think the mid-terms were extremely reassuring and I don't buy the "horse race" that the MSM makes this out to be every 4 years. The RNC is a nightmare along with the old guard Republicans and I'm speaking of the Bob Michael, Bob Dole, and McCain types and don't forget Hastert....good God, they are as much to blame as the numb skull Dems. This race should not be a referendum on the Republican nominee, which is how the RNC is doing it and so is the MSM - this should all be about Obama. If they would just do this, then it will be a bigger landslide then Carter/Reagan. Only their stupidity could lose this election.
People that think like me (poor souls they may be) are ready for someone like Newt that doesn't fold up when asked about "Libya" and can shut down the MSM with facts and logic. You and I both know that we are at war with an ideology that wants to destroy the American culture that we grew up in, so I want the baddest general I can find. Newt can talk over your head, and can get swept up in nonsense like "climate change" but I do believe he knows where the nuts and bolts are in running the government and has a depth of understanding of American and global history that leaves everyone else behind.
While Romney seems like a fine person, I sense that people perceive him as the RNC golden boy that will tow their line and that's where his problem is for me.
And then again, I'm wrong about a lot of stuff."
My response:
Our choices are distinct because Newt is a bomb thrower of sorts - colorful and accomplished.
Romney is bland, accomplished and more methodical but leaves you wondering whether he has strong convictions he will not change.
Newt also has strong convictions and he too has made many changes in his thinking but you can depend upon some core beliefs around which you can build your confidence tent.
The key, like you say, is rid this nation of the most radical and dangerous president we have ever known and on that we will always agree.
-0-
As you surmised, I do dislike Newt. But not because of any political position he has taken. He is all over the map politically, but he should not be forced into an ideological straight jacket. I want a President who is a problem solver and not frozen by some rigid ideology.
I am much more concerned with his character, e.g., his ethics (as were House Republicans when they tossed him) and his morals (paying himself first, before his creditors; multiple affairs ending in divorces; telling us he was teaching history to Fannie Mae, when he was actually working Congress for Fannie Mae; and so on. It is not just one big thing, but a series of smaller things which show the make up of his character.
I am also concerned about his judgment which is the most important trait a person can bring to the presidency. In addition to the above, putting his wedding gift wish list (for his third marriage) on the Internet (his web site certainly raises a judgment issue.
Any one of these can be forgiven or dismissed. But collectively, they indicate a very flawed character, too flawed to be President.
My response:
I have no problem with anything you have stated. I believe Newt has always felt jealous of those with money because he has enjoyed the opportunity of being with them but not one of them. He was raised as an Army brat, traveled all over as his father moved from post to post and perhaps it is the Nixon 'cloth coat' thing.
That said, I agree character in the White House used to count for something then it went down hill with Nixon and sped up with Clinton. Critical analysis is also important and I believe Newt has that. The problem I have, as I cited above, is he often carries judgement to a bomb throwing extreme and in the office of the president that can be dangerous.
-0-
This is an informed response to my comment highlighting Iran's claim of having captured one of our high tech drones and my own suspicions why we either could not destroy it from a distance or posing whether it is a purposeful plant:
"There’s nothing quite like a spirited debate. With high-resolution images and video readily available on the Web of the recovered RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle that went down in Iran last week, experts familiar with UAV design and journalists who cover the aviation beat are at odds over whether the photographic and video evidence displayed with bravado by Iranian officials is indeed an actual so-called “Beast of Kandahar.”
Aviation reporter David Cenciotti is believed to be the one who first stumbled upon the high-resolution photos on Iranian Web forums on Dec. 8, the same day the videos were available, reports David Axe at Wired’s Danger Room. His story has the high-resolution images.
The CIA reported last week losing track of a stealth drone on loan from the Defense Department for a secret mission on the Iran-Afghanistan border. The Iranians claim to have electronically hacked the RQ-170 and steered it to a soft landing. U.S. officials, who repeatedly declined to discuss the nature of the mission, flatly refuted that assertion, the Associated Press reports.
A former U.S. official said the aircraft displayed in a two-minute video was indeed the RQ-170 Sentinel, but offered no explanation for the opinion, reports the Associated Press. In contrast, a former DOD official with extensive experience in UAVs said that a close examination of the visual evidence reveals a wealth of evidence that indicates the vehicle shown is fake, reports Colin Clark at AOL Defense.
First, the vehicle does not look like one that lost control and crashed, the UAV expert told AOL Defense. Second, the Iranians have hung propaganda banners that obscure the landing gear and the bottom of the aircraft, making positive identification difficult. Third, it is not the correct color. Fourth, the welds on the wing joints are not the kind used on a stealth aircraft
-0-
Even Caroline Glick comments about Newt and points out telling the truth is not the usual course taken because it invites rebuke and scorn and because Obama's foreign policy seems destined to appease Arabs and Muslims and allow their propaganda to go unanswered. (See 1 below.)
---
Maybe some of those protesters on Wall Street would be willing to get their hands dirty. (See 2 below.)
You might also click on this You Tube video:"Land of The Freebies, Home of the Enslaved" By Blaise Ingoglia.
---
Several months ago I reviewed David Mamet's transition from liberal to conservative.
I have sent a series of videos and links pertaining to Obama's attitude regarding Israel of late and, therefore, find Mamet's op ed of interest. I reviewed Mamet's book several months ago about why he departed his links with the brain dead left. (See 3 below.)
Meanwhile, Obama is learning to soft pedal his bike because he cannot allow his record to be exposed to the light of day.
It was only yesterday, Obama was touting how he had decimated al Qaeda by killing so many of their leaders and how his policy of an on time withdrawal from Iraq was allowing that nation to move forward as a staunch, dependable ally of the U.S.
Obama failed to discuss how his drone bombing in Pakistan had driven the nation further away from us and vis a vis Iraq, how Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, did not support us in Syria and how Iranian influence in the Middle East was gathering steadfast steam.
Nor did Obama discuss his failed negotiations with Iraq's leader for our country to retain troops in Iraq because Maliki refused to bend and Obama failed to press forward so we are leaving with our tail between our legs and Obama is again acting in opposition to his field general's recommendations.(See 3a below.)
Has Obama undercut any prospect of success in Iraq from a longer term perspective. You decide.
---
Dennis Prager on presidential qualifications of those engaged in various sins. (See 4 below.)
---
Dick
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)Gingrich's fresh hope
By Caroline Glick
Last Friday, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, did something revolutionary. He told the truth about the Palestinians. In an interview with The Jewish Channel, Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an "invented" people, "who are in fact Arabs."
