World leaders—including, sadly, the President of the United States—are competing energetically for the Suck Up to a Genocidal Maniac Award. And Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must be laughing himself silly. The crazier he gets, the more desperately the “world community” scrambles to appease him and the regime he represents. The latest offender is the widely admired President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. He will be hosting Ahmadinejad next month, when the latter pays an official state visit to Brazil. And David Harris of the American Jewish Committee just can’t figure it out.

Let me suggest one possibility. The Holocaust, which consumed the lives and bodies of some 6 million Jews, finally terminated anti-Semitism’s status as an overt, mainstream prejudice. With exception of fringe kooks such as Holocaust deniers, the West abandoned overt Jew hatred.

But anti-Semitism, perhaps the world’s oldest form of racial prejudice, proved too hardy a perennial to be uprooted by even the Holocaust. The desire to hate the Jews remained, and the establishment of the State of Israel eventually provided it with a respectable outlet. Now it’s possible for anti-Semites such as Pat Buchanan to bash the Jews to their hearts’ content. They’ve got nothing against Jews, you see, it’s just those wicked Israelis they can’t stand.

When progressives whine about the “neocons” and Israel’s supposed lock on US foreign policy, they’re simply recycling old conspiracy theories in an updated form. The Jews, it seems, are still plotting to take over the world, and their evil influence circles the globe. Now wonder that the ousted president of tiny Honduras (holed up in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, come to think of it)  has claimed that “Israeli mercenaries” are shooting death rays into his head.

That the establishment of Israel has given anti-Semitism a new lease on life is a sad historical irony. I suspect, however, that if Israel did not exist, something else would have come along to reanimate this ancient prejudice. We’d do well to remember that hate can be as vital as love.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:07 AM EDT

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It’s true that in the past, the Nobel Peace Prize has been given to some pretty dubious characters. But even with that caveat, this year’s award to Barack Obama seems bizarre.

Let me stipulate at this point that I’m not criticizing the President for winning the prize. As far as we know, he was as surprised as anyone by last week’s announcement. It may even have embarrassed him. For surely Obama realizes that the Nobel came to him not for anything he’s done but rather for what he is: America’s first post-patriotic president.

Consciously or not, Obama has communicated the impression that he sees nothing special about America. To him it’s simply one country among many—larger, richer and more powerful than most, to be sure, but American exceptionalism? Please! Small wonder that Europe’s postmodern elites—to whom anti-Americanism comes as naturally as breathing—love this guy. He also shares their hostility toward Israel, albeit in a less virulent form. From the European point of view, therefore, no American could be more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.

But it seems to me that there was also an element of condescension in Obama’s selection— condescension toward both the man and the country he leads. Perhaps that explains why the Nobel Peace Prize, supposedly such a high honor, has left him looking slightly diminished. Since when has an American president required the encouragement of a committee of jaundiced Norwegian leftists? For that was the motive behind their selection of Obama: to encourage him in his post-patriotic course. An approving pat on the head at this juncture might prevent backsliding later.

I’d like to believe that the President is too smart to fall for such a transparent ploy. But everybody likes flattery, after all, and when it comes to a man as vain as Barack Obama, laying it on with a snow shovel generally does the trick.

Posted by tmg110 at 7:26 AM EDT

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OK, I've managed to stop laughing long enough to post the news: Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Since nominations for the award closed on February 1, this means that he is being recognized for the achievements of his first ten days in office.

No, seriously, I get it—I really do. President Obama is being honored not for anything he did, but for what he is, or rather isn't. He's not that oafish yet sinister, quasi-fascist neocon cowboy, George W. Bush, and that's enough, it seems, for the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Just by showing up on January 20, Obama clinched the award.

Indeed, in a subtle way, the Committee's decision is an insult to America. For quite clearly, Obama's Nobel Peace Prize honors all that America is not: left-leaning, post-patriotic, postmodern. What Europeans really like about the guy is precisely what is causing his domestic poll numbers to fall.

Besides being ridiculous, the award seems ill-timed. It comes at a moment when Obama is wrestling with the decision that may decide the fate of his presidency: What to do about Afghanistan? If he decides to accede to General Stanley McChrystal's request and send 40,000 more troops to the Afghanistan, how might that play in Oslo?

I suspect that even the Obama claque will be clearing its throat and shuffling its feet over this silly business.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:16 AM EDT

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The Spanish prime minister is coming to Washington, DC, which makes this a good time to have a look at one case of “real, existing socialism.” (Michael Moore, pay attention!)

Reelected just 18 months ago on a left-wing platform that would gladden the heart of the most worshipful Obama hymn-singer, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is not a happy camper nowadays. For despite the wonderfulness of his Euro-progressivism, Spain’s unemployment rate stands at 18%—and no, that is not a typo. When the books are closed on 2009, economists expect to record that the country’s GDP will be found to have contracted by 4%. But there’s one statistic that’s arrowing up: thanks to the Zapatero government’s profligate spending, Spain’s budget deficit is expected to reach 10% of GDP this year.

