With Rosh Hashana, the new year, beginning tonight Monday evening, the blog will go on hiatus until the end of Rosh Hashana on Wednesday evening.

As this update runs Congress is debating the final plank for the gangplank of corporate socialism, bringing America one step closer to the EU way of doing things. The economic crisis we are facing is a manufactured crisis, anyone who doubts that need only look at the connections between George Soros, Countrywide, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. It's a manufactured crisis with a solution that will not only damage our economy but free enterprise, which is the real target here. Whatever happens in the election we will be worse off if this bill passes and our future as a free nation will be worse off.

(Update, the bill has failed)

In Israel, Olmert, Livni and the Shabak goon squad are beginning the usual noises about right wing extremism. Which naturally is a preface to a crackdown on the opposition before announcing the surrender of Jerusalem and the forced ethnic cleansing of Jews in other parts of Israel as well. Left wing extremists always decry right wing extremism just as they're preparing for a major betrayal.

On the way out Olmert meanwhile has said what we knew all along, that Kadima will give away Yerushalayim and the Golan Heights and just about everything else to the Fatah terror state. Livni is of course carrying on those same policies behind the scene.

Meanwhile from Africa, Peter Hitchens has a compelling account of how China is building a slave empire in Africa. If you haven't read it yet, you should. We're seeing a new wave of totalitarian capitalism fueled by China, Russia and the Arab Gulf states that's spreading around the world.

The unfortunate 20th century Western mistake of confusing capitalism with free enterprise and corporatism with free labor, which is what Lincoln truly fought for only to have his legacy carved up by corrupt business and political interests. Now the corporate spawn we've nurtured have turned poisonous and weak, they exploit us even as they're slithering off to sell off our assets, jobs and markets abroad and finally sell off themselves too.

Wall Street has been behind much of this problem, turning companies from long term projects into short quarter earnings machines overseen by short term CEO's who don't care about anything but raising the stock price for the quarter and justifying their seven or eight figure salaries by any means necessary. Bailing Wall Street out will reward those responsible while making the marketplace safe for politically correct and completely irresponsible lending once again, this time backed primarily by the taxpayers.

In the blogsphere roundup, The New Centrist replies to my post Does No One Know What Treason is Anymore, with his own take in Communism and Treason and Lessons of the Cold War

The CPUSA was not only dedicated to the ideology of communism it was an appendage of the Soviet Union, an enemy state. CPUSA cadre constantly worked to further the foreign policy goals of the USSR against the capitalist world, especially the US. All one needs to do is read their newspaper, The Daily Worker, to read this firsthand. But a large part of the strength of the US—and all free societies—is the ability to allow these crackpot groups to exist and express their views. Let them have their newspapers.

Problems developed when members of the CP began to occupy positions of authority in the unions (especially the CIO), produce media and educational materials, and infiltrate the federal government. They were ultimately driven out of the unions but the level of government infiltration was much greater than many realize today. The Rosenberg case is still fairly well-known but many people have forgotten about Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers.

Via the Ol Broad blog and from the Edwards Report is the transcript for the coming Vice Presidential debate and not too far from reality either.

Lemon Lime Moon has a post on the Clinton - Gore Alinsky connection

The Keli Ata blog takes on Obama as the ultimate Harvard Educated Idiot

Verdict--Barack Obama, guilty of being dumb as a post and not smarter than a fifth grader and a pathological liar and ego maniac. So much for the value of a Harvard education. Now let's get Obama to appear on Are Your Smarter Than a Fifth Grader with Jeff Foxworthy.

The Obama campaign meanwhile scraped a new low by looking for rape victims to appear in political attack ads

Meanwhile the incitement set off by uber dhimmi Denise Spellberg has now translated into actual terrorism with the firebombing of a publisher for The Jewel of the Medina. Now just so you know folks, under Islamo censorship not only can you not publisher material critical of Islam, you can't even publish praise of Islam if you don't do it the approved Islamic way.

That's Dhimmi-Freedom for you.

The blog now goes into hiatus during the new year and will return Wednesday evening. Shana Tova and may the coming year be a better year for us all, jews and non-jews.

Elections are often culture wars as much as they are political campaigns, but the 2008 Presidential election is certainly more of a culture war than anything else, with the left putting forward a completely unqualified candidate whose entire pitch is built around his personality and biography, rather than any actual accomplishments. But it is a culture war now also centered around the definition of masculinity.

The counterculture for some time has championed a definition of masculinity that uproots the old heroic paradigms, what they produced was generations of selfish, lazy, inept, irresponsible males dedicated to no higher virtues than Carpe Diem and Questioning Authority, which in turn produced broken homes, illegitimate children, swollen welfare rolls and a new kind of culture war.

There are few clearer places to see the erosion of masculinity than Hollywood with its focus on putting forward the manchild as the new action star, ushering in the likes of DiCaprio and Matt Damon into action hero parts, baffled by the shock to the system that happens when a film of traditional masculine virtues such as 300 takes off and becomes wildly popular.

And the 2008 President election pits these definitions of masculinity against one another in stark fashion, the seasoned tough war hero against the polished skinny metrosexual, the bluff packaging of the McCain campaign against the shiny polish of the Obama campaign, the hard jabs of the McCain campaign against the dirty tricks and crybaby tactics of the Obama campaign.

It isn't race that divides McCain from Obama. Black voters may come out for Obama but few identify with him and most black leaders continue to resent him. It is not black voters that identify most with Obama but his own kind, the blow dried TV anchors and reporters, Hollywood actors and the left coast elites because Obama does not simply represent them politically, he represents their type as well-- the smugness, the arrogance, the effeminate mannerisms and the weakness of character overlaid by shiny packaging.

Similarly Obama has to work hard to crack working class male populations who do not identify with him and do not recognize what he's selling as leadership. His immaturity does not charm them and his flippancy does not appeal to them. To win them over Obama brought in Joe Biden, but such a statement of weakness only further worsens his position. Obama cannot succeed where Hillary did, because what he is selling is not the old fashioned brand of hardworking leadership but postmodern escapism through rhetoric and wishful thinking. And that makes for a poor brand in parts of the country where people have to work for a living and raise families.

McCain does not have to work hard to sell himself to working class voters, only to assure them that his policies will help them. Obama must work twice as hard, expending most of his effort on selling himself, not because as the media would like you to believe, American working class voters are racist, but because to them he does not represent a commanding presence.

When Obama supporters mock McCain as old, that holds a double meaning, both in reference to age and to the outmoded figure he represents. Similarly when McCain supporters ridicule Obama's flippancy, arrogance and drama queen poses, they are knowingly or unknowingly ridiculing the modern male.

Obama gained his credibility from opposing the war, both the War in Iraq and the War on Terror, both struggles that revived the idea of the old fashioned male whether it was the NYPD officer and Firefighter rushing into the burning towers or the soldier in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is the classic masculine virtues of heroism against which McCain like Bush runs his campaign. By contrast Obama emphasizes the modern male as diplomat and appeaser, eager to get down to work making everyone love him.

McCain's book gave his story as the making of a man through endurance, suffering and faith. Obama cannot tell a similar story because he has never become a man and never will. Prototypical of the modern male, Obama's book that introduced him to a generation of college students was a fixation on his own identity and lack of self-esteem, both consuming preoccupations for the modern male.

Where McCain is trafficking in the much derided virtues of patriotism and masculinity, all that Obama really has to sell is his own angst and his journey of overcoming self-consciousness and self-esteem deficits. A perfect fit for Oprah, which is why little wonder that aside from the racial issues, Oprah so fiercely campaigned for Obama. He is a product of the same weak willed self-help culture that she promotes.