His statement about the Palestinians was entirely accurate. At the end of 1920, the "Palestinian people" was artificially carved out of the Arab population of "Greater Syria." "Greater Syria" included present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. That is, the Palestinian people were invented 91 years ago. Moreover, as Gingrich noted, the term "Palestinian people" only became widely accepted after 1977.
As Daniel Pipes chronicled in a 1989 article on the subject in The Middle East Quarterly, the local Arabs in what became Israel opted for a local nationalistic "Palestinian" identity in part due to their sense that their brethren in Syria were not sufficiently committed to the eradication of Zionism.
Since Gingrich spoke out on Friday, his factually accurate statement has been under assault from three directions. First, it has been attacked by Palestinian apologists in the postmodernist camp. Speaking to CNN, Hussein Ibish from the American Task Force on Palestine argued that Gingrich's statement was an outrage because while he was right about the Palestinians being an artificial people, in Ibish's view, Israelis were just as artificial. That is, he equated the Palestinians' 91-year-old nationalism with the Jews' 3,500-year-old nationalism.
In his words, "To call the Palestinians 'an invented people' in an obvious effort to undermine their national identity is outrageous, especially since there was no such thing as an 'Israeli' before 1948."
Ibish's nonsense is easily dispatched by a simple reading of the Hebrew Bible. As anyone semi-literate in Hebrew recognizes, the Israelis were not created in 1948. Three thousand years ago, the Israelis were led by a king named David. The Israelis had an independent commonwealth in the Land of Israel, and their capital city was Jerusalem.
The fact that 500 years ago King James renamed the Israelis "Israelites" is irrelevant to the basic truth that there is nothing new or artificial about the Israeli people. And Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, did not arise in competition with Arab nationalism. Zionism has been a central feature of Jewish identity for 3,500 years.
THE SECOND line of attack against Gingrich denies the veracity of his claim. Palestinian luminaries like the PA's unelected Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told CNN, "The Palestinian people inhabited the land since the dawn of history."
Fayyad's historically unsubstantiated claim was further expounded on by Fatah Revolutionary Council member Dmitri Diliani in an interview with CNN. "The Palestinian people [are] descended from the Canaanite tribe of the Jebusites that inhabited the ancient site of Jerusalem as early as 3200 BCE," Diliani asserted,
The Land of Israel has the greatest density of archeological sites in the world. Judea, Samaria, the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan Heights and other areas of the country are packed with archeological evidence of the Jewish commonwealths. As for Jerusalem, literally every inch of the city holds physical proof of the Jewish people's historical claims to the city.
To date, no archeological or other evidence has been found linking the Palestinians to the city or the Jebusites.
From a US domestic political perspective, the third line of attack against Gingrich's factual statement has been the most significant. The attacks involve conservative Washington insiders, many of whom are outspoken supporters of Gingrich's principal rival for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
To date, the attackers' most outspoken representative has been Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. These insiders argue that although Gingrich spoke the truth, it was irresponsible and unstatesmanlike for him to have done so.
As Rubin put it on Monday, "Do conservatives really think it is a good idea for their nominee to reverse decades of US policy and deny there is a Palestinian national identity?"
In their view, Gingrich is an irresponsible flamethrower because he is turning his back on a 30- year bipartisan consensus. That consensus is based on ignoring the fact that the Palestinians are an artificial people whose identity sprang not from any shared historical experience, but from opposition to Jewish nationalism.
The policy goal of the consensus is to establish an independent Palestinian state west of the Jordan River that will live at peace with Israel.
This policy was obsessively advanced throughout the 1990s until it failed completely in 2000, when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat rejected then-prime minister Ehud Barak's and then US president Bill Clinton's offer of Palestinian statehood and began the Palestinian terror war against Israel.
BUT RATHER than acknowledge that the policy - and the embrace of Palestinian national identity at its heart - had failed, and consider other options, the US policy establishment in Washington clung to it for dear life. Republicans like Rubin's mentor, former deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams, went on to support enthusiastically Israel's surrender of Gaza in 2005, and to push for Hamas participation in the 2006 Palestinian elections. That withdrawal and those elections catapulted the jihadist terror group to power.
The consensus that Gingrich rejected by telling the truth about the artificial nature of Palestinian nationalism was based on an attempt to square popular support for Israel with the elite's penchant for appeasement. On the one hand, due to overwhelming public support for a strong US alliance with Israel, most US policy-makers have not dared to abandon Israel as a US ally.
On the other hand, American policy-makers have been historically uncomfortable having to champion Israel to their anti-Israel European colleagues and to their Arab interlocutors who share the Palestinians' rejection of Israel's right to exist.
The policy of seeking to meld an anti-Israel Arab appeasement policy with a pro-Israel anti-appeasement policy was embraced by successive US administrations until it was summarily discarded by President Barack Obama three years ago. Obama replaced the two-headed policy with one of pure Arab appeasement.
Obama was able to justify his move because the two-pronged policy had failed. There was no peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The price of oil had skyrocketed, and US interests throughout the region were increasingly threatened.
For its part, Israel was far more vulnerable to terror and war than it had been in years. And its diplomatic isolation was acute and rising.
Unfortunately for both the US and Israel, Obama's break with the consensus has destabilized the region, endangered Israel and imperiled US interests to a far greater degree than they had been under the failed dual-track policy of his predecessors. Throughout the Arab world, Islamist forces are on the rise.
Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power.
The US is no longer seen as a credible regional power as it pulls its forces out of Iraq without victory, hamstrings its forces in Afghanistan, dooming them to attrition and defeat, and abandons its allies in country after country.
The stark contrast between Obama's rejection of the failed consensus on the one hand and Gingrich's rejection of the failed consensus on the other hand indicates that Gingrich may well be the perfect foil for Obama.
Gingrich's willingness to state and defend the truth about the nature of the Palestinian conflict with Israel is the perfect response to Obama's disastrous speech "to the Muslim world" in Cairo in June 2009. It was in that speech that Obama officially abandoned the bipartisan consensus, abandoned Israel and the truth about Zionism and Jewish national rights, and embraced completely the lie of Palestinian nationalism and national rights.
Both Rubin and Abrams, as well as Romney, justified their attacks on Gingrich and their defense of the failed consensus by noting that no Israeli leaders are saying what Gingrich said. Rubin went so far as to allege that Gingrich's words of truth about the Palestinians hurt Israel.
This is of course absurd. What many Americans fail to recognize is that Israeli leaders are not as free to tell the truth about the nature of the conflict as American leaders are. Rather than look to Israel for leadership on this issue, American leaders would do well to view Israel as the equivalent of West Germany during the Cold War. With half of Berlin occupied by the Red Army and West Berlin serving as the tripwire for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, West German leaders were not as free to tell the truth about the Soviet Union as American leaders were.