Zapatero has blamed Spain’s economic woes on “neocons” and “radical liberalism.” In sharp contrast to these sinister reactionaries, he has proposed an innovative response to the economic crisis: higher taxes. Good idea in the middle of a deep recession.

Incidentally, Zapatero is also a leading Greenshirt. The green energy initiative that he cobbled together has been cited by President Obama as a model for the United States. Yet somehow, green jobs have failed to arrest Spain’s precipitous economic decline, while the country remains Europe’s leading greenhouse gas emitter.

On the foreign policy front, Zapatero showed himself to be a good little soldier of progressivism by withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq with days of his 2004 election. He followed up with a steady stream of anti-American rhetoric. All this earned him the lasting enmity of the Bush Administration, which spent the subsequent four years more or less ignoring Zapatero’s existence.

So needless to say, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero can expect a cordial welcome at the White House. In so many ways, he’s Barack Obama’s kind of guy.

(A tip of the hat to Soeren Kern, whose article in the Weekly Standard alerted me to Zapatero’s impending visit, and reviews his sorry record.)

Posted by tmg110 at 7:37 AM EDT

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No, I’m not going to see Michael Moore’s new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story. Life is too short. Let him preach that socialism is the best thing that ever happened to humanity; he has that right. I was about to observe that Moore isn’t fooling anyone, but that really isn’t true. He’s fooling himself, surely. Unlike some of his critics, I doubt that Moore is simply a con artist. No, he believes what he’s saying—in this case, that “capitalism” is a great evil. But his idea of what constitutes capitalism is crude to the point of caricature. To Moore, it’s all fat cats and greedy bankers and crooked politicians. Wall Street’s recent collapse has made him mad as hell, and he wants our money back.

But money is, of course, capitalism’s sine qua non. Without it, a modern market economy could not exist. Socialism, which looks to the destruction of capitalism, implies the demise of the market economy, private property—and money. To be sure, in the late, unlamented Soviet Union, pieces of paper called money existed. But the Soviet ruble’s face value bore no relation to its actual purchasing power. It never served as a store of value or medium of exchange on the capitalist model. Indeed, for the whole of the Soviet period, the ruble was not convertible to other currencies. Nobody had any idea what, if anything, those fancy pieces of paper bearing Lenin’s portrait were really worth.

So when, as apparently he does in his movie, Moore goes around badgering “capitalists” and demanding the people’s money back, he falsifies his entire argument. And I don’t think he’s being dishonest. He simply doesn’t know what he talking about. His documentary on capitalism mostly documents his own dim-bulb inability to grasp simple economic concepts.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:15 AM EDT

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Speaking of the middle of the road, that appears to be the Obama Administration's preferred route where Afghanistan is concerned. On the one hand, he won't just pull out, but on the other hand he won't give the commanding general the resources necessary to win.

Now it's certainly true, as Clausewitz observed, that war at its highest point of view is politics—but I doubt that he meant the craven, poll-driven politics that dominates the Obama Administration's thinking. The President is quite evidently afraid (a) to appear weak by abandoning Afghanistan and (b) to alienate his progressive base. So he's not trying to win, but he doesn't want to lose. I think I know how that's going to turn out.

Clausewitz notes that war is characterized by a principle of polarity: what's good for one side is necessarily bad for the other side. If the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan, the US and its allies are losing. That's the fundamental nature of war, and there's no way around it. Unfortunately, we now have a commander-in-chief who can't bring himself to utter the word "victory"—and if he can't even say it, he'll never achieve it. So for what, precisely, are the troops risking their lives? A healthier presidential approval rating?

Posted by tmg110 at 8:01 AM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 8 October 2009 7:47 AM EDT

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Writing in the online edition of the Jerusalem Post, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee puts the best possible spin on a somewhat disquieting poll. That poll, conducted by the AJC itself, found that contrary to the claims of Left and Right, the views of American Jews are straight down the middle. "They yearn for peace in the Middle East and support some territorial concessions in its pursuit," Mr. Harris notes, "but, at the same time, they have serious doubts about Arab intentions towards Israel."

This is why what you generally find in the middle of the road is unappetizing road kill. American Jews appear to recognize the grim realities of the Middle East, but they cannot bring themselves to connect the dots. For if, as they suspect, Arab intentions toward Israel are in fact malign, then territorial concessions would be utterly futile. American Jews seem unwilling to draw this obvious conclusion. For the same reason, probably, they support the Obama administration's handling of US-Israeli relations by a 54-32% margin. In its desire to appease the Arabs, the Obama Administration has caused a crisis in US-Israeli relations, but American Jews don't want to see this.