Also fittingly Obama's campaign for public office embroiled him in fights with two women as the postmodern male's inadequacies cause him to compete with and resent women. It is also inevitable that Obama's supporters have unleashed their ugliest tactics against women as the inadequacies of the modern male has fueled a torrent of ugly rage and resentment against women that bobs to the surface whether in frat boy humor or Judd Apatow movies or a culture that mainstreams and legitimizes pornography and the abuse of women. As a tradition man McCan can be comfortable around women, Obama cannot unless he is exploiting them as with Obama girl, or unless he is in an assigned subsidiary role to them as with his wife.

For the past month McCain has managed to put Obama on the defensive simply by showing initiative, taking daring risks and forging ahead. It is a strategy that Obama is unable to embrace because his postmodern campaign lacks a central command structure capable of quickly reaching decisions. With the McCain campaign the buck stops at the top, with Obama the buck stops at a committee.

At the heart of the leadership question between two men is the question of the masculine virtues they represent. For decades the liberal shapers of our culture and counter-culture have sought to put forward a new man, painfully sensitive to a fault, self-conscious, irresponsible, magnetic in personality but hollow in character, morally degenerate but personally charming. Obama fits that profile perfectly down to the drug use and the constant lying and the inability to take responsibility for his actions, instead of tap dancing around them with verbal theatrics.

On the other side of it are the classic heroic masculine virtues, the warrior, the risk taker, the man of quiet faith but unmoving determination (instead of public faith and pliable will) and McCain represents that. Those are the virtues that America was built on and that most workable countries have been built on. In cinematic terms McCain projects Leonidas who defies convention and calls to appeasement by taking the war to the enemy while Obama projects the Persian god-king who in his arrogant effeminacy believes himself to be of different stuff than mortal men.

It is a striking contrast, the warrior against the messiah, leadership against worship. McCain's slogan "Country First" is all the more devastating to Obama and his supporters who reject the very idea of country because it requires putting something beyond their own ego first, yet it is the slogan embraced by those who truly care about America and are therefore capable of setting aside their own egos, their need for self-esteem affirmation and their theatrics to take action.

In this election voters will not choose simply between candidates, they will choose between the new model of the inept vacillating male and the classic strong male role model. They'll choose between the kind of male who would rush into a burning building to save the people side or the kind of male who would make self-depracating jokes about being unable to rush into buildings. And in doing so they will choose which is truly best for this country's ethos.

VIDEOS



A former Sudanese slave speaks out against Islamism and tyranny.



Beth Gillinsky of the Jewish Action Alliance calls to "Bring back the light"



Sarah Palin's representative, a former candidate for Governor Edward Cox showed up to deliver her speech.



Guardian Angels head Curtis Sliwa takes on Ahmadinejad



A Speaker for the Christian Alliance described the Churches meeting with Ahmadinejad as representing shrinking congregations.



A Speaker for Middle Eastern Christians denounces petrodollar politics that put Jews and Christians for sale.



MK Benny Elon Spoke



An Iranian dissident whose father has been imprisoned by the regime speaks out.

On 9/25 wide variety of organizations and speakers gathered together at Perishing Square outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel and Grand Central Station to protest the meeting between Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a variety of liberal Churches including the World Council of Churches and Mennonite and Quaker groups notorious for their pro-terrorist slant.

With the speakers came a wide variety of protesters from teenage boys and girls to senior citizens such as Charlotte from AFSI who are regulars at pro-Israel protest rallies along with Sudanese, Hindu, Anti-Jihadist, Christian and a variety of people united by outrage at the festive reception for a bloody tyrant and the world's main sponsor of terrorism.

The signs were numerous from "No Nukes for Kooks" to Ahmadinejad as the Quaker Oats quaker to a teenager dressed as the grim reaper. Up front a man stood wrapped up in the original Persian flag, while Israeli and American flags fluttered over the rally.

Rally speakers called attention to everything from the persecution of the Sudanese to the persecution of Iranian women and dissident clerics to of course Ahmadinejad's plans against Israel and denunciations. Large cheers came for Edward Cox there as a representative of Sarah Palin to read her speech, Curtis Sliwa and MK Benny Elon as well as Beth Gillinsky herself who had put the rally together on short notice. Boos were directed at Penny Pritzker, owner of the Hyatt Hotel and chairman of Obama's finance committee along with calls for her to donate her ill gotten proceeds from the meeting to the American Armed Forces.

Pritzker was denounced between speeches with speakers vowing to boycott the Hyatt hotels. As the day turned to evening and then to night, the promised rain did not fall, but a series of speakers including Ruben Diaz, a politician and minister from the Bronx, Donahue of the Catholic League, a Jewish school teacher, Gillinsky herself, MK Benny Elon, Edward Cox representing Sarah Palin, which produced loud cheers for Sarah, and speakers from Sudan, Iran and the Middle East who had been and were oppressed by Islamism and Iran.

As Gillinsky herself noted many of the groups had little in common agendawise, but they had come together in a show of solidarity to stand up to Iran's dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the rally was a striking contrast to the compromise rally thrown by the enstablished Jewish organizations, who were blackmailed by Democratic party apparatchiks and J Street, along with John Ruskay, a former Anti-Israel radical who has participated in a pro-terrorist group before finding a warm and very financially rewarding home at the head of the United Jewish Federation.

And indeed part of the message of this rally was not only the calculated defiance of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but those left wing Jewish groups and Jewish figures who had done their best to undermine opposition to Ahmadinejad and restrict speakers while promoting "Strong Diplomacy", Obama's euphemism for Cowardly Appeasement over real resistance. As such the 925 rally was a bracing triumph of free speech and a message sent to organized Jewish groups that despite their six figure salaries and perks and public role, they do not speak for us.

We speak for ourselves.

The 9/25 Stop Ahmadinejad rally represented a true mix of voices. Some like an Israeli MK or a former Sudanese slave or an Iranian dissident a Bronx politician spoke English poorly, yet their sentiments rang all the more true for that, through their stifled grammar and accents.

The common message though was the one held up on one man's sign. "I will not submit."

From Curtis Sliwa of the Guardian Angels to a man who had been enslaved by Arab Muslims in the Sudan to an Iranian dissident whose father faces possible execution to MK Benny Elon whose niece was imprisoned following the left's crackdown after Rabin's assassination and who remains a target of the left wing government for his Zionist views-- these were all men and women of courage who had endured a great deal, faced great odds and were bonded by a refusal to submit and surrender.

While a few voices sounding into the night may not seem to matter or even the crowd that had gathered here in the face of the forces arrayed against them, from Iran's nuclear program to Obama's candidacy, even a few people standing up can and do make a difference, time and time again throughout history. And there were more than a few people here tonight. Far more.

The victory of evil is assured by silence. A silence that aids it in conquest and propaganda and tyranny. Those who spoke out tonight and those who cheered them on participated in the true democracy of free speech and of dissenting from the establishment in the pursuit of freedom and the right to life, liberty and the happiness.

With the Wall Street Crisis being declared a financial apocalypse, blame is being hurled at Wall Street Companies and at the Federal government, and while they both deserve the blame, the deeper reality is that the blame also lies with the general public.

Wall Street could not have banked so much on a culture of debt, if debt had also not become part of the American landscape.

Americans once used to be known as thrifty people and American banks only flourished in the first place because Americans worked hard and saved money. Debt was something shameful and people took on loans for serious ventures that would repay themselves.

Today much of that has vanished. Instead we live in a culture of debt, a system in which just about everyone has a credit card or several, in which people routinely buy cars, homes and even appliances they cannot afford to pay for.

That is the real ticking time bomb at the heart of our economy. We have gone from an economy based around creating value, to an economy that creates debt. We had plenty of encouragement from banks and financial companies that cultivated the culture of debt through advertising, thrust student credit cards with high interest rates at college students not even old enough to drink and taught Americans not to think of the cost of the money they spend, if they just charge it.