Today, with Jerusalem under constant political and terror threat, with all of Israel increasingly encircled by Islamist regimes, and with the Obama administration abandoning traditional US support for Israel, it is becoming less and less reasonable to expect Israel to take the rhetorical lead in telling important and difficult truths about the nature of its neighbors.
When Romney criticized Gingrich's statement as unhelpful to Israel, Gingrich replied, "I feel quite confident that an amazing number of Israelis found it nice to have an American tell the truth about the war they are in the middle of, and the casualties they are taking and the people around them who say, 'They do not have a right to exist and we want to destroy them.'"
And he is absolutely right. It was more than nice. It was heartening.
Thirty years of pre-Obama American lying about the nature of the conflict in an attempt to balance support for Israel with appeasement of the Arabs did not make the US safer or the Middle East more peaceful. A return to that policy under a new Republican president will not be sufficient to restore stability and security to the region.
And the need for such a restoration is acute. Under Obama, the last three years of US abandonment of the truth about Israel for Palestinian lies has made the region less stable, Israel more vulnerable, the US less respected and US interests more threatened.
Gingrich's statement of truth was not an act of irresponsible flame throwing. It was the beginning of an antidote to Obama's abandonment of truth and reason in favor of lies and appeasement. And as such, it was not a cause for anger. It was a cause for hope.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Williston, ND and the Bakken from space
Some of you may have heard of the huge oil boom occurring right now in western N. Dakota and eastern Montana in a place called the Williston Basin. Its truly unbelievable whats going on. Jobs start at $25/hr - $15 to work at McDonalds. The first question they ask is if you have a place to live. If you say yes, you've got a job. I'm completely serious. A lot of guys are staying in man camps, small modular trailers basically, with rooms plus showers and 3 meals - that charge $100/day, thats $3,000 month for what is in essence a shared dorm room. I listened to the mayor of Williston speak a couple weeks ago when he was in Billings for a conference and he said that on any given day there are probably 1,500 - 2,500 jobs available. The farmers and ranchers that are leasing their land to the oil companies are getting monthly dividend checks with 3, 4 and 5 zeros.
Its about a 10 hr drive to 'the Bakken', as its called, from Billings and a lot of local companies are working there and locals working there. For comparison, Billings population is 100,000; Williston is maybe 25,000. So, if you know anyone who needs a job.....
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3)Israel, Isaac and the Return of Human Sacrifice
Why have liberal Westerners turned their backs on the Jewish state?
By DAVID MAMET
As Iran races toward the bomb, many observers seem to think the greater threat is the possibility that Israel might act against its nuclear program. Which raises the question: What should it mean if, God forbid, militant Islam through force of arms, and with the supine permission of the West, succeeds in the destruction of the Jewish State?
1) That the Jewish People would no longer have their ancestral home;
2) That they should have no home.
At the Versailles Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson stated as an evident moral proposition that each people should have the right to national self-determination. The West, thereafter, fought not for empire, nor national expansion, but in self-defense, or in defense of this proposition. But, for the Jewish State, the Liberal West puts the proposition aside.
Since its foundation Israel has turned the other cheek. Eric Hoffer wrote that Israel is the only country the world expects to act like Christians. Some Jews say that the Arabs have a better public relations apparatus. They do not need one. For the Liberal West does not need convincing. It is thrilled merely to accept an excuse to rescind what it regards as a colossal error.
The Liberal West has, for decades, indulged itself in an orgy of self-flagellation. We have enjoyed comfort and security, but these, in the absence of gratitude and patriotism, cause insecurity. This attempted cure for insecurity can be seen in protestations of our worthlessness, and the indictment of private property.
But no one in the affluent West and no one among the various protesters of various supposed injustices is prepared to act in accordance with his protestations. The opponent of "The Corporation" is still going to use the iPhone which permits him to mass with his like. The celebrities acting out at Occupy meetings will still invest their surplus capital, and the supposed champion of the dispossessed in the Levant will not only scoff at American Indian claims to land he has come to understand as his—he will lobby the City Council to have the homeless shelter built anywhere but on his block.
The brave preceptors who would like to end Poverty, War, Exploitation, Colonialism, Inequality and so on, stop at the proclamation. How may they synchronize their wise fervor with their inaction?
How may they still the resultant anxiety? The Left's answer is the oldest in the world: by appeal to The Gods. But how may The Gods be appeased? The immemorial answer is: By human sacrifice.
What is the essence of the Torah? It is not the Ten Commandments, these were known, and the practice of most aspired to by every civilization. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner teaches they are merely a Calling Card; to wit: "remember me . . . ?"
The essence of the Torah is the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. The God of Hosts spoke to Abraham, as the various desert gods had spoken to the nomads for thousands of years: "If you wish me to relieve your anxiety, give me the most precious thing you have."
So God's call to Abraham was neither unusual nor, perhaps, unexpected. God had told Abraham to leave his people and his home, and go to the place which God would point out to him. And God told Abraham to take his son up the mountain and kill him, as humans had done for tens of thousands of years.
Now, however, for the first time in history, the narrative changed. The sacrifice, Isaac, spoke back. He asked his father, "Where is the Goat we are to sacrifice?" This was the voice of conscience, and Abraham's hand, as it descended with the knife, was stayed. This was the Birth of the West, and the birth of the West's burden, which is conscience.
Previously the anxiety and fear attendant upon all human life was understood as Fear of the Gods, and dealt with by propitiation, which is to say by sacrifice. Now, however, the human burden was not to give The Gods what one imagined, in one's fear, that they might want, but do, in conscience, those things one understood God to require.
In abandonment of the state of Israel, the West reverts to pagan sacrifice, once again, making a burnt offering not of that which one possesses, but of that which is another's. As Realpolitik, the Liberal West's anti-Semitism can be understood as like Chamberlain's offering of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, a sop thrown to terrorism. On the level of conscience, it is a renewal of the debate on human sacrifice.
Mr. Mamet is a playwright and screenwriter.
3a)Barack Has a Record
By William L. Gensert
Every Obama speech is fraught with lies and half-truths. He relies on his belief in the ignorance of his audience, and that Americans are too lazy and soft to recognize his dishonesty. When your record is abysmal, you can't tell the truth.
---
Dennis Prager on presidential qualifications of those engaged in various sins. (See 4 below.)
---
Dick
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)Gingrich's fresh hope
By Caroline Glick
Last Friday, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, did something revolutionary. He told the truth about the Palestinians. In an interview with The Jewish Channel, Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an "invented" people, "who are in fact Arabs."
