The Dow is falling just as the Twin Towers once fell. Obama’s campaign soars on the wings of this crisis. Some Obama supporters no longer care about facts and become exceedingly aggressive when one tries to offer any. “I dare you to prove that,” they yell, their faces all a-snarl. “That’s a right-wing racist lie.”
“Lies” include noting that the Democrats were the ones who originally backed Fannie and Freddie; that Obama’s group, ACORN, was involved in demanding non-affordable housing for the poor–and in voter fraud allegations as well; that Obama’s relationship to Bill Ayers was neither casual nor insignificant; that, according to one source, both Ayers and Obama attended Edward Said’s classes at Columbia; that Obama’s choice of foreign policy advisors are anti-Israel…that Obama’s campaign literally stole the election from Hillary, caucus by caucus.
“Racist lies, damn racist lies.” (This is usually said with a twisted, angry face mainly by white liberals).
“Obama has very important Jews who vouch for him. I know some of them personally.” (This is usually accompanied by shaming and bullying tactics: “What is wrong with you?” “Are you going to do the right thing or not?”)
Wiser Obama supporters are not necessarily defensive or hostile.
“Did you see how fragile McCain looked in the last debate,” says my gifted dentist as he rescues me from yet another emergency. “He looked frail. Those five years in captivity plus the repeated bouts of cancer had to have weakened him.” My mouth is open and there is nothing I can say. “But here’s where he really lost me,” my dentist continues. “Palin may be a Babe, she may even be a governor-Babe, but how can anyone function as a national leader with so many under-age children? I include her soon-to-be-born grandchild. I’d say the same thing if she was a man whose spouse worked on the North Face. She should have turned the offer down and offered to serve in some other position if McCain wins.”
The dental nurse chimes in. “Why do you think she parades her infant and young children around so late at night? That’s not right, is it? What kind of judgment does this show?”
An investment banker, (one of the lucky ones who’s landed on his feet), genially points out that “McCain’s still my guy but what a shame he didn’t pick Mitt Romney who’d know something about handling a fiscal crisis. This is one time that McCain’s creative impulsivity may not have paid off long-term.”
A corporate lawyer sighs. “McCain tapped someone who is simply not qualified to govern in case he dies. I can’t vote for a man with such poor judgment or for Palin as a Vice President.”
A religious Israeli-American businesswoman says: “McCain lost the election in that last debate. I don’t feel safe in America anymore. My family ran from Hitler. Where will we run now?”
“McCain’s gonna win,” another businessman tells me. “Wait until people are alone in that voting booth, when no one can tell them what to do or how to think.”
My son and daughter-in-law are ardent Obama supporters. I cherish them both, I respect their views. They strongly feel that America now belongs to the younger generations, that it is their time to take over, that a professorial and oratorical Obama is head and shoulders above anyone who does not have his grace and style.
Me? I voted for Hillary and for six years now, I have been documenting the ways in which the allegation of “racism” intimidates and silences people–as it is meant to do–and allows totalitarian thuggery and Jew hatred more room to grow. All over Europe charges of “racism” are being used to subdue the indigenous populations. This time, the natives are mainly white people–but the victims also include Jews, Muslim girls and women, and Muslim dissidents. I also believe that, in the name of “anti-racism,” French Revolutionary style mobs are assembling, dreaming of heads rolling. A new Dawn of blood is being threatened in Europe. Mainly Muslim mobs are rioting in cities in Holland, France, and England but many more are simply accomplishing jihad and separatism by stealth, lawsuit, and Saudi money.
I hope this “soft” jihad never reaches our shores but I fear it has.
Yesterday, I spent the day praying to God to forgive my many sins and the sins of others and I prayed to God to protect the American government, soldiers, and people, as well as the leaders and soldiers of Israel. I prayed for all humanity and for world peace. I prayed for reason to prevail over madness, love over hatred.
Happy Jewish New Year to one and all. May our prayers be answered.
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12 Comments
1. George Jochnowitz:I share your fears about Obama. But I also fear creationism. I look upon it as part of a great wave of irrationality that is spreading across the world—and whose main component is jihadism.
I am quite aware of the fact that the greatest opponents of jihadism in America are the creationists. But then, the greatest opponents of the Sunnis are the Shiites.