And so debt became normative. Where their great-grandparents would have viewed buying on credit as troubling or indicative of poor financial circumstances, today buying on credit is the norm. Commercials jeer at those who pay cash while endorsing those who use credit cards as smart shoppers. What all the loans and credit card debts and the myriad of lending services and services meant to consolidate and get us out of debt once we're too deep in debt added up to was a culture of debt.

Then credit became a civil right. Getting a mortgage wound up somewhere on the Bill of Rights between the 1st and 2nd amendments. It had begun under FDR but by our time the government was waist deep in the business. Political correctness meant that you could drive loans to people who couldn't repay them and didn't even have any right to them, so long as they weren't white Caucasian males. Illegal aliens got on board the train, so did organized crime, but no one cared very much so long as the money kept being moved around and politicians could claim credit for it. You no longer even had to be an American or even legally in the country to jump on the bandwagon.

Banks stopped caring all that much if people could even repay the loans. Financial institutions began canceling the credit cards of people who paid on time. Customers who weren't carrying a lot of debt became bad risks. The penalties had become their own reward and the goal was to actually lend to people who would rack up penalties, people who once upon a time would have been seen as a bad risk. Payday lenders became the new loan sharks. More and more sharks swam up eager to drag anyone already in debt further under, whether it was providing auto loans at terms that could never be repaid or phony loan consolidation services that would actually significantly increase the debt.

But none of this could have spiraled so far out of control if Americans had not lost touch with basic values of thrift and economic common sense.

If we have a government that acts like money comes out of a printing machine and debt is a problem for the next generation to worry about, it's because those have become the national values. The culture of debt has made money into something unreal and plastic. Spending has become a national duty as Bush demonstrated after 9/11 and saving has gone by the wayside.

Baby boomers are expected to leave less money to their children than any previous generation, in part because of debt and in part because they've chosen to spend it on themselves. Consumerism is the product of self-indulgence that has arisen in the wake of the shattered multi-generational family. And sustaining a consumerist lifestyle requires going into debt.

Americans have lost touch with the values of previous generations. Generations whose public morality abhorred gambling, and would have recoiled at the disgusting spectacle of a state sponsored lottery system for public utilities or schools-- established because state governments could not control their spending, and so found another way to bleed their own constituents.

At the government level money means power and elections have become high stakes battles for the power to administer vast fortunes that in turn enrich their sponsors. Federal, State and all branches of government have become giant vacuum cleaners sucking up as much money as possible in order to spend it on new programs to gain the approval of their backers. So much so that we're told that paying high taxes is patriotic by Joe Biden and that Democrats were positively outraged at Bush's tax cuts.

But the problem did not begin and will not end at the government level. Nor at Wall Street. Only with the American people. Government in the end is a reflection of us, our strivings and our shortcomings.

At every level, from the individual to the nation, we are in debt, because we have become a culture of debt.

Conservatives often focus on how our culture has become corrupted morally in terms of sexual mores, but rarely in terms of financial mores. Yet poor financial morals are as great a problem as poor sexual morals. Anyone who doubts that need only look at the mountain of debt, on the block he lives on or in the nation's capitol.

Our economic system has become virulently self-destructive. And we are the gears in that machine. Every time we buy something we can't afford, promote a program we can't pay for, buy a lottery ticket, buy on credit, we continue to be part of the problem. And part of the culture of debt.

Let's begin with the fact that there really is no such thing as a Jewish vote. The idea of a "Jewish Vote" is a relic of late 19th and early 20th century Democratic machine party politics in which wards and urban political machines took control of entire ethnic communities and drummed up the Irish Vote, the Italian Vote and the Jewish Vote.

While Democratic machine politics is alive and well, it has mostly moved on to the Black Vote or less reliably the Latino Vote, newer immigrants and economically depressed groups with a sense of victimization that can more reliably be controlled.

That's not to say that the reliable well oiled machine is not a factor in the Jewish vote. It certainly helps insure that millions of Jews and Non-Jews remain registered Democrats in cities such as New York where you're either a registered Democrat or you might as well stay home during the primaries, and often on election day too. But the idea of a Jewish vote is mostly a collective myth.

Jews do vote fairly predictably but the most predictable percentage of the Jewish vote breaks down into three categories, senior citizens who grew up with FDR or the memory of FDR and treat the Democratic party as a safety blanket against fascism and the depression, Jewish women for whom gender is highly important and are career oriented and thirdly an assimilated class of politically liberal yuppies with very little in the way of a Jewish identity.

McCain is making inroads with the seniors, for a number of reasons. They are more likely to have serious concerns about Obama's candidacy and genuinely worry America and Israel. Obama relates very poorly to seniors, his Class President style of campaigning plays great with college kids and fairly well with baby boomers, but leaves many senior citizens suspicious of his flippancy and cold to his charm. Lieberman's endorsement and speech have made a serious difference there, but more seriously they feel the country and the world is in a crisis which requires serious leadership, something they see in McCain, but fail to see in Obama. Palin is a mixed bag for this demographic and alienates as many as she attracts. These form some of Obama's most passionate and dogged critics, rejecting him often by instinct alone.

Jewish middle class women play a significant role in sliding the statistics for the Jewish vote to the Democratic party. Career oriented, many of them identify with Hillary Clinton's challenges and aspirations. Abortion plays less of a role here than social aspirations for women in general particularly for middle aged women. They see a crisis in America and a threat to Israel, and while they may not be hawkish per se, McCain has made inroads here by having more credibility to wield, by showing a willingness to take personal responsibility and handle difficult situations and to some degree because of Palin, though not necessarily her personally.

This group should not be underestimated though, they have already made a big difference in the blogsphere, and a shift here would be a seismic shift.

McCain will however not make a great deal of inroads with the latter category of younger liberal yuppies because they are liberal first, followed by a catalog card of identities, with Jewish and American appearing on the list somewhere in the back or not at all. Which is why asking why they don't vote following Jewish interests or Israel is pointless, because they really don't consider themselves particularly Jewish. And really they aren't.

There are tens of millions of Irish-Americans and people of Irish descent, but how many of them genuinely care about Ireland or could tell you what Ireland needs right now? How many of them base their vote in any serious way on Ireland? If you checked back a century and a half ago or even 75 years ago, you would have a much more sizable number than you do today. Run the same numbers for Italians or Norwegians and then map it over on Jews. Yes there many Jews who care about Israel, but not as many as you think. That's the cover charge for assimilation into the Great American Melting Pot.

While having a Jewish identity of some sort may be trendy, in the way that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day, that doesn't translate into a real identification or a commitment to anything. Surveys and studies often count people with a single Jewish parent or grandparent as Jewish, who are not Jewish in any meaningful way. And it is commitment that makes identity meaningful rather than just a genetic statistic.

So what does this all boil down to?

I would not necessarily invest too much in predictions of McCain pulling in Reagan sized numbers of the Jewish vote, though I wouldn't rule it out either.

The Obama campaign has been hurt by its own limitations and inexperience. Those in charge have been very clumsy about reaching out to Jews who aren't like them and the campaign has been light not only on substance, but on rhetoric too.

Jewish seniors will form a major part of the defection from the Democratic base and with the heightened concern for Israel, more Orthodox Jews who often do not bother voting may turn out for a national election and aside from some liberal Modern Orthodox Jews, the sentiment there is 100 percent McCain.

Many Jewish voters still fall into the undecided column and may not make their mind until the final week of the campaign. Many are waiting for the debates to hear both candidates before they make their decision. Obama's biggest problem with the Jewish vote is that more of it is in the shaky column than ever, and with a troubled party and a hostile former opponent whose base is in New York, he lacks the local cooperation he needs to even begin fixing the problem.