His statement about the Palestinians was entirely accurate. At the end of 1920, the "Palestinian people" was artificially carved out of the Arab population of "Greater Syria." "Greater Syria" included present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. That is, the Palestinian people were invented 91 years ago. Moreover, as Gingrich noted, the term "Palestinian people" only became widely accepted after 1977.
As Daniel Pipes chronicled in a 1989 article on the subject in The Middle East Quarterly, the local Arabs in what became Israel opted for a local nationalistic "Palestinian" identity in part due to their sense that their brethren in Syria were not sufficiently committed to the eradication of Zionism.
Since Gingrich spoke out on Friday, his factually accurate statement has been under assault from three directions. First, it has been attacked by Palestinian apologists in the postmodernist camp. Speaking to CNN, Hussein Ibish from the American Task Force on Palestine argued that Gingrich's statement was an outrage because while he was right about the Palestinians being an artificial people, in Ibish's view, Israelis were just as artificial. That is, he equated the Palestinians' 91-year-old nationalism with the Jews' 3,500-year-old nationalism.
In his words, "To call the Palestinians 'an invented people' in an obvious effort to undermine their national identity is outrageous, especially since there was no such thing as an 'Israeli' before 1948."
Ibish's nonsense is easily dispatched by a simple reading of the Hebrew Bible. As anyone semi-literate in Hebrew recognizes, the Israelis were not created in 1948. Three thousand years ago, the Israelis were led by a king named David. The Israelis had an independent commonwealth in the Land of Israel, and their capital city was Jerusalem.
The fact that 500 years ago King James renamed the Israelis "Israelites" is irrelevant to the basic truth that there is nothing new or artificial about the Israeli people. And Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, did not arise in competition with Arab nationalism. Zionism has been a central feature of Jewish identity for 3,500 years.
THE SECOND line of attack against Gingrich denies the veracity of his claim. Palestinian luminaries like the PA's unelected Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told CNN, "The Palestinian people inhabited the land since the dawn of history."
Fayyad's historically unsubstantiated claim was further expounded on by Fatah Revolutionary Council member Dmitri Diliani in an interview with CNN. "The Palestinian people [are] descended from the Canaanite tribe of the Jebusites that inhabited the ancient site of Jerusalem as early as 3200 BCE," Diliani asserted,
The Land of Israel has the greatest density of archeological sites in the world. Judea, Samaria, the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan Heights and other areas of the country are packed with archeological evidence of the Jewish commonwealths. As for Jerusalem, literally every inch of the city holds physical proof of the Jewish people's historical claims to the city.
To date, no archeological or other evidence has been found linking the Palestinians to the city or the Jebusites.
From a US domestic political perspective, the third line of attack against Gingrich's factual statement has been the most significant. The attacks involve conservative Washington insiders, many of whom are outspoken supporters of Gingrich's principal rival for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
To date, the attackers' most outspoken representative has been Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. These insiders argue that although Gingrich spoke the truth, it was irresponsible and unstatesmanlike for him to have done so.
As Rubin put it on Monday, "Do conservatives really think it is a good idea for their nominee to reverse decades of US policy and deny there is a Palestinian national identity?"
In their view, Gingrich is an irresponsible flamethrower because he is turning his back on a 30- year bipartisan consensus. That consensus is based on ignoring the fact that the Palestinians are an artificial people whose identity sprang not from any shared historical experience, but from opposition to Jewish nationalism.
The policy goal of the consensus is to establish an independent Palestinian state west of the Jordan River that will live at peace with Israel.
This policy was obsessively advanced throughout the 1990s until it failed completely in 2000, when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat rejected then-prime minister Ehud Barak's and then US president Bill Clinton's offer of Palestinian statehood and began the Palestinian terror war against Israel.
BUT RATHER than acknowledge that the policy - and the embrace of Palestinian national identity at its heart - had failed, and consider other options, the US policy establishment in Washington clung to it for dear life. Republicans like Rubin's mentor, former deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams, went on to support enthusiastically Israel's surrender of Gaza in 2005, and to push for Hamas participation in the 2006 Palestinian elections. That withdrawal and those elections catapulted the jihadist terror group to power.
The consensus that Gingrich rejected by telling the truth about the artificial nature of Palestinian nationalism was based on an attempt to square popular support for Israel with the elite's penchant for appeasement. On the one hand, due to overwhelming public support for a strong US alliance with Israel, most US policy-makers have not dared to abandon Israel as a US ally.
On the other hand, American policy-makers have been historically uncomfortable having to champion Israel to their anti-Israel European colleagues and to their Arab interlocutors who share the Palestinians' rejection of Israel's right to exist.
The policy of seeking to meld an anti-Israel Arab appeasement policy with a pro-Israel anti-appeasement policy was embraced by successive US administrations until it was summarily discarded by President Barack Obama three years ago. Obama replaced the two-headed policy with one of pure Arab appeasement.
Obama was able to justify his move because the two-pronged policy had failed. There was no peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The price of oil had skyrocketed, and US interests throughout the region were increasingly threatened.
For its part, Israel was far more vulnerable to terror and war than it had been in years. And its diplomatic isolation was acute and rising.
Unfortunately for both the US and Israel, Obama's break with the consensus has destabilized the region, endangered Israel and imperiled US interests to a far greater degree than they had been under the failed dual-track policy of his predecessors. Throughout the Arab world, Islamist forces are on the rise.
Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power.
The US is no longer seen as a credible regional power as it pulls its forces out of Iraq without victory, hamstrings its forces in Afghanistan, dooming them to attrition and defeat, and abandons its allies in country after country.
The stark contrast between Obama's rejection of the failed consensus on the one hand and Gingrich's rejection of the failed consensus on the other hand indicates that Gingrich may well be the perfect foil for Obama.
Gingrich's willingness to state and defend the truth about the nature of the Palestinian conflict with Israel is the perfect response to Obama's disastrous speech "to the Muslim world" in Cairo in June 2009. It was in that speech that Obama officially abandoned the bipartisan consensus, abandoned Israel and the truth about Zionism and Jewish national rights, and embraced completely the lie of Palestinian nationalism and national rights.
Both Rubin and Abrams, as well as Romney, justified their attacks on Gingrich and their defense of the failed consensus by noting that no Israeli leaders are saying what Gingrich said. Rubin went so far as to allege that Gingrich's words of truth about the Palestinians hurt Israel.
