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In this issue
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review March 6, 2009 / 10 Adar 5769

It's a scary movie, but the plot is old

By Wesley Pruden


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Woe is definitely us, woe laced with trouble, nurtured by tribulation and swathed in sorrow. Surely soon there will be a booming back-alley market in hemlock.


The brokers on Wall Street are elbowing each other out of the way in the frantic search for the stairs to the basement. Detroit is trying to figure out how to give its cars away. The investment bankers are just trying to stay out of jail.


The Republican Party is dead - you can read about it everywhere - and beginning to throw off a distinctive fragrance, more pungent than the aroma of the elephant house at the Zoo. Conservative pundits are chattering among themselves over which hymns are appropriate for the funeral. The consensus is that it should be something in the hip-hop line. Republicans are told they must become more like Democrats, not that Republicans encouragement for that.


The prudent who saved their Confederate money may be the wisest of all: the dean of Russia's school for diplomats says President Obama will call out the troops and impose martial law by the end of this year when the United States breaks up into six sovereign states. Hmmmm. "Dixie" will be a national anthem yet.


But I've seen this movie, and it's a clunker, even if brought back by popular demand. Alas, we live in a time when there is no institutional memory, when the present is quickly disposable and the past and its lessons has been thrown into the Sea of Amnesia. We no longer elect a president, but choose a celebrity-in-chief. We forget that the politics of the nation, like events in the life of the individual, move in cycles, regulated as if by the tides that move the waves, presided over with an iron hand by Mr. Yin and his partner Mr. Yang.


History, as usual, instructs. FDR destroyed the Republicans in 1932. You could look it up. Dwight Eisenhower was elected after two uninterrupted decades of Democratic rule in 1952, promising to "throw the rascals out." Lyndon B. Johnson destroyed the Republicans again in 1964, bringing in the Great Society and sending Barry Goldwater back to the desert and all the conservatives with him, never to be seen or heard from again. You could look that up, too.


Four years later Richard Nixon arose from a California grave to preside over a Republican expansion of Lyndon Johnson's Democratic war, and four years after that the Republicans destroyed George McGovern and the Democrats. But the body politic burped and out popped a peanut farmer from Plains. Right on schedule, Ronald Reagan arrived on the next cycle with "the permanent Republican majority." Another burp produced Bill Clinton - "sex between the Bushes" - and now Barack Obama sits enthroned as the latest party-killer. Sometimes you don't have to be a psychic to read how the future returns from the past.


Neither do you have to be a particle-beam physicist to understand that for every action there's a reaction, nor a Harvard political science professor (it helps if you're not) to see a pattern in presidential cycles. Throwing the rascals out is great fun, but a wise man understands that with every new cycle we get a new set of rascals. Not yet two months into Barack Obama's presidency and already we see the first faint symptoms of rascalism, and worse, Carter-like incompetence.


Barack Obama continues to blame George W. Bush for every hic and headache - the economy, stubborn terrorism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and everything else that displeases. The celebrity-in-chief is entitled to time to find the dog that will eventually be his only friend. No one applied a measuring stick to Jimmy Carter for a full year; already critics are readying their measuring sticks for Mr. Obama.


Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, recalls an old Italian woman in her neighborhood who told her how to tell when the spaghetti is done. "You take a strand and fling it against the wall. If it's done, it sticks. If it's not done, it falls down the side of the stove. You keep flinging till one sticks. That is Obama's recovery plan. Cash infusions for the banks, fling. Tax increases, thwack! Pork - excuse me, public investment, splat! When we look back years from now, we'll see what stuck."


The president continues to sail with the wind behind his back, riding high in the polls. Only knockers, churls, racists, rustics, bigots and knaves dare measure him, yet. But reckoning is coming; it always does. Nothing recedes like success. It's written in the stars.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.

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