Still the Republicans are not likely to take New York, as wonderful as that would be. Florida though is another matter and Lieberman and the senior factor are going to seriously undermine what should have been safe territory for the Democrats. Meanwhile the Obama campaign insists on playing defense with Congressman Wexler, an unloved not so local politician with some serious ethical questions and slime you can practically slip on. Like most of their approach it's dangerously youth oriented and clueless.

McCain though has his own problems with the Jewish vote. While his credibility on Israel is better than Obama's, it's fuzzy at best. Obama is a mostly known negative but McCain is a wild card and even people like me who are pro-McCain and will vote for him, believe that he will continue the disastrous policies of the second term of the Bush Administration. Palin's role is a mixed bag, particularly when it comes to the issue of religion, but not all that significant one way or another to undecided Jewish voters.

Many Jews, like many Conservatives, are not comfortable with voting for the lesser evil which keeps them in the undecided category. McCain's personal biography is compelling but his policies are a mixed bag and don't really provide much to be enthusiastic about. As the safe bet, he will pull in a sizable amount of Jewish votes, but how many and what impact they will have won't be known for quite some time.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So does human nature. Atheists pride themselves on thinking that by rejecting "theism" they become free. On the contrary for the most part the absence of conventional religion simply breeds less conventional forms of worship.

When the West retreated from monotheism into secularism, watering down religion and reforming their faiths until they were nothing more than leisure beliefs they could throw on over the weekend and then quickly put away, or banishing it entirely, what it did was retreat back to more primitive forms of worship.

Cult of Personality - The first of course was the cult of personality. The cult of personality is one of the most basic pre-religious forms of religion there is with man substituting for God with man. The emotional investment in a cult of personality leader enables the individual to identity with the transcendent or uplifted leader and to incorporate him into his own ego.

Cults of personality have become commonplace on the left by no coincidence, since in many ways left wing politics form a secular religion, particularly Marxism with its Messianic emphasis. As Obama's cult of personality demonstrates, it is believers from liberal religious denominations who are extremely susceptible and who once they have assigned a portion of their ego to the cult figure replicate classic religious iconography, engage in simulated worship services and treat any opposition as an act of heretical blasphemy that must be stamped out.

What should be most disturbing to those closely following the Presidential election in the United States is the sudden 'out of nowhere' psychotic hatred suddenly being manifested by liberals for McCain and Palin. The senseless and unreasoning torrent of hate, particularly by reporters and pundits who had recently praised both politicians, seems baffling in a rational context. It is however a primitive religious phenomenon associated with Obama's cult of personality. It isn't true hatred for McCain or Palin, but a pathological adoration for Obama as secular savior lashing out at those obstructing the emotional climax of his coronation.

Palin's role as a woman in symbolically verbally emasculating Obama at his party's coronation complete with Greek columns, the key moment in the liberal worship of Obama, touched off the kind of uncontrollable fury that only blasphemy to a fanatic can set off. Most telling is the repeated meme describing Jesus as a "community organizer" and Pilate as a governor. This language made rather blatant the genuine liberal emotional investment in the power of Obama to "redeem America and the world" and viewing opposition to him as not only blasphemy but even comparable to deicide.

Forces of Nature - The second is of course a more general worship of the forces of nature, in our time the personification of the earth itself, Gaia "the mother" whom mankind has sinned against with our technology.

Environmentalism of course incorporates the classic apocalyptic themes of religion, an original sin doctrine, collective guilt for planetary deicide and a chance to atone and redeem our mistakes by achieving harmony with the mother deity.

Even the man most associated with popularizing the eco-catastrophic global warming version of the creed, was a former leader who lost power, grew a beard, went into the wilderness and was thought mad, only to return gloriously as a prophet warning of imminent catastrophe. Better known as Al Gore. The analogy may seem facile to some, but think of how many times Al Gore has been described as a prophet by the news media. Just as with Obama's halo photographs or comparisons to Jesus, what may seem like an overextended metaphor reveals people's unconscious attitudes.

Worship of Life - Eat, drink and be merry. Live the good life. We can call this consumerism with an emphasis on the party circuit. Sensual pleasure is emphasized as is amassing possessions. This form of pagan religion lacks any real beliefs, only a constant drive to stimulate the id in order to achieve revelation and meaning or in the modern parlance, self-fulfillment.

Stronger Religion - Water down a monotheistic religion enough and people will instinctively seek out another. Some will find more stringent versions, but many will simply be directed toward a religion that seems genuinely uncompromising and therefore spiritual.

Today that is Islam. Islam's violence suppresses criticism even as its otherness imposes a sense of unworthiness on secularized Westerners. Its very intolerance attracts those who have grown weary of tolerance. The rise of Islam is directly proportional to the paling of the religious immune systems of Christians and Jews.

In the end monotheism has won time and time again around the world, which suggests that in the end liberal belief systems centering on cults of personality or the world must give way to an expansionist monotheistic system, which naturally is why liberals give way to Islam at every turn.

From cults to earth worship to Dhimmi or Muslim convert seems like a radical transition, but it's the transitionmuch of what would become Saudi Arabia underwent under Islam. While Muslims are frustrated and infuriated by Christians and Jews, they know quite well what to do with pagans, old or new. Where to Christians and Jews, Islam is a pathetic and clueless bastardization of their beliefs, to liberals Islam is superior, simply because their own beliefs are forms of religion that for all their tolerance and enlightenment are actually so hopelessly backward and pagan that to them Islam actually looks superior.

This is the West without religion and it is a very ugly and explosive picture indeed.

What do the two most successful Republican Presidents of the last few decades have in common? None of them were lawyers.

It might seem like a trite observation but Reagan and George W. Bush were both noted for their pragmatism, their ability to connect to voters and grand visions. While both men were certainly flawed, they also had an ability to transcend the trite legalisms of process and procedure in order to strive for something bigger.

As I wrote on Friday, the 2008 election beyond party comes to a choice between a ticket with 2 lawyers and a ticket with no lawyers on it. It is any wonder that the liberal political elite has fervently embraced the lawyer ticket while lashing out venomously at the non-lawyer ticket?

The legal profession today, more than any other profession, embodies the moral equivalence and the distortions of language that turns right and wrong upside down, at the heart of modern liberalism. While conservatives often attack academia and Hollywood, the worst of the problem is inherent in the modern understanding of American law, an understanding that requires creating a moral vacuum and advocating not for justice, but for the criminal. And yet America's leaders repeatedly come out of the legal profession, almost in inverse proportion to the amount of public hatred for lawyers.

In the hands of liberalism the law has become a tool for undoing the body of work of America's Founders, replacing it with hypocritical interpretations and distortions, shelving the second amendment while interpreting the death penalty and denial of citizenship as cruel and unusual punishment.

When it came to crippling the War on Terror, while journalists did their part, it was the lawyers who hounded and harangued and undermined until they got their way. It was the lawyers who time and time again stepped forward to fight for, sympathize and even aid and abet terrorists. And now it is two lawyers who are running on the Messiah ticket for the White House on empty rhetoric and a hollow spectacle and a great deal of dirty tricks.

Even as liberalism has demonized the soldier, smeared the patriot and the religious man, it has put forward three heroes, the reporter, the lawyer and the teacher. These are the three pillars of American liberalism. The reporter smears and brings down the reactionary power structures and the political opposition, the lawyer provides legal cover, overturns "unjust" laws and rules from above and the teacher propagandizes in the classroom.

Of these the lawyer is the most flexible, especially as the lawyer rises to power, ruling from above. The reporter and teacher are primarily indoctrinators, the lawyer is actually a ruler and wields real political power.