This is of course absurd. What many Americans fail to recognize is that Israeli leaders are not as free to tell the truth about the nature of the conflict as American leaders are. Rather than look to Israel for leadership on this issue, American leaders would do well to view Israel as the equivalent of West Germany during the Cold War. With half of Berlin occupied by the Red Army and West Berlin serving as the tripwire for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, West German leaders were not as free to tell the truth about the Soviet Union as American leaders were.
Today, with Jerusalem under constant political and terror threat, with all of Israel increasingly encircled by Islamist regimes, and with the Obama administration abandoning traditional US support for Israel, it is becoming less and less reasonable to expect Israel to take the rhetorical lead in telling important and difficult truths about the nature of its neighbors.
When Romney criticized Gingrich's statement as unhelpful to Israel, Gingrich replied, "I feel quite confident that an amazing number of Israelis found it nice to have an American tell the truth about the war they are in the middle of, and the casualties they are taking and the people around them who say, 'They do not have a right to exist and we want to destroy them.'"
And he is absolutely right. It was more than nice. It was heartening.
Thirty years of pre-Obama American lying about the nature of the conflict in an attempt to balance support for Israel with appeasement of the Arabs did not make the US safer or the Middle East more peaceful. A return to that policy under a new Republican president will not be sufficient to restore stability and security to the region.
And the need for such a restoration is acute. Under Obama, the last three years of US abandonment of the truth about Israel for Palestinian lies has made the region less stable, Israel more vulnerable, the US less respected and US interests more threatened.
Gingrich's statement of truth was not an act of irresponsible flame throwing. It was the beginning of an antidote to Obama's abandonment of truth and reason in favor of lies and appeasement. And as such, it was not a cause for anger. It was a cause for hope.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Williston, ND and the Bakken from space
Some of you may have heard of the huge oil boom occurring right now in western N. Dakota and eastern Montana in a place called the Williston Basin. Its truly unbelievable whats going on. Jobs start at $25/hr - $15 to work at McDonalds. The first question they ask is if you have a place to live. If you say yes, you've got a job. I'm completely serious. A lot of guys are staying in man camps, small modular trailers basically, with rooms plus showers and 3 meals - that charge $100/day, thats $3,000 month for what is in essence a shared dorm room. I listened to the mayor of Williston speak a couple weeks ago when he was in Billings for a conference and he said that on any given day there are probably 1,500 - 2,500 jobs available. The farmers and ranchers that are leasing their land to the oil companies are getting monthly dividend checks with 3, 4 and 5 zeros.
Its about a 10 hr drive to 'the Bakken', as its called, from Billings and a lot of local companies are working there and locals working there. For comparison, Billings population is 100,000; Williston is maybe 25,000. So, if you know anyone who needs a job.....
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Israel, Isaac and the Return of Human Sacrifice
Why have liberal Westerners turned their backs on the Jewish state?
By DAVID MAMET
As Iran races toward the bomb, many observers seem to think the greater threat is the possibility that Israel might act against its nuclear program. Which raises the question: What should it mean if, God forbid, militant Islam through force of arms, and with the supine permission of the West, succeeds in the destruction of the Jewish State?
1) That the Jewish People would no longer have their ancestral home;
2) That they should have no home.
At the Versailles Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson stated as an evident moral proposition that each people should have the right to national self-determination. The West, thereafter, fought not for empire, nor national expansion, but in self-defense, or in defense of this proposition. But, for the Jewish State, the Liberal West puts the proposition aside.
Since its foundation Israel has turned the other cheek. Eric Hoffer wrote that Israel is the only country the world expects to act like Christians. Some Jews say that the Arabs have a better public relations apparatus. They do not need one. For the Liberal West does not need convincing. It is thrilled merely to accept an excuse to rescind what it regards as a colossal error.
The Liberal West has, for decades, indulged itself in an orgy of self-flagellation. We have enjoyed comfort and security, but these, in the absence of gratitude and patriotism, cause insecurity. This attempted cure for insecurity can be seen in protestations of our worthlessness, and the indictment of private property.
But no one in the affluent West and no one among the various protesters of various supposed injustices is prepared to act in accordance with his protestations. The opponent of "The Corporation" is still going to use the iPhone which permits him to mass with his like. The celebrities acting out at Occupy meetings will still invest their surplus capital, and the supposed champion of the dispossessed in the Levant will not only scoff at American Indian claims to land he has come to understand as his—he will lobby the City Council to have the homeless shelter built anywhere but on his block.
The brave preceptors who would like to end Poverty, War, Exploitation, Colonialism, Inequality and so on, stop at the proclamation. How may they synchronize their wise fervor with their inaction?
How may they still the resultant anxiety? The Left's answer is the oldest in the world: by appeal to The Gods. But how may The Gods be appeased? The immemorial answer is: By human sacrifice.
What is the essence of the Torah? It is not the Ten Commandments, these were known, and the practice of most aspired to by every civilization. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner teaches they are merely a Calling Card; to wit: "remember me . . . ?"
The essence of the Torah is the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. The God of Hosts spoke to Abraham, as the various desert gods had spoken to the nomads for thousands of years: "If you wish me to relieve your anxiety, give me the most precious thing you have."
So God's call to Abraham was neither unusual nor, perhaps, unexpected. God had told Abraham to leave his people and his home, and go to the place which God would point out to him. And God told Abraham to take his son up the mountain and kill him, as humans had done for tens of thousands of years.
Now, however, for the first time in history, the narrative changed. The sacrifice, Isaac, spoke back. He asked his father, "Where is the Goat we are to sacrifice?" This was the voice of conscience, and Abraham's hand, as it descended with the knife, was stayed. This was the Birth of the West, and the birth of the West's burden, which is conscience.
Previously the anxiety and fear attendant upon all human life was understood as Fear of the Gods, and dealt with by propitiation, which is to say by sacrifice. Now, however, the human burden was not to give The Gods what one imagined, in one's fear, that they might want, but do, in conscience, those things one understood God to require.
In abandonment of the state of Israel, the West reverts to pagan sacrifice, once again, making a burnt offering not of that which one possesses, but of that which is another's. As Realpolitik, the Liberal West's anti-Semitism can be understood as like Chamberlain's offering of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, a sop thrown to terrorism. On the level of conscience, it is a renewal of the debate on human sacrifice.
Mr. Mamet is a playwright and screenwriter.
3a)Barack Has a Record
By William L. Gensert
Every Obama speech is fraught with lies and half-truths. He relies on his belief in the ignorance of his audience, and that Americans are too lazy and soft to recognize his dishonesty. When your record is abysmal, you can't tell the truth.
