Counter-Predictions for TPM

This is the body of a letter I sent to the TPM regarding their predictions for the Iowa/New Hampshire and beyond: "How We See it":

In general, I believe that your prediction of the potential nominees is on the mark. Two caveats, one for each prediction:

1. Democrats - I don't think you can rule out Obama even if Hillary gets #1 in Iowa and New Hampshire for two reasons:

(a) Obama has a lot of money- that gives him the ability to fight loud for a long time (unlike Edwards in '04 who kept running after it was clear that Kerry had clinched it, but it was largely a futile gesture).

(b) Hillary's negatives are pretty high. I think that Kerry was able to lock up the nom in '04 because most Democrats accepted the expertise of the early primary voters, assuming that since all the non-screaming candidates (e.g. Kerry, Edwards, Clark) were all major unknowns that they felt "if the early voters accepted one of them then, OK, let's just take that one." I heard this from my parents who accepted at face value Kerry's front-running status (and the false-positive crossover appeal of his military record) even though I, as a political junkie, felt that he was the kiss of death.

I don't think there'll be a front-runner repeat of 04 with Hillary because we KNOW that woman very very well. Even if she wins the first three contests (IA, NH, SC), I assume that all that will do is force Edwards to leave the race. Edwards is so far splitting the anti-Hillary vote, and if he drops he'll leave a loud Obama to provide a valid alternative contrast to Hillary. And when the field clears between these two well-funded choices, I think that Obama will get much more popular.

I think a model for Hillary vs. Obama could be 1984's Mondale vs. Hart -- if Mondale had more money, was more hated, and actually had no governing experience and if Hart was smarter, had more substance, and a lot more money. I was only 12 at that election, but in looking at the data I'm impressed at how many states Hart managed to win.

2. Republicans - Huckabee is not going to be easy to eliminate.

To consolidate a blog post I wrote on this, I think that Romney's support is very soft. He is the default candidate because all the other candidates are sick jokes and because Mitt's got looks, money, and clean living. But he's also a laughable phony. What scares me about Huckabee is that even though he has very little money and little staff, he is a very impressive Evangelical poster child and that gives him a built-in power base. Four words: "Passion of the Christ" - that movie made money because of the massive outpouring of Evangelicals who were probably not compelled by Madison Avenue but because thousands of them heard about it in church every Sunday. I think this power-base and free communication network can explain Huck's explosive rise in Iowa and South Carolina and also how he's tied with Giuliani nationally. Add real money and a real staff to Huckabee and I think he'll be a Goldwater on Christ.

While Huck has a dark side (a temper, the gifts in office, his compulsion to cover up and lie) and a dumb side (much of his policy ideas), I would posit that the scandals won't bother Evangelicals. Why? Three more words: "George Dubya Bush." How many scandals did Dubya accrue? His dark side is darker than Huck and his dumb side deeper. But the Evangelicals gave him a pass because (a) he was Born Again, and (b) every time he committed a sin against The Lord or against The Human Race, he'd just accept Jesus again and he'd be as right as rain. And if the Evangelicals accepted that with the Bush, then they'll be even more generous with Huckabee. Because while Bush is reborn, Huck is a freakin' preacher!

For example, Huck's biggest scandal (so far) is freeing Dumond, yet I believe the Evangelicals will just look at it as an act of Christian charity and move on. Seriously. And I don't think the Evangelicals will care that he's got liberal-ish views about spending government money to help the poor because that also fits into the preacher paradigm.

The only way I think Huck is knocked out is if somehow the fervid support he'll get from the Evangelical base is statistically too small to offset the GOP's anti-Evangelical voters. Given the stripping away of almost every group from the GOP over this scorched earth years of Bush-Cheney, I don't think there's enough anti-Evangelicals to stop Huck.

2009 Update: Hey, these predictions held up pretty well. Yay me.

Backpost finished 2009-12-14.