The character of the lawyer as the apex of the liberal power pyramid also reveals much about liberalism. The lawyer is morally selective, excels at rhetoric and at putting forward the image he wants others to see, he is capable of bending men and women to his will and of exploiting the letter of the law to suit his own morally ambiguous purposes. The lawyer may posture as a moral crusader, but in the end no matter how noble his goals are supposed to be, his means are rarely noble.

The lawyer may wear many hats, most of them political, because as a liberal footsoldier, his goals are generally political. He is the perfect weapon for an ideology that views everything as political since in the end politics comes down to rhetoric and law, and he has mastered both. He can convince the crowds or individuals and make the legal case for his agenda and this makes him into the King piece of the modern political struggle's game of chess.

The greatest trick of the lawyerocracy is to insist that obedience to the strictest of the letter of the law is all that preserves our morality, when it benefits the criminal or the terrorist, even as they shape and reshape the law as they see fit.

This cynical legalistic morality has crippled our ability to fight everything from crime to terrorism to foreign enemies, required us to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone hates us, while denying it to our own people.

The one thing that most Americans can agree on is that we do not need another lawyer President. We need a clear vision and common sense solutions, not more cynical legalisms and manipulative class warfare politics. We already know what the definition of "is", it's a lawyer who speaks out of two sides of his mouth and we've had enough of that.

 

With the Sarah Palin email break-in, the Democratic party has legitimized its own Watergate. The hacker was the son of a Democratic politician who somehow obtained a private email address. But what happened afterward is the Democratic party’s Watergate moment. Major liberal blogs and websites, including the Huffington Post and Gawker Media gloatingly published private letters and photos putting even Nixon to shame, while the media repeatedly ran stories mitigating the break-in by claiming that having a semi-private email account justified this version of Watergate.

Still you can understand why liberals would be so outraged by the McCain\Palin ticket. For the first time in a long time a major party Presidential ticket is running without a lawyer in the Presidential or VP slot as McCain is a Naval Academy grad and Palin has a degree in Communications. By contrast both Obama and Biden are law school graduates… and lawyers and liberals are naturally terrified and enraged at the thought of the country not being run by lawyers.

Meanwhile in Israel, Livni has slithered her way predictably to the top of Kadima to begin the reign of Olmert in a Dress. Fatah is positively gleeful at the thought that Israel will have just as weak and corrupt of a leader as Olmert, if not even weaker. Swapping Livni for Olmert extends Kadima’s hall life a little longer prolonging the disenchantment cycle, at a time when Israel cannot afford it.

Meanwhile in the US, the Democrats have already succeeded in sabotaging the planned rally as J-Street, their Anti-Israel puppets have achieved the forced withdrawal of Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. Personally I think the rally is mostly a waste of time, but the ability of J Street to exert pressure in order to sabotage a pro-Israel rally shows that the left is getting its blood money’s worth out of the J Streeters. I do wish they would get rid of the J since there isn’t anything Jewish about them. L Street for Limousine liberal or K Street for Kapo would be so much more accurate.

Update: A New rally is being planned to protest the World Council of Churches meeting with Ahmadinejad

by Beth Gilinsky, Jewish Action Alliance

Posted on Friday, September 19, 2008 10:32:54 AM by Ziva

On Thursday, Sept 25, at 6pm in Manhattan, The American Friends Service Committee, Mennonite Central Committee, Quaker UN Office, Religions for Peace, World Council of Churches-UN Liaison Office will be honoring Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at an Iftar (dinner to break the day’s Ramadan fast).

At the same time, The Jewish Action Alliance, Stand With Us, the Israel Project, Americans for a Safe Israel, The Center for Security Policy, the Catholic League, Rabbi Potasnik from NY Board of Rabbis, the Traditional Values Coalition, and the Alliance of Iranian Women will hold an interfaith counter-rally to protest Ahmadinejad’s presence at the United Nations, and to oppose his nuclear weapons program and his outrageous threats against America’s ally, Israel.

Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been invited to speak along with other politicians, Democrats and Republicans.

Please join us at the Hyatt Hotel, East 42nd St, near Lexington Ave and Grand Central Station, in Manhattan, at 5:30pm.

Send a message to the Mullahs in Iran!

For more information, or to bring your organization on board, call 212-726-1124

Luckily the Jewish people still have have the wisdom of age

One of the residents, 105-year-old Miriam Pollak, is believed to be the oldest American voter living abroad. With five generations of descendants, she "stopped counting" how many great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren she has.

She is surprisingly engaged and aware, and even tech-savvy: She spends significant time on-line reading political news from America; she even "Skypes" her children and grandchildren in America daily.

She is a lifelong Democrat and votes in Del Ray Beach, Florida - and she is voting for John McCain. Barack Obama, she and her family say, is just "too much of a risk."

Another resident, Ben Genauer - 95, with more than 100 great-grandchildren - is planning on voting for McCain, noting that he can't recall ever having previously supported a Republican presidential candidate. Genauer, for decades a pillar of Seattle's Jewish community, was personally friendly with former Democratic senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who serves as the yardstick by which Genauer measures the candidates.

Regarding which candidate is "best for Israel," Genauer's position boils down, in essence, to: I knew Scoop Jackson. Scoop Jackson was a friend of mine. You, Sen. Obama, are no Scoop Jackson.

I'll take Bubby over the smug millionaire yuppies eager to sell out America and Israel by voting for Obama.

Meanwhile since the group Israel for Obama is in the news again and Yeshiyah Amariel has been pestering me while claiming to be Jewish, here is some more updated material on the Amariel family.

Yeshiyah, your support for Obama has zero to do with Jews or any interest in Israel, but your own family’s Chicago background and their involvement in Black Nationalism.

Your father participated in Farrakhan’s Million Man March, together with Obama and demanding slave reparations at Jesse “Hyimetown” Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition together with the vile antisemitism of Dr. Leonard Jeffries. Jeffries is even listed on your family’s page as one of your colleagues

Your background is in the same toxic mix of Chicago politics and black nationalism as Obama, except that your “family” is part of the Black Hebrew movement and so attempts to integrate it into the framework of some kind of Jewish identity.

I have no interest in arguing people’s presumptions to a Jewish identity, whether they’re Mormons or Black Hebrews– until they begin pretending to be Jews and speaking on behalf of Jews, particularly while advocating an Anti-Jewish agenda. Which is what the election of Obama is.

Your presence running a front group to promote Obama while pretending to be something you’re not is disgusting and despicable, just as if I were to start a group called “African-Americans for McCain.”

For anyone who’s forgotten this is who Leonard Jeffries, the Amariel family’s “colleague” is

– “Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a financial system of destruction of black people.” This was “a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood” by “people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani . .

Turning to the larger roundup of the blogsphere, Elder of Ziyon notes that Iran’s supreme religious leader Ali Khameni has defined all Jews in Israel are valid targets.

The use of the word "army," I believe, is significant. Officially, Islam says that it is against killing innocent women and children, but if Khamenei is classifying every single Israeli as being effectively military, he has just given the Islamic justification for, let's say, exploding a nuclear device in Israel.

This is similar to the justifications for terror given in the past by various terror groups against Israel, but they would say that all citizens are legitimate targets by the virtue of the military service they are presumed to be doing, have done or will do. That "logic" was always a stretch. Now, in Iranian eyes, the very existence of Zionist Jews living on land in the Middle East is considered an aggressive act, no matter who they are - and by implication, it would be mandated to get rid of them.

This might sound silly, but in the end all terrorists strain to find religious justifications for their actions. Last April we saw al-Qaeda chide Hamas - using sharia - for indiscriminate rocket attacks, and Hamas defend itself by saying that children aren't the targets.

Khamenei might have just given the sharia-compliant green light for Iran's politicians and generals.

Michelle Malkin takes on the Freddie Mac Fannie Mae debacle

Yes, yes, crony Democrats are to blame for much of how we got here. You don’t need to recite all the talking points back to me. I’ve been writing about the Fannie/Freddie debacle for years.