Obama, hasn't a clue on how to fix the economy. Instead, without ideas, he copied Teddy Roosevelt's 100-year-old speech in Osawatomie. With Barack Obama, it's always yesterday's answers to today's problems...and this is the man they told us was a genius. The president maintains that the rich get richer by making everyone poorer. Ah...bitterness and envy, the illegitimate stepchildren of hope and change.
The fix, of course, is higher taxes, but when the taxes to pay for ObamaCare go into effect in 2013 and the Bush tax cuts expire, everyone's taxes will increase -- not just the highest income brackets. People in the top 1%, while earning 17% of the nation's income, already pay almost 40% of all taxes and are scheduled for an almost 20% rise even before the president's proposed increases.
The tax on capital gains will rise by 33%. This is a tax on the sale of assets purchased with after-tax income and held for a specific period of time. A lower rate promotes long-term investment; economists understand this, and every time the rate has been cut, revenues have increased. Yet Barack Obama would raise the rate in the interest of fairness. The nation doesn't need investment; that would just provide jobs, and the country doesn't need jobs. Besides, a higher rate on investment income makes a good slogan, and it "fits well on a bumper sticker."
The president now regularly runs $1.5-trillion deficits and has spent almost a trillion dollars of stimulus funds rewarding political backers such as unions, government employees, and crony capitalists. It's not that he cares for any of them. These people financed his 2008 campaign and are now paying for his 2012 campaign. He is bankrupting America for no reason other than his own re-election.
He wants to spend $1 billion on this election. Disregarding the $800 million he spent in 2008, this is more than all the previous presidential elections combined. It won't be cheap buying all the votes he'll need in 2012 to overcome his failure as president.
Despite what he says, Barack Obama is the original fawner to the fat cats. He has gotten more money from Wall Street, union bosses, and crony capitalists than anyone. For him to position himself as a class warrior, doing battle against an entrenched elite, speaking truth to power, is ridiculous.
In addition, the extra taxes the president demands will not go to deficit reduction; he wants the money for more spending on his vision. His first stimulus provided dozens, if not hundreds of jobs. If the nation would just give him more money to spend, we could be out of the eternal Obama recession in under a thousand years. Pass the bill now; we can't wait.
The tax on capital gains will rise by 33%. This is a tax on the sale of assets purchased with after-tax income and held for a specific period of time. A lower rate promotes long-term investment; economists understand this, and every time the rate has been cut, revenues have increased. Yet Barack Obama would raise the rate in the interest of fairness. The nation doesn't need investment; that would just provide jobs, and the country doesn't need jobs. Besides, a higher rate on investment income makes a good slogan, and it "fits well on a bumper sticker."
The president now regularly runs $1.5-trillion deficits and has spent almost a trillion dollars of stimulus funds rewarding political backers such as unions, government employees, and crony capitalists. It's not that he cares for any of them. These people financed his 2008 campaign and are now paying for his 2012 campaign. He is bankrupting America for no reason other than his own re-election.
He wants to spend $1 billion on this election. Disregarding the $800 million he spent in 2008, this is more than all the previous presidential elections combined. It won't be cheap buying all the votes he'll need in 2012 to overcome his failure as president.
Despite what he says, Barack Obama is the original fawner to the fat cats. He has gotten more money from Wall Street, union bosses, and crony capitalists than anyone. For him to position himself as a class warrior, doing battle against an entrenched elite, speaking truth to power, is ridiculous.
In addition, the extra taxes the president demands will not go to deficit reduction; he wants the money for more spending on his vision. His first stimulus provided dozens, if not hundreds of jobs. If the nation would just give him more money to spend, we could be out of the eternal Obama recession in under a thousand years. Pass the bill now; we can't wait.
The Record: Energy
Some claim that the president has no energy policy, but that's not true. It consists of allowing no new sources of oil, natural gas, or coal, while curtailing existing supply. He has restricted drilling in the Gulf, on land, and off our coasts. The Gulf alone lost 40,000 jobs when the president decided to shut down oil production after the BP oil spill.
He postponed the approval for Keystone XL Pipeline until after the election (surprise, surprise). It would have connected Canadian oil from the tar sands of Alberta with refineries in Cushing, Oklahoma and Nederland, Texas, while creating 20,000 direct jobs and 100,000 indirect jobs. Eventually, it would have provided America with over a million barrels of oil a day.
He is removing coal-fired plants, responsible for 50% of America's electricity, from production, while the EPA wages war against "fracking" to prevent the nation from exploiting America's vast natural gas resources. The president's plan is to replace this energy with...nothing. After all, if you can't triple electricity bills and the price of gasoline, his green energy pipe dreams will never come to fruition.
Some claim that the president has no energy policy, but that's not true. It consists of allowing no new sources of oil, natural gas, or coal, while curtailing existing supply. He has restricted drilling in the Gulf, on land, and off our coasts. The Gulf alone lost 40,000 jobs when the president decided to shut down oil production after the BP oil spill.
He postponed the approval for Keystone XL Pipeline until after the election (surprise, surprise). It would have connected Canadian oil from the tar sands of Alberta with refineries in Cushing, Oklahoma and Nederland, Texas, while creating 20,000 direct jobs and 100,000 indirect jobs. Eventually, it would have provided America with over a million barrels of oil a day.
He is removing coal-fired plants, responsible for 50% of America's electricity, from production, while the EPA wages war against "fracking" to prevent the nation from exploiting America's vast natural gas resources. The president's plan is to replace this energy with...nothing. After all, if you can't triple electricity bills and the price of gasoline, his green energy pipe dreams will never come to fruition.
He has relentlessly promoted electric cars, sinking billions into battery-makers. Sales of the Chevy Volt are on fire. And why wouldn't they be? The vehicle costs only $40 thousand and can travel almost 40 miles before needing a charge. That $40 billion of taxpayer money dropped on bailing out the UAW, Chrysler, and GM was worth it. Soon we'll all be driving electric cars, or pushing them when the batteries die.
Justice
This administration's Fast and Furious program deliberately armed Mexican cartels in order to bolster their case for stronger gun control, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American. Eric Holder, the "my people" attorney general, shows no remorse. Why is it racist to call Obama the worst president ever? Yet when the president shows little to no regard for the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans, it's not a problem. After all, they're only Mexicans...right? It's not like they're his people.
Private Enterprise
Barack Obama, the anti-capitalist, has pursued Gibson Guitar with passion unseen in the president, except on the golf course. The administration raided the small manufacturer and seized their inventory, claiming not that they broke American law, but that they broke foreign law. Even though India, the country in question, says no laws were broken.
After stacking the NLRB with the recess appointment of former SEIU lawyer Craig Becker, Obama set his sights on Boeing, the nation's largest exporter. His objection was the $2-billion plant the company built in South Carolina, a right-to-work state. This didn't sit well with the president's union backers; Boeing had to be taught a lesson.