Prager INRI

More and more I am deciding that certain people cannot be listened to anymore. It's the extremity of our times - the stakes are high, people are more extreme, and true colors are being shown. Some people like to ignore that our Executive Branch has engaged in criminal activities and possibly crimes against humanity. Some of those who deny these crimes have so sunk their fate with Bush & Crew that they need to get even more extreme.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Dennis Prager has lost any early merit he had; his fine mind now twisted into saying absurd, hatful things.

Yesterday, he published a column where he argues that Ellison, the first and only Muslim to serve in Congress, should be prevented from using a Koran to swear into his oath of office.

Prager was educated in yeshiva. And yet, like many Jewish Republicans, he has forgotten that freedom is good because its good and because it has saved Jews from prosecution.

Prager supported Mel Gibson's movie, "The Passion" and naturally needed to defend Mel after his drunken tirade against the Jews. So now he's letting his GOP validated self-hatred devolve into total Christianist racism.

Prager in fact demonstrates how any solid belief in the GOP will require a definition of America as (fundamentalist) Christian. As he says:

[Ellison] should not be allowed to do [use the Koran] -- not because of any American hostility to the Koran, but because the act undermines American civilization.

Dennis, dennis, dennis. Why don't you convert out, already, let your family and fans sit shiva, and save us further grief.

Munich Madness, part 1

This will need to be brief because I actually have too much to say. Back in 2005, Steven Spielberg, King of the Jews (with all that title entails) decided that his years in higher education (baccalaureate from film school, which, admittedly, is better than Clown College), gives him the authority, nay, the responsibility to comment on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

We know from the fact that he is (1) rich, (2) not-religious, and (3) married a bunch of non-Jewish women, we shouldn't expect that a movie about Israel will not be favorable to the Jewy Jewish State for Jews. And we'd be right.

Munich (2005) is based on a fictional account, written as non-fiction, of the aftermath to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. But because the book source wasn't false enough, Spielberg needed to fake it up with a whole bunch of stuff that insults the memories of the victims of the tragedy, insults Israel, and all in the service of making a simple grade-school morality point: there's no such thing as good violence.

Well, I didn't have the time to waste watching the film before talking about it from the pulpit. Rather, I adhered to the "Silence of the Jesus Lambs" Rules which state that you don't have to sit through a movie if more than 90% of eyewitnesses, including many you trust from other encounters but including ordinary neutral parties, all agree. People from all walks agreed that The Passion was a blood-orgy of anti-Semitic hate. And even though Mel Gibson was a known tee-totaling philo-Semitic philanthropist, the eyewitnesses spoke as one.

So too with Silence of the Munich. Many trustworthy sources said that it was mean, stupid, hokum. And so I based my sermons on their words, including this fine analysis by Rabbi Benjamin Blech.

The key point of Rabbi Blech is that Spielberg uniformly distorted events, and then just made stuff up, in order to broadcast a dishonest agenda:

Too bad the movie does not include perhaps the single most relevant dialogue in Jonas' book, Vengeance, that served as the primary source for Munich. In assigning the mission, the agents are given clear instructions: If you get all of the names on the list, your mission is an incredible success. Get six or five, we will feel the message has been sent that Jewish blood is not cheap, that we will not sit idly by as the world did during the Holocaust. Even if you get only one or two, it will not have been in vain. But if you will be faced with a choice between killing any one on the list together with an innocent bystander or aborting your mission, your instructions are to do nothing.

That piece of information is probably the most crucial difference between the Munich terrorists and the Israeli hit-squad, yet it wasn't included in the film.

Munich concludes with a final insult: The disillusioned leader of the mission, who cannot abide the ideology of a country that dares to declare that it will no longer idolize the glorification of the Jew as victim, renounces his country and settles in Brooklyn. And so ends the hope of the Jewish people.

It never happened. And it makes whatever message Spielberg sought to bring to the screen indefensible.

Part 2 of this topic will deal with my reaction to actually seeing the movie.

P.S. I do like the fact that after insulting the memories of the victims of the Olympic massacre, Spielberg becomes part of the Beijing Olympics committee. His moral compass was shattered, and who knows when. And, yeah, he pulled out of the committee a few months ago in protest over the Chinese complicity of the genocide in Darfur. Bra-effing-O Steve. You're a real hero.