But it is September 19, 2008. And this is a Republican White House presiding over the Mother of All Bailouts. Every step along the way since stimuluspalooza began last summer, we’ve heard that every bailout step was just a one-off. Each step was supposed to calm the markets. Each new government intervention and allocation of taxpayer dollars was supposed to achieve “stability.” Each new package of goodies rewarding irresponsible behavior and bad financial decisions was supposed to prevent new ones.

None did. And now, here we are.

This is your Bush legacy — not Pelosi’s, not Reid’s, not Obama’s: A ginormous bailout of every last, failing, panicked financial institution’s illiquid assets that may reach into the trillions — TRILLIONS – when all is said and done.

Lemon Lime Moon contributes her take National Debt: $9.634 trillion and rising...........

The government has bailed out AIG but who will bail out the government? With a national debt of $9.634 trillion we are in deep, deep and deeper doo doo than politicians want to acknowledge. That’s 4 TRILLION dollars more than when Bush took office. For years the administration has told the people the economy is great. It was not and is not 'great' No household with more going out than coming in is in 'great' shape. No household in deep debt to creditors is in 'great ' shape

Look at fema’s declared disasters webpage. Ronald Reagan had averages of 23 disaster declarations each year he was president. His successor had39 each year. Bill Clinton dealt with an average over 47. President Bush had 54 annually. Hurricanes Gustav and Ike brought this year’s total, just til September , up to 56. That’s a new disaster that requires the government to intervene every five days.

Small Dead Animals meanwhile has the charitable stats for the top contributing nations

The KeliAta blog has Sarah Palin on Israel

IsreallyCool has the disgraceful news that the Jerusalem Post buckled to pressure and added Richard Silverstein’s Tikkun Olam deceptively named pro-terrorist blog to its blogroll. Of course any blogroll that already includes the likes of Ima Shalom, On the Face and Jewlicious already has major quality control issues.

Meanwhile at KapoDickie, Richard Silverstein appears to be whining about being threatened with violence by one Seva Brodsky. As is well known Richard Silverstein whines very easily.  Not long ago this terrorist advocate was whining to the Forward, which of course naturally loves any Jewish blogger who hates Jews, whether it’s Richard Silverstein or FailedMessiah’s Shmarya Rosenberg. Finding a pro-Jewish blogger featured in the Forward is as likely as finding chili in the tundra.

Back then Richard Silverstein was complaining about “below the belt discourse” Apparently supporting terrorism isn’t below the belt, but hurting his feelings is.

At Jihad Watch, non-Muslim workers are now protesting the accommodations made to Muslim workers

Right Truth has word on more education abuse with a professor ordering students to write an essay critical of Palin

At Atlas Shrugs, Obama’s national finance chair owns the hotel hosting Ahmedinejad

Clearly Obama's chief fundraiser could refuse to host the Ahmadinejad at her hotel. Instead, she has rolled out the red carpet.

It was bad enough that Obama would not send someone to represent him  at the anti-Ahmadinejad rally on Monday now this

One of the reasons that appeasement is so popular is because it's so easy. All you have to do is turn a blind eye, make the occasional vague statement asking both sides to take it easy and go along on your merry way never thinking about the consequences to come.

That has been the position of the Paleocons on Russia, just pander to Putin, concede that he has the right to conquer any part of the old USSR and Warsaw Pact nations that he feels like and admit defeat now. It's the stale air wafting from the likes of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, the same old "Isolationism is the Best Defense" politics that allowed Hitler and Stalin to gobble up so much of the world in the first place.

The problem with turning a blind eye to Putin is that what happened in Georgia wasn't simply a border dispute, but expansionism by a hungry former world power looking to reclaim vast stretches of territory and former subject nations. Russia finds it convenient to pass off the invasion of Georgia as a border dispute and a squabble over Russian ethnic minorities, much as Germany found it convenient to camouflage its invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland under the guise of German ethnic minorities and border disputes.

The real tell can be seen from the attitude of Russia's neighbors rushing to sign deals with NATO while even staunch Putin allies in Belarus and Uzbekistan did their best to maintain an uncomfortable silence. While Westerners may debate the geopolitical meanings of Russian tanks smashing through Georgia, those nations formerly under the Russian boot didn't need any interpreters. They knew exactly what it meant.

While too many self-proclaimed haters of war and imperialism are busy lecturing us on how it was all Georgia's fault, much as their spiritual ancestors did in the 1930's at mass anti-war rallies and in cafes and bulletins, declaiming that Poland and Czechoslovakia were pawns of Western European capitalists and bankers, the Russian bear growls and lays out the menu for the next meal. Will it be the Ukraine or Poland? In the aftermath of the invasion, both are doing their best to move closer to NATO, to frantic jeers from the Paleocons warning us that American boys risk dying for Poland.

The problem with this line of argument is that if you don't fight for Poland, you will find yourself fighting Poland's conquerors, except they'll have Polish conscripts, Polish resources and Poland itself at their disposal. That was how it happened twice in the 20th century and yet the same apologists for Hitler and Stalin, from the far right and the far left are doing their best to shout down this most fundamental lesson paid for in blood.

Until less than 20 years ago, Russia controlled the Warsaw Pact countries all the way into Berlin. Germany is a NATO member. Even if this time around Russia stops at the German border and NATO expels all the Eastern European nations, then we're right back where we were in 1988 and Europe has been cut in half. The loss of so many nations from the free world as a strategic and political disaster this would make Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler and FDR's appeasement of Stalin seem almost mild by comparison.

But the problem is much bigger. Germany and Russia in the 1930's were not carving up countries merely out of some historic claim to the territory, neither is Russia in the 00's. They were seizing strategic bases, resources and subject nations for a vast empire. And while Europe was a starting point, it was not the end point. It is not the end point today.

The paralysis of wishful thinking that claims that if Russia were to take Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Ukraine and so on down the list, that we can sleep safely in our beds so as long as we don't annoy the Russian bear with any missile defenses or promotion of Democracy is just that, wishful thinking. Restoring its old Cold War sphere of influence is a starting point for the New Russia, not the endpoint.

Russia is moving aggressively to control as much of the world's energy resources as possible. It is a move that that has brought it into conflict with Georgia, but also with Canada as Russian submarines are laying claim to the Arctic, and eventually will drive a repeat conflict with Turkey. In the Middle East, Russia is Iran's backer, promoting the Shiiatization of the Middle East and the takeover of Lebanon and a war with Israel.

We can of course turn our back on all of them too. We can also ignore Russia's nakedly obvious plans to squeeze Western Europe with a pipeline noose, creating domestic chaos by pumping up oil prices, putting in governments that favor the Russian agenda and dismantling NATO. The riots in the UK and the employment of the former President of Germany as a Moscow lackey are only small signs of to come in that regard.

But it's not as if we have to worry about the price of oil. Somehow when the price of oil spikes, we will remain immune. And as Russia reinvents itself as a Water Empire but with oil in place of water, we will no doubt be safe. Never mind that Russia's Lukoil has already bought up thousands of gas stations across America or that it has American Senators already lobbying on their behalf joining their voices to the "Leave Russia Alone" chorus.

The lesson of WW2 was that the price of appeasement means having to fight the same enemy, now much stronger and enriched and empowered by the same countries you allowed him to gobble up. Growing empires need to eat and they will keep eating. An ocean may be a barrier to a Russian army showing up in Washington D.C., but no army needs to be sent.

Russia can simply continue arming proxy states and terrorists, pushing the rise of a new left wing Latin American alliance centered around Venezeula and Cuba, while squeezing us with oil and gas prices until the American economy has been destroyed. And that is only the Russia of today. What the Russia of 10 or 20 years from now will be able to do to us can only be imagined.