Both companies could have avoided all this by building their factories in China. If additional jobs created are not union jobs, the president feels that America doesn't need them. Even union jobs in fossil fuel production, like drilling for oil or coal-mining, electrical production or building the Keystone XL Pipeline -- well, America doesn't need those, either.
Employment
The unemployment rate has recently declined 0.4% to 8.6%. For the president, this is a huge personal victory, as well as vindication of his economic policies.
While the economy needs to add around 180,000 jobs a month to stay current with population growth, the nation added 120,000 jobs in November, a marked improvement over recent months. Many are seasonal positions that will disappear after the holiday, but at least these are real jobs, not mythical "saved" jobs.
At the same time, more than 300,000 Americans left the workforce, having exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, or stopped looking for work. Once this happens, they are no longer counted in the official unemployment rate, so the rate drops. This brings workforce participation in the Obama economy to 64%, the lowest in decades.
Forget about the 5% unemployment rate of George Bush's jobless recovery from a few years ago -- if more people would do their patriotic duty and simply stop looking for work, we could push the rate down to near 0 and not only rejoice in the leadership of Barack Obama, but also provide millions of potential volunteers for his re-election campaign.
After all, it's not like they have anything else to do.
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4)Adultery, Character and Politics — My Responses
By Dennis Prager
Because the issue is so important, I have decided to respond to critics of my last column on adultery, politics and character.
As any reader of my columns or books knows, I am a religious conservative, and my primary concern is morality. By morality, I mean issues of good and evil. I am also concerned with the issue of sin, but sin and evil are not identical. All evil is sin, but not all sins are evil. For example, religious people regard saying the word 'G0d' for no religious purpose ("taking God's name in vain") as sinful. But to regard saying, for example, "G0d damn it, I stubbed my toe," as evil is to trivialize evil.
Justice
This administration's Fast and Furious program deliberately armed Mexican cartels in order to bolster their case for stronger gun control, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American. Eric Holder, the "my people" attorney general, shows no remorse. Why is it racist to call Obama the worst president ever? Yet when the president shows little to no regard for the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans, it's not a problem. After all, they're only Mexicans...right? It's not like they're his people.
Private Enterprise
Barack Obama, the anti-capitalist, has pursued Gibson Guitar with passion unseen in the president, except on the golf course. The administration raided the small manufacturer and seized their inventory, claiming not that they broke American law, but that they broke foreign law. Even though India, the country in question, says no laws were broken.
After stacking the NLRB with the recess appointment of former SEIU lawyer Craig Becker, Obama set his sights on Boeing, the nation's largest exporter. His objection was the $2-billion plant the company built in South Carolina, a right-to-work state. This didn't sit well with the president's union backers; Boeing had to be taught a lesson.
Both companies could have avoided all this by building their factories in China. If additional jobs created are not union jobs, the president feels that America doesn't need them. Even union jobs in fossil fuel production, like drilling for oil or coal-mining, electrical production or building the Keystone XL Pipeline -- well, America doesn't need those, either.
Employment
The unemployment rate has recently declined 0.4% to 8.6%. For the president, this is a huge personal victory, as well as vindication of his economic policies.
While the economy needs to add around 180,000 jobs a month to stay current with population growth, the nation added 120,000 jobs in November, a marked improvement over recent months. Many are seasonal positions that will disappear after the holiday, but at least these are real jobs, not mythical "saved" jobs.
At the same time, more than 300,000 Americans left the workforce, having exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, or stopped looking for work. Once this happens, they are no longer counted in the official unemployment rate, so the rate drops. This brings workforce participation in the Obama economy to 64%, the lowest in decades.
Forget about the 5% unemployment rate of George Bush's jobless recovery from a few years ago -- if more people would do their patriotic duty and simply stop looking for work, we could push the rate down to near 0 and not only rejoice in the leadership of Barack Obama, but also provide millions of potential volunteers for his re-election campaign.
After all, it's not like they have anything else to do.
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4)Adultery, Character and Politics — My Responses
By Dennis Prager
Because the issue is so important, I have decided to respond to critics of my last column on adultery, politics and character.
As any reader of my columns or books knows, I am a religious conservative, and my primary concern is morality. By morality, I mean issues of good and evil. I am also concerned with the issue of sin, but sin and evil are not identical. All evil is sin, but not all sins are evil. For example, religious people regard saying the word 'G0d' for no religious purpose ("taking God's name in vain") as sinful. But to regard saying, for example, "G0d damn it, I stubbed my toe," as evil is to trivialize evil.
Above all, I seek to clarify moral issues. It is everyone's duty, religious or secular, to strive for moral clarity.
That is what I tried to do in my last column in examining two questions: Does adultery disqualify a presidential candidate? What does adultery tell us about a person?To the first question, my answer was: sometimes, but not usually. And to the second question, I responded that, in general, issues related to others' marriages, divorces, and infidelities are too complex an arena for outsiders to draw immediate conclusions about a person.
Most readers who commented on websites or who wrote to me directly agreed with me, but a significant percentage did not. And some of them attributed a host of motives to my writing on this issue — from personal to political. But the fact is that the column had nothing to do with my life or with support for any particular politician. I wrote the column in order to try to provide clarity on a very important issue that is too frequently relegated to emotion rather than reason.
That is what I tried to do in my last column in examining two questions: Does adultery disqualify a presidential candidate? What does adultery tell us about a person?To the first question, my answer was: sometimes, but not usually. And to the second question, I responded that, in general, issues related to others' marriages, divorces, and infidelities are too complex an arena for outsiders to draw immediate conclusions about a person.
Most readers who commented on websites or who wrote to me directly agreed with me, but a significant percentage did not. And some of them attributed a host of motives to my writing on this issue — from personal to political. But the fact is that the column had nothing to do with my life or with support for any particular politician. I wrote the column in order to try to provide clarity on a very important issue that is too frequently relegated to emotion rather than reason.
Allow me to share two emails sent to me.
The first is from a friend. She and her husband are religious conservatives who have three young children. They are so traditional in their values that they home-school their children and do not allow TV-watching in their home. Here is what she had to say:
"I completely agree with you. A woman I know well had an affair that ended her marriage. Yet, I trust this woman implicitly, and to this day we are very close. I know two other women who have been (to my knowledge) faithful as daylight in their marriages, yet I do not trust either one because they are emotional, insecure women, and I have to walk on eggshells when I deal with them.