Oct 10, 2008 - 9:00 am 2. J.J. Sefton:Back in the good ol’ days of Falwell and the Moral Majority, my biggest fear were the gun toting Neo Nazis, Aryan Nations and the Evangelical Christians who thought that unless you accepted Christ you would go to hell. Suffice it to say, they never took over, never rounded us up, and with the exception of the crazies (Koresh, McVeigh, Matthews et al) their influence, or at least their appearances on the nightly news faded away.
I fear the spread of Islam across the planet as well as the subversion of this country by the people pulling Obama’s strings. Let’s face it, he is for all intents and purposes an empty suit. Ayers seems to have ghost-written his novel for him and, along with Soros, is probably his puppet master.
Maybe this is a fin du ciecle, but as long as I live and breathe, it will not be the end of America. Not the America I love and cherish. That was my prayer in temple yesterday and it is my prayer each and every day. Maybe McCain no longer believes in his calls to fight, fight, fight for what I believe in and what’s right, but I will. G-d bless us all and G-d bless America.
Shana tovah….
Oct 10, 2008 - 9:12 am 3. S. Berry:I also wonder about Obama’s advisers, friends
Oct 10, 2008 - 9:43 am 4. Hev:and supporters. However, the thought of Palin becoming president sends chills down my spine. Although she attended five or six
colleges she is an uneducated, bigoted rabble-rouser.
“Although she attended five or six colleges she is an uneducated, bigoted rabble-rouser.”
Umm, methinks this is exactly what Phyllis is referring to in her piece. That statement makes no sense, at all. I cannot believe the people worried and hand-wringing over the Christian gestapo of their imaginations. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, repugnant as they may have been, accomplished exactly what in curtailing your freedoms? How may Americans murdered from their beliefs? Zero? So some people believe in G-d and you disagree with them–big deal. They have little influence. BTW, Falwell is DEAD, and Pat Robertson is a screaming lunatic, who doesn’t know that? We have real problems on our hands and when these problems get pointed out, so aptly by Phyllis Chesler, all you can come up with is “Palin is a Christian and she’s religious” ? Where is the bigotry? How is she uneducated, even tho she attended five or six universities?
Oct 10, 2008 - 10:14 am 5. Norman Simms:Dear Phylklis
One of the saddest letters ever! But I know how you feel. We are having an election too just about the same time, and I see no shining hope on any side.
Yet sometimes I think: perhaps no matter how the American election turns out, the world will grind on, and the governments there in the USA and elsewhere in the world will do their usual imperfect and more than foolish things as always.
Only if we are looking for a saviour, a messiah, a bright shining ideal will we speak in terms of demons versus angels.
My hope, from way down here at the bottom of the world, is that we get some commonsense, some practical, pragmatic people who form a cabinet in one place and a body of advisers around them in another, and that we all muddle through for another four to eight years, no matter who wins the elections.
Norman
Oct 10, 2008 - 10:46 am 6. Fern Sidman:Dr. Chesler said:
“Yesterday, I spent the day praying to God to forgive my many sins and the sins of others and I prayed to God to protect the American government, soldiers, and people, as well as the leaders and soldiers of Israel. I prayed for all humanity and for world peace. I prayed for reason to prevail over madness, love over hatred.”
The power of prayer can never be understated and indeed it is the most power weapon we have at our disposal is these dangerous and trying times. G-d has proven to us on infinite occasions that He never abandons us. I applaud your efforts to storm the gates of Heaven with your prayers and personal supplications. If we are to survive what the days and years ahead will bring us, it will be because of you declaring the Oneness and Omnipotence of G-d.
Oct 10, 2008 - 11:31 am 7. bbloom:I see that you are also having to face the unpleasant situation of a child who supports Obama. My 28 year old daughter said that she will not even consider children until a Democrat is in office. I have to be a closet McCain supporter.
Oct 10, 2008 - 4:27 pm 8. SeanLA:I am reminded of John Lennon here: `Ain’t no Jesus gonna come from the sky’, and also, what the Jews should know all too well about praying and putting faith into the hands of `God’ are you familiar with the film `seven beauties?’
But mostly I am reminded of Faulkner and more than the `power’ of prayer, but the power of the imagination and of the duty of the writer is NOT to pray in silent desperation
In his December 10, 1950, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner said:
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
Oct 11, 2008 - 12:39 pm 9. BL:Dr. Chesler,
Happy New Year to you and joyous atonement at the breaking of the fast! Near’ly a day off in this important Oct. before the first Tues. in Nov., you have been my voice at this important time.