In a decade Germany went from a bankrupt nation to a world conqueror. Russia is making the same leap forward now, functioning as a capitalist totalitarian state, its economic boom compromised by the vast corruption and inefficiency endemic to such states, a gap that can only be filled through reform or conquest. Like Germany, Russia has chosen the path of conquest. Not because we were "mean" to Russia, not because we threaten Russia, but because empires do not stand still.

Russia's rise to power is based on the Looter Principle. First the privatization of energy companies, now followed by a drive to seize energy seize supplies in other nations and unclaimed territories while spreading war throughout the Middle East. Then carving up country after country, installing puppet dictators and putting members of the Putin mafia, generally former KGB officers in charge of the loot, following the SS role in the German model. The problem with the German model is that more always had to be seized.

German prosperity under Hitler was based on loot. First the private property loot of political opponents and Jews, followed by the loot of conquered territories shipped back to the Fatherland, slave labor in factories and finally collapse as conquered territories had been stripped bare and the push forward reversed.

Russian prosperity under Putin is based on the same principle. Like Germany it requires forward motion to subsist, except that Russia's corruption problem is even worse than Germany's, with estimates ranging as high as double the amount of federal revenues going to bribery alone. And that means the pressure on the Russian government to Expand or Collapse is even worse than that of Germany.

What that means is that as long as the the current regime coup in Russia persists, the Russian problem isn't going anywhere. It may have crossed the Georgian border, but it won't end there. It isn't driven merely by politics or rhetoric or national pride or injured feelings, it's driven by the logic of Russia's economic imperative. Putin's reign over Russia functions as a form of organized crime leveraged through kickbacks pushed upward from the street level to the halls of power and it must expand to live.

Once the Russian regime has finished seizing private companies, squeezing foreign investors for bribes, it will have no choices but to keep those tanks moving and to spread war and chaos around the world in order to drive up energy prices and ring up more profits. From the Arctic, to the Caucasus to the Middle East to Europe, we're already feeling the effects now. What will they be like 5 years from now? 10 years from now? 20 years?

Sticking your head in the sand offers no immunity for the ostrich and turning a blind eye to the Russian bear won't help us either. The folly of appeasement is to offer a choice, you can either be courageous now and stand your ground or find your courage far later and at a far higher cost. Today to block Russia we need not be heroes, we only need to show some courage. To block Russia in 20 years will take the sort of battles that gave the Greatest Generations its name.

An article has been making the rounds over the internet this week called, "Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin." The real answer to the question of course is that feminism as a political movement ceased when feminism was co-opted by the counterculture and morphed into "sex-positive feminism" which focuses the bulk of its efforts on protecting abortion rights and birth control, the two vital elements that make sex positive feminism practical for women, while ignoring the emotional, financial and health toll this has taken on American women.

Professional feminists like professional Jewish or gay or black or union activists have little to do with the groups they claim to serve. They're simply nothing more than front groups for a general Progressive agenda who are funded by major liberal think tanks, donors and political groups for the specific purpose of selling that agenda to the specific demographic they are responsible for.

A professional feminist's job is to recruit, train and position activists and voters to serve the larger progressive agenda and the Democratic party, by identifying the agenda and the party with their own identities. The role of most professional Jewish and black and radical union activists (e.g. SEIU) is the same. Many of them function as "community activists" or professors or recruiters, but that is a difference in function only. The agenda stays the same.

When people read about a Women's Group or a Jewish Group or a Black Group or a Gay Group or a Union, they're reading about a front for the Democratic party that is in lockstep with the Democratic party 95 percent of the time, and dissents 5 percent of the time to "demand" something more for their members to establish credibility with their base. If the party approves, it cedes another 2 percent and the Group leadership are celebrated for "making inroads". If the party doesn't approve, the Group leadership cites the legitimacy of the process and thanks the party for being allowed to voice their concerns.

So too feminists are allowed to be a little bitter about Hillary, so long as they understand that they are expected to return to the big tent and attack Sarah Palin. So too Jewish activists are allowed to sit on their hands or even walk out when the party gives Jimmy 'Hamas' Carter a standing ovation, so long as they understand that they are expected to promote and defend Obama at every turn.

And anyone who doesn't go along is clearly not a woman or Jewish or black. So Congressman Robert Wexler can inform us that Lieberman doesn't actually represent Jews, only he does. Never mind that Congressman Wexler himself lives in Maryland while representing a district in Florida, proving that he not only doesn't represent Jews, but doesn't even represent the right state. So too the professional feminists can announce that Sarah Palin is not a woman or black activists can announce that Colin Powell and Rice aren't really black.

The system is nothing new. The various flavors of Marxists and Communists used it to great effect in Europe and America, setting up front organizations aimed at "artists and writers", "wives and mothers", "workers and laborers", creating numerous shell organizations designed to parrot their agenda. (This became absurdly obvious when these groups spent every day until Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and attacked Russia, agitating against the war and condemning the warmongers, only to suddenly switch tack and cry for war with Germany.)

This demographic targeting served as a quite effective tool for making it appear that there was a wide range of opinion in favor of one policy or another, while co-opting and recruiting people who would have never walked into a Communist party meeting by adopting their identity.

By doing so the Communist agenda stopped being the Communist agenda and became the agenda of Wives and Mothers, Writers and Artists and Workers and Laborers. The front groups allowed people to invest their identity, often unknowingly, into a Communist cause.

These same tactics are used by the Democratic party today. Tens of thousands of liberal groups adopt the identities of Jews, women, and any other social, ethnic or demographic that they can think of, raise money from them and convince them that their interests lie with the Democratic party. To some they actually deliver enough of a pittance to make them fearful and dependent on the party, to others, such as Jews, they don't even bother with that much.

The battle for equality for women, which began with a battle not only for the vote but against sexual exploitation, has been co-opted to serve the "sex positive" ends of the counterculture which tore down American values by undermining its morals and attacking American society by undermining the family. Take away all the layers of justification and Newspeak about "Entitlement" and the "Patriarchy", and professional feminists today exists to defend the sexual exploitation of women by safeguarding the exit clauses of birth control and abortion. Not because it's what women need, but because it's what the larger agenda of those who fund and teach them, requires.

Meanwhile professional Jewish activists exist to channel Jewish contributions and volunteers to serve liberal aims that are hurtful and dangerous to Jews in America. They promote the culture of "Criminal rights first" that helped drive Jews out of the inner cities. They promote "Peace in the Middle East" when that really means funding terrorism against Jews. They promote redistributive taxation that penalizes both middle class and working class Jews for their hard work. They promote affirmative action which has forced numerous Jewish professionals out of civic jobs and denied Jewish students places in college. They promote immigration despite endless studies showing that the spikes in anti-semitism comes from immigrants. And they wrap it all up by claiming that these are Jewish values, when in fact they are blatantly anti-Jewish values.

I could go on with a similar list group by group, but so could most people reading this blog. Nevertheless we've been trained to take seriously the pseudo-marxist alphabet soup of organizations dedicated to co-opting the identities of different groups and exploiting and even destroying them to serve their own ends.

When you listen to a professional activist or organization that claims to represent one ethnic or religious group or gender, 9 out of 10 times you're listening to nothing more than a liberal activist camouflaging an agenda behind the colors of a specific identity.

There is an old Russian anecdote dating back from the Six Day War. A party meeting was held in a factory so that the workers would denounce the criminal Zionist aggression. A resolution would then be passed for this factory, and for factory after factory across the USSR denouncing Israel.