The first is from a friend. She and her husband are religious conservatives who have three young children. They are so traditional in their values that they home-school their children and do not allow TV-watching in their home. Here is what she had to say:
"I completely agree with you. A woman I know well had an affair that ended her marriage. Yet, I trust this woman implicitly, and to this day we are very close. I know two other women who have been (to my knowledge) faithful as daylight in their marriages, yet I do not trust either one because they are emotional, insecure women, and I have to walk on eggshells when I deal with them.
"If the only fact you know about a person is that she has been unfaithful to her spouse, it tells you nothing about her trustworthiness in other areas, in my experience."
The second is from a listener/reader whom I do not know:
The second is from a listener/reader whom I do not know:
"My wife has dementia, with no intimacy for over a decade. My eight-year affair has kept me sane. It also kept me there to be sure she has the best care (living now with her sister) without divorcing her because of issues with regard to health insurance.
"I am not proud of it, but I feel I handled it the best I could. Surely it has been better for her than divorcing her and letting her be a ward of the state. A person's character is important, but we need to be sure we are using good standards when we judge it."
What do those who are so certain that adultery tells us "all we need to know" in order to judge a person's character say to these two people?
I am incredulous at the callousness of those who would counsel the man who wrote the above that if he cannot control himself, he should divorce his demented wife. Those people embody my fear of those religious people who make snap judgments of all sexual sin. It actually makes them meaner people. If everything the man wrote to me is true, I salute him. Beyond that, let G0d judge him.
As should be obvious from my work, I am a big believer in making moral judgments — about good and evil. And in my view, the good this man did for his wife by not divorcing her (if he had divorced her, his affair would not have been adulterous) far outweighs the sin of his staying married and committing adultery.
What do those who are so certain that adultery tells us "all we need to know" in order to judge a person's character say to these two people?
I am incredulous at the callousness of those who would counsel the man who wrote the above that if he cannot control himself, he should divorce his demented wife. Those people embody my fear of those religious people who make snap judgments of all sexual sin. It actually makes them meaner people. If everything the man wrote to me is true, I salute him. Beyond that, let G0d judge him.
As should be obvious from my work, I am a big believer in making moral judgments — about good and evil. And in my view, the good this man did for his wife by not divorcing her (if he had divorced her, his affair would not have been adulterous) far outweighs the sin of his staying married and committing adultery.
Now, of course, regarding this man's case, some who condemn all adultery may find it in their hearts to be more understanding, even forgiving, since the ill spouse is no longer functioning as a spouse. But, they would likely add, that is not the situation of the average adulterer, whose spouse is not suffering from dementia or some other degenerative condition.
I have two responses to this. First, whoever makes this argument is tacitly acknowledging that not all adultery is equally sinful (before G0d as well as man). Second, just because a spouse does not suffer from dementia does not mean he or she is functioning as a spouse. Plenty of mentally normal people cease playing the role of husband or wife in anything but name. And yet the husband or wife may choose not to divorce for reasons similar to the man who wrote to me: to provide a home with both a mother and father for young children, fiduciary duty that could not be sustained in a divorce, etc.
And what about Oskar Schindler of "Schindler's List," the German Nazi Party member who saved the lives of over 1,100 Jews? He was a married man who had a mistress. He was a "serial adulterer," as many respondents would characterize him. Yet, he was a moral giant — at a time, moreover, in which many religious and secular men and women who kept their wedding vows did nothing for their Jewish neighbors as they were all sent to their deaths.
Finally, for those still wondering why, aside from a desire for moral clarity, I am so passionate this issue, I call their attention to 1992, the year I first wrote and spoke about this subject. That year, my dear friend, Bruce Herschensohn, one of the finest, kindest, and most honest human beings I have ever had the honor of knowing, was the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from California. By the weekend before Election Day, he and the Democratic candidate, then-Rep. Barbara Boxer, were in a virtual tie. The California Democratic Party, spearheaded by a man named Bob Mulholland, whose vocation was to dig up dirt on Republican candidates, sent him to disrupt a Herschensohn campaign appearance, shouting that "Bruce Herschensohn frequently travels the strip joints of Hollywood."
Apparently, on one occasion, Herschensohn, an unmarried man, had lunch with the woman he was dating and another couple at a strip club. As a result, Herschensohn lost the election and Barbara Boxer has been a senator from California for the last 18 years.
I have two responses to this. First, whoever makes this argument is tacitly acknowledging that not all adultery is equally sinful (before G0d as well as man). Second, just because a spouse does not suffer from dementia does not mean he or she is functioning as a spouse. Plenty of mentally normal people cease playing the role of husband or wife in anything but name. And yet the husband or wife may choose not to divorce for reasons similar to the man who wrote to me: to provide a home with both a mother and father for young children, fiduciary duty that could not be sustained in a divorce, etc.
And what about Oskar Schindler of "Schindler's List," the German Nazi Party member who saved the lives of over 1,100 Jews? He was a married man who had a mistress. He was a "serial adulterer," as many respondents would characterize him. Yet, he was a moral giant — at a time, moreover, in which many religious and secular men and women who kept their wedding vows did nothing for their Jewish neighbors as they were all sent to their deaths.
Finally, for those still wondering why, aside from a desire for moral clarity, I am so passionate this issue, I call their attention to 1992, the year I first wrote and spoke about this subject. That year, my dear friend, Bruce Herschensohn, one of the finest, kindest, and most honest human beings I have ever had the honor of knowing, was the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from California. By the weekend before Election Day, he and the Democratic candidate, then-Rep. Barbara Boxer, were in a virtual tie. The California Democratic Party, spearheaded by a man named Bob Mulholland, whose vocation was to dig up dirt on Republican candidates, sent him to disrupt a Herschensohn campaign appearance, shouting that "Bruce Herschensohn frequently travels the strip joints of Hollywood."
Apparently, on one occasion, Herschensohn, an unmarried man, had lunch with the woman he was dating and another couple at a strip club. As a result, Herschensohn lost the election and Barbara Boxer has been a senator from California for the last 18 years.
The left and the Democratic Party know how to play many social conservatives like the proverbial violin. As a result, thanks to those who equate sexual sin with character, America lost a truly great man, conservatives lost one of their most eloquent spokesmen of the last half-century, and America got Barbara Boxer.
That event scarred me. I do everything I can to see that what happened in California doesn't happen to America.
Adultery is indeed a serious sin, often with terrible consequences. But I can think of at least two more serious sins. One is character assassination. And the other is electing people who ruin the greatest country in history.
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Adultery is indeed a serious sin, often with terrible consequences. But I can think of at least two more serious sins. One is character assassination. And the other is electing people who ruin the greatest country in history.
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