Backpost finished 4/13/08, 9:11 PM. I had just the link to Blech's article.

More Passion

[This is a draft post from sometime in early March 2004 - I didn't post it because it was unfinished, as you can see from the Roman Numerals at the end of the post... I don't have time to finish it now, either, but I gotta make this blog less drafty!]

Hopefully, the end of this topic

Some last points about the "Passion."

First of all, I want to rationalize why we are spending so much time on it. I happen to believe that it is a significant point in early 21st Century. Yeah, this is just a film; yeah, its a pet project of a lowbrow religious punk - a punk who has been able to manipulate the entire Western World into paying attention to his personal demonology.

The 20th century saw the transformation of Western Culture from Industrial to post-Industrial to Information. We are in the "information age" (for those who're keeping track) and when you recognize that information is all in the mind, you will recognize that anything which directly impacts the mind is both powerful and significant.

In a land that holds free speech as an inalienable right, we have understood even back in the 18th Century that ideas are powerful and significant. However, over those hundreds of years, we've learned that speech can liberate as well as obliterate.

"Hate speech" is a difficult and nebulous substance that has only been seriously thought out in the late 20th Century. We have the Supreme Court cases that relate to dangerous speech (shouting fire in a crowded room) to hate speech. A watershed moment, I believe, was the Clarence Thomas - Anita Hill case which alerted America that sexual harassment is harmful and is accomplished in the intangible realm of verbal and non-verbal language. The fact that the culprit of the harassment is one of the most powerful people on earth is ironic but understandable when you see him as an antediluvian vestige and an accident of history.

Speech is a weapon; images are weapons. The cultural-conservatives who demand prayer in schools (speech), Ten Commandments in stone in the courthouse (images), no smut on television and radio (both), understand this.

In fact, were you to ask a cultural-conservative and a cultural-liberal what the greatest threat to American society is in 2004, the liberal would say "the near-fascist thuggery of our rapacious and illegally elected government." A conservative would say "Hollywood."

The reason why "The Passion" is so important is because it wages a war of images and ideas using the enormous power of Hollywood and Big Business. It's message - about religion and violence - has been the public discourse for the past 20 years and ever-so-much-more-so in the past 3 years.

That's why I think we need to still discuss it.

II. Why you do not need to see it
III. Christianity is anti-Semitic by definition

The Passion of the W

No, that's not a Sesame Street episode (much to my dismay), but a sad assessment of the popularity of the current President and why he is held in esteem by many. Just as Jews, secularists, and other non-Christians misjudged the eye-bulging power of Gibson's theocide fantasy "The Passion" so the popularity of the first Christian Right President has been misjudged.

George W does not seem to have much of an overt personality; his whole life he's been defined by someone else and by golly he's good at that. He was defined by Mommy, his Daddy, and Jack Daniels. Many non-Christian republicans (I think I know most of them personally) see him as the flag-draped defender of America after 9/11. He isn't, but he fills out a role well. It's the advantage of having an arid brain.

But for most of his rabid followers, and the core of the Republican party, George W is the embodiment of a devout Christian; and that makes him durn near infallible. The closest I can get to this view is if I were a Chassid and a fellow Chassid became President.

I say Chassid and not a fellow Jew because we Jews are notorious for attacking our own when they are in prominent positions (we may vote exclusively for Jewish candidates, but I heard too many people shy away from Gore in '00 because they didn't want Lieberman to be VP for "they may hate us" reasons)

The Christians in this country feel like an abused minority even though they consider themselves the "moral majority." They think the media is liberal and antagonistic and they believe there's no voice for them (despite the rabid vapid Right Wing press which is powerful and unapologetically partisan).

Again, see the "Passion" reaction - any attack on the movie was seen as an attack on Jesus H. himself. No matter that the movie - according to reliable reports - was badly made. Who cares about quality?! It's about Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezuz. I see the exact same reaction about Bush. He's a devout Thumper and if you attack his idiotic worldview, his inability to handle contrary information, his profligate past before his rebirth in the blood of the lamb - these are all traits that the Christian Right considers positive signs of a true believer!