Two generations are competing for the soul of one nation (two if Obama were able to say the word, Israel). Our nation, a Union of United States, is so divided between what is fact/fiction; what matters, what doesn’t. The truth lays like road kill on the highway. Thank goodness, we still have the right to vote! I will enter that booth on Nov. 4th and cast my vote. But will it be cancelled out by 4 other ballots cast by one person! Will it be lost due to mechanical error? Will it really be one person, one vote?
I care about myself, and about my country, but I, too, have encountered the rants of craziness, unpatriotism, stupidity at the mere thought that I would discuss the pluses or minuses of either candidate. Too many people think it is a done deal and if you’re not with them you’re against them. As if the facts are all out and the processes of debate and independent thinking has come to a halt.
Thank you for making me not feel alone that this election is too important for the United States and the world to continue to assimilate fact and discerning it from fiction and withholding judgement as free debate is clobbered by ideological, bullying, and quite simply undemocratic abuse by people,friends in fact from both the Red and Blue states.
Our country deserves better and thank you for letting us know!
Oct 11, 2008 - 1:03 pm 10. Frances Von Koenig:October 12, 2008
Oct 12, 2008 - 2:16 pm 11. Jpeditor:Dear Phyllis, I do not know if you received your EMails okay. Would you please comment more abou the Violence Against Women Act. Would you be able to find out the WHY of McCain not voting for it. I am still ” hanging” about this. This Act does pertain to
Human Trafficking, right? I did not find your dentist’s description at all sound or sensible. For example, sun screen, most better brands, do ” whiten” the skin!
( Give Me A Break!)
Shalom and Pax,
Frances
” Would you please comment more abou the Violence Against Women Act. ”
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/761/
“Indeed, McCain voted that day against a conference report on the crime bill, but he opposed it not because of the Violence Against Women provisions, but because it included extra spending that McCain considered unrelated to crime and it had a provision that would have banned so-called assault weapons.
Nine months earlier, McCain had supported the original bill, which included the Violence Against Women Act, when it passed the Senate 95-4. So that alone is a significant contradiction of Planned Parenthood’s claim.
Also, McCain has supported the Violence Against Women Act when it has come up for reauthorization.
In 2000, McCain joined a unanimous vote on a crime bill that included the Violence Against Women Act.
In 2005, he praised the law when he introduced a companion bill to provide protections for Indian women. “The 1994 Violence Against Women Act has had a tremendous impact on raising the national awareness of domestic violence and providing communities, including Indian tribes, the resources to respond to the devastating impact of domestic violence,” he said.
Oct 13, 2008 - 8:07 am 12. Kermit H.:I have got to say that I have not been a big fan of McCain since 2000. This is entirely based on the response to my questioning a now deceased friend who served with McCain, as an aviator, before he was shot down.
The business that I engage in is at a complete standstill due my customer base (small chemical and plastics manufacturers) stopped investing in plant and equipment when it became clear that the Dem leader would be either Clinton or Obama. They cannot afford either’s economic ideology. Thus I became a Republican de facto McCain supporter without my heart in it.
Then came Palin, and the GOP Convention speeches. They invigorated me into a fervent support.
Living in Louisiana I can tell you what a positive message it sends when a leader fights unethical behavior. Our governor, Jindal now has an 88% approval rating. This is something that Palin did. I believe that the extent publicized is not in line with is likely to be the reality, but it is a giant step forward. Thus I do not have any problem with Palin at all. A woman actually was elected and beat the big boys in what is described in the media as a backwards macho state should speak volumes of her abilites. She has overcome the odds and accomplished quite a lot.
Now my ex-wife was one of those who in her profession exuded the naive gal image to her advantage in all of her negotiations. It works. I see that in Palin, she is no dumb bunny.
The end of McCain’s speech at the convention cinched it for me when he spoke of his internment and his conversion from being self centered and service centered. Having had such and experience myself in the midst of hopelessness and helplessness I knew that he was speaking the truth.
Integrity means a great deal to me. Biden is a complete liar he proves that everytime he opens his mouth. Obama has no track record and his campaign has been one of whichever way the wind blows on the surface.
As to Fanatical Fundamentalist Christion, I tuned in to Hagee when I saw that he has a regular TV show just to see for myself. He is a robust devout defender of Israel. He airs shows on how women can fight gender bias in the workplace from the lower to the upper ranks. He coaches women on how to break the glass ceiling. He may well be more of a feminist that feminist leaders are. He just does it on his interpretation of scripture. Only those ignorant of his works are wholeheartedly against his type.
Oct 25, 2008 - 6:25 am