Since the average factory worker had very little political knowledge of the world, the usual procedure was to have workers from key demographics rise and read prepared statements from cards denouncing Israel. Things went smoothly as a young man denounced Israel on behalf of the students, an older worker denounced Israel on behalf of the Veterans of the Red Army who had fought in WW2, until a mix up occurred with the cards, and a drunken foreman rose and proclaimed, "As a wife and mother, I stand to condemn the Zionist aggression."

The professional feminists busy reading denunciations of Palin are nothing more than fancier versions of that drunken foreman with publishing deals and academic positions, who got the right card. Had they gotten the wrong card, they would have gone ahead and read it anyway. After all who can forget that Bill Clinton was really our first Black President.

If Bill Clinton can be a black man, then Sarah Palin can be not a woman. After all when you hijack people's identities, race, gender and ethnicity for your own ends-- you get to decide who's black and who's a woman.

The idea behind this is far more ominous than people realize. When Hitler was told of a Nazi party member with some Jewish blood, he responded, "I decide who is a Jew." Hitler had created his own idea of what Jewishness is and imposed it on Germany and much of the world. As such he could "waive" someone's Jewishness when it suited him.

Liberals have created and imposed their own ideas of Jews, women, blacks and various ethnic minorities and social classes should be. And they have the right to waive them when they please and decide who gets to be a part of that identity and who doesn't.

That will sound silly and far fetched to many. After all even if you concede that many racial and ethnic identities are artificially constructed, gender is not one of them. There is a clear line between a man and a woman drawn in biology.

Or so you would think, because when you can't easily control an identity, you begin deconstructing it to put it under your control. And deconstruction is something liberals are very good at. Today a man can have several surgeries, take a few hormones, and be considered a "woman" under the law. Transgender rights are one of the senseless pet causes of liberalism precisely because it puts gender identity under their control, to be able to say, "I define who is a Jew" or in this case, "I define who is a woman."

The way to fight that of course is to reject imposed liberal group identities and the phony professional activists who claim to speak for us in order to subvert and enslave us to their agenda. We resist by defining ourselves and rejecting the attempt to hijack who we are by ruthless ideologues who exploit identity as another playing card in their games of power.

Nature abhors a vacuum and so it was always inevitable that Post-Zionism would mutate into Anti-Zionism.

Labor Zionism had already embraced Post-Judaism, substituting socialism for religion and framing it in a national context in recognition of the reality that Jews would not be able to participate as equals in any other nation’s socialist system. In the Post-Zionism era, socialism gave way to capitalism, the old boys network still existed but it was now geared to business and investment. Israel's left did not actually embrace the free market as Netanyahu wanted, instead like Russia or China they embraced a limited oligarchic grip on the free market by those in power and those willing to bribe them.

It is only fitting that today Shimon Peres, the first post-Zionist Prime Minister of Israel now serves as President. Peres' vision of a New Middle East was meant to toss away national identity along with religious identity in favor of technocratic capitalism. This was the Post-Zionism that Israel's Labor and business elites embraced, Israel as another European country devoid of nationalism or patriotism or religion, reduced to a marketplace and a vacation paradise. Come for the business and stay for the beaches.

The problem with Peres’ Post-Zionism is that it required the willing cooperation of Israel's neighbors to tear down the walls, open up markets and create a Mini-EU in the Middle East. And Israel's totalitarian Arab neighbors had no intention of doing that.

Instead of opening up the Middle East, Post-Zionism ran headlong into the realities of the Middle East, that a vision can only stand up if it is backed by force. With its dream deferred, Post-Zionism turned on Zionism and became Anti-Zionism. The political and business leadership that had invested so much of their prestige and money into a Post-Zionist vision of Israel were not prepared to surrender it or accept responsibility for the tremendous failure on their hands. Nor were they prepared to defy the United States and the world community still pressuring them to continue the farce of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

The new narrative held that it was the "extremists" who were holding back the progress of peace. The radical lunatics who believed that Israel should be a country rather than a highway, a Jewish state rather than a beach resort and a place to raise families rather than a collection of holding companies. And the extremists were of course the Religious Zionists who combined both Judaism and Zionism to form together the cornerstone of the nation, made up of the two things that the left had discarded and had now come to hate the most.

In Tehilim 118, the verse states, The Stone that the Builders Despised became the Head Corner Stone. The unity of Judaism and Jewish nationhood as one is the cornerstone despised by the builders, discarded by both the secular left and the haredi establishment, is the stone that persists in being the cornerstone that holds up the nation. And it is the stone that is rejected, despised and hated all the more for it.

When Post-Zionism sent the lads of the secular left out of the army and straight to the Riviera, it was the despised Zionists who took their place. Post-Zionism commanded a retreat from Israel's borders and the Zionists insisted on settling them instead. And so it was war and as in the days of the Hellenistic kings of Bayit Sheni, a wave of persecution was unleashed against those dangerous extremists, the Zionists.

If they set up camps, they were torn down. If they built houses, they were demolished. If they protested, they were beaten and imprisoned. If they were complained, they were arrested for incitement. If they tried to broadcast on the radio, they were shut down. If they planted crops, Arabs were encouraged to come and destroy them and the police were sent to arrest not the Arab thieves, but those who had committed the unspeakable Zionist crime of planting the crops in the Land of Israel. Entire towns were destroyed, their residents dragged away, men, women and children, homes were gutted, synagogues burned by the Arab terrorist allies of Israel's Post-Zionism government.

Day after day the media carried new stories of how these Zionists were violent, threatening and dangerous. And to prove it, their children were locked away for months without trial, their possessions down to their household goods were seized for years without recompense, they were beaten and tortured, their skulls were cracked, horses stomped them into the dirt and all of it only went to prove how dangerous those Zionists with their encampments and many children were in the first place. After all if they were not so very dangerous, why did the government have to use such tactics to break them down?

Each failure of Post-Zionism to break through to the Arab world and create its imaginary business and bikinis paradise that Livni, Kadima's next Prime Minister, tried to sell in Israel's latest ad campaign, only further deepened its Anti-Zionism. Each setback only made the Post-Zionists more eager to cut a deal and more fevrent to suppress the Religious Zionists who remained as the only real ideological opposition and alternative to their perversity. And the only reminder of their abysmal failure.

Where Arab Anti-Zionism is nationalistic, Jewish Anti-Zionism is Anti-Nationalistic, the rejection of a single cornerstone, a unitary Jewish identity based on a single people living in a single land. Israeli Anti-Zionism fits into the same category, but is motivated as much by greed as by secularism. Post-Zionism promised a Sugar Candy Mountain in which life would be easy, war would be over if you wanted it and you could drive from Morocco to Syria uninterrupted, do business in their capitals and party in their nightclubs.

No purely Anti-Zionist vision could have been as compelling in convincing a secular generation to reject Zionism, as Peres' New Middle East was. For the first time Israelis were promised that they could live just like the Americans and Europeans who had become their idea of a good life. All they had to do was agree to negotiate and give up some territories no one except a few crazy Zionists wanted anyway. And then a few more. And then a few more. And then there was war, and it wouldn't go away just because you wanted it to. No matter how many songs you sang about it.

Someone had misled a generation. Someone had told them that they wouldn't have to fight anymore. Someone had promised that we were living in a new age. There would have to be an accounting for that, unless a scapegoat could be found. And so fed by left wing politics Post-Zionism absorbed the hatred that had always been churning in its own left wing and fed it out again to become Anti-Zionism. Under the plaster statue of Rabin the Martyr, murdered by the wicked Zionists to deprive us of our promised peace, the war on Zionism by the Israeli media, the Israeli government and academia has continued with only brief interruptions for a decade and a half.

Even as the cornerstone which the builders had rejected has become the cornerstone holding the nation together, the Anti-Zionists continue their war against it, seizing, arrests, beating, imprisoning and inciting hate and violence in the name of the same hate that their Arab terrorist allies do. The hatred of a Jewish nation in a Jewish state.