Bush's support should thus be seen as rabid. His reaction to 9/11 is seen as a holy war, a crusade, and in the mind's of the Christian Right, that's a good thing! When Bush says that he's following the (direct) orders from God, the XR thinks that's accurate and wonderful. Catholics have the Pope, American Protestants have their Papist-President, Bush II.

Kerry has no chance against that. First, he's an unholy papist… and he's not even that frum! Again, showing that Edwards would have been a smarter choice. And I'm just assuming because he's a smiley gentile from North Carolina that he's frum.

I've said again and again that Jews need to be very careful with the Christian Right. They do what they want and that often means Holy War against those they consider unholy. They appear to celebrate ignorance and intolerance. And Bush is their prophet.

Pic found in 2009 here.

The Best Passion Commentary Yet

I haven't seen "South Park" since the first season (which was groundbreaking, at times funny, in general disturbing, and had enough intelligence and satire to continue surviving.

The most recent episode is Episode 804: The Passion of the Jew. Cartman, the Parker-Stone everyhick who is the butt of most of the satire, has seen the Passion so often that he starts dressing up as Hitler and calling a picture of Mel Gibson "Furher." Kyle, the Jewish character, is chickened into seeing the movie (we see him cowering and vomiting through it) and he feels so guilty for his responsibility in killing Jesus that he has nightmares featuring his joining in with the disgusting Jewish stereotypes stabbing and jeering Jesus.

Meanwhile, Stan and Kenny see the movie and they think it's so bad that they go to Mel Gibson in Malibu to demand their money back. Mel turns out to be a sado-masochistic loony who runs around his house in his underwear, shrieking, and demanding to be tortured.

Over-the-top, but (as usual) the message is very true.

The Passion for 99 cents

According to this website, you can buy Mel Gibson's coffee table book about his sicko movie, The Passion, for 99 cents! The website sez, and I quote:

This elegant coffee-table book is fully illustrated with the most moving photographic images of the film. Throughout the book biblical verses and dialogue explain to the reader the story of Jesus' final 12 hours. You will share in his suffering, passion, crucifixion, death and resurrection. This book also is a great teaching book for children.

No, I didn't make the children part up.

The ever important James Carroll

James Carroll, Boston Globe columnist, former Catholic priest, philo-Semite, author of "Constantine's Sword" is a person of great authority on Catholic anti-Semitism. Here's his take on Gibson's Passion:

Boston Globe: "An obscene portrayal of Christ's Passion"

The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord JoJo

THE DOLOROUS PASSION OF OUR LORD JOJO - one of the sources for, guess what, the Passion. Hoo hah.

More Passion Info

Baraita: October 2003, a post about the background material used in the 'Passion'

More Passion: Jewsweek

The Jewsweek Review of the Passion

One Hand Clapping about the Passion

Good read.

Safire on the Passion

William Safire: "Not Peace, but a Sword."

Key line:

"And there's the rub. At a moment when a wave of anti-Semitic violence is sweeping Europe and the Middle East, is religion well served by updating the Jew-baiting passion plays of Oberammergau on DVD?"

Roger Ebert on the Passion

Critical point: Ebert grew up a religious Catholic (altar boy etc) and his perspective is very valuable.

More Passion Commentary

This one from The New Yorker: "Nailed" by David Denby.

Wieseltier on the Passion

Leon Wieseltier: "MEL GIBSON'S LETHAL WEAPON: The Worship of Blood" in the New Republic.

The key line:

"In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film."

Listen to this dude; he knows these things.

Purim and Passion

Eliezer Segal, a brilliant scholar from Canada, has many timely and well-researched articles on the Jewish holidays and modern issues. Considering that I am overdoing the Passion Response, here is an article about The Purim-Shpiel and the Passion Play.

Do Not Give Him Money

Do not pay money to see The Passion - don't fuel his egoistic blood libel. If you must see it, download.