It's the liberalism of American Jews drives these contradictory results. Jews in this country have always leaned left, and they supported Obama in 2008 by a wide margin. If today, they seem unwilling to recognize that he sold them a bill of goods on Israel and the Middle East, well, their reaction as reported in the AJC poll is natural enough. Breaking up is hard to do.

Posted by tmg110 at 7:32 AM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 7 October 2009 7:53 AM EDT

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President Obama has established a disturbing pattern of appointing people with radical backgrounds to important posts in his administrations. Usually, they are posts not requiring Senate conformation, a coincidence that becomes readily understandable when you examine the resume of Van Jones, the former "green jobs czar," who lost his job once his radical background was publicized.

Now there’s Kevin Jennings. A gay activist, he was named to head the Education Department's Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools. Writing for the Washington Examiner, Byron York recounts the sorry tale that has surfaced to call Jennings’ qualifications into question:

As a young teacher, nearly two decades ago, Jennings was approached by a 15-year old boy (some defenders now say the boy was 16) who said he had had an encounter with an older man. Instead of pursuing the matter with the authorities, Jennings, by his own account, offered some simple advice: "I hope you used a condom."

Now I find this disturbing. Perhaps our progressive elites do not. After all, many of them—not all, mercifully—have leapt to the defense of Roman Polanski. He once drugged and raped a 13-year-old-girl—but he is, they remind us, a renowned cinema artiste who ought not to be judged by the philistine standards of middle-class morality. I suppose that Debra Winger and Woody Allen, to name two of these people, would see nothing wrong in Jennings’ behavior. (For the record, Jennings himself now says that he made a mistake.)

 Then there’s Barack Obama. What could he possibly be thinking when he appoints a man of obviously questionable judgment to a key position in the Department of Education? Did he really think that Kevin Jennings was the best possible choice for a job concerned with safe schools?

Posted by tmg110 at 9:14 AM EDT

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Surely I’m not the first to not that self-regard lies at the heart of the progressive world view. So it’s not surprising that our first progressive president of the postmodern era should also be our first celebrity president.

Some might quarrel with that formulation. JFK is certainly remembered as a rock star, Ronald Reagan hailed from Hollywood, and Bill Clinton received the extensive coverage on the front page of the National Enquirer. But (with perhaps the partial exception of Clinton), they didn’t think of themselves in celebrity terms. Even Clinton, who was so clearly in love with himself, probably spent most of his time in the White House talking about outer things.

Not so Barack Obama. If we know one thing about him after nearly nine months, it’s that his presidency is all about him. Obama’s use of the first-person personal pronoun has been promiscuous enough to attract the attention of the media. His speeches refer constantly to—himself. He will provide health care for the masses, he will fix the economy, he will defeat the Taliban. The American soldier crouching in a fighting position somewhere on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border might reasonably wonder why he’s needed at all, with Barack Obama in the fight.

George Will, who did the math, reports that in his speech to the Olympic Committee, President Obama used the pronouns I and me 26 times in a speech of 48 sentences. I was not surprised to learn this. Will also notes that Obama's address was, by any reasonable standard of political rhetoric, “dreadful.” Having read the speech myself, I can only agree:

We stand at a moment in history when the fate of each nation is inextricably linked to the fate of all nations—a time of common challenges that require common effort. And I ran for President because I believed deeply that at this defining moment, the United States of America has a responsibility to help in that effort, to forge new partnerships with the nations and the peoples of the world.

Nice of him to remind the Olympic Committee why he ran for president, wasn’t it? And I like that bit about the inextricable link between all nations—which, as Will notes mordantly, raises the question of how the fate of Chad, say, is linked to that of Chile.

This is precisely why, despite the triviality of the stakes, the failure of Obama’s Olympic bid was significant. It called attention to the man’s overweening vanity—a character flaw that has already crippled his presidency and that might, if not forcefully checked, destroy it. But who might check it? Certainly not the President's better half. In her pitch to the Olympic Committee, Michelle Obama used the first-person personal pronouns 44 times in 41 sentences.

Posted by tmg110 at 7:45 AM EDT

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One of the really comical things about Barack Obama is the gap—no, chasm—between his rhetoric about  peace, justice, the "world community," etc. and the ugly realities of his foreign policy. If there still remains a despot, dictator, tyrant, anti-Semitic head case or genocidal thug that the Obama Administration hasn't sucked up to, it can only be because the White House has lost his phone number.

I say comical, and there is something funny about it: Just seeing Obama and Hugo Chavez together was a howl. It's not very funny for the victims of Obama's new best friends, however. Observers here in the US of A may laugh at the spectacle of the Obama Administration's ongoing effort to restore to power in Honduras a raving anti-Semite who believes that Israeli mercenaries are shooting death rays into his head, but probably the people of Honduras don't get the joke. Still, in the Age of the Messiah, I suppose we have to take our laughs where we find them—in this case, south of the border, down Tegucigalpa way.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:48 AM EDT

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