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Caroline B. Glick:
Olmert's parting blows
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by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q: Often customers looking for our competitor accidentally enter our store. Can we just serve them without comment?
Jonathan Tobin: Jewish pundit quiz on next year's news
Sept. 29, 2008
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Sept. 26, 2008
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The shofar and the Echo of Sinai
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Sept. 24, 2008
Greg Crosby: Home for the Holy Days
Ethel G. Hofman: Rosh Hashanah Favorites: Old-fashioned taste, reduced calories
Sept. 23, 2008
Caroline Glick: Liberalism or lives!?
Michael Ledeen: Dear President Ahmadinejad
Sept. 22, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q: I gave a check to a local merchant, but it hasn't been cashed in months. Probably they lost it. Do I have to tell them?
Diana West: We are losing Europe to Islam
Sept. 19, 2008
Rabbi Berel Wein: On harvesting success
Caroline B. Glick: It is time to act
Sept. 18, 2008
Rabbi Hillel Goldberg: Is camping the panacea to save Jewry from self-destruction?
Craig Gordon: Was SNL hilarity too much for Hillary?
Sept. 17, 2008
Jonathan Tobin: The Whole World Is Watching
The Kosher Gourmet
By Linda Gassenheimer: East meets Southwest in this quick meal: MEXICAN-ASIAN TOSTADOS
Sept. 16, 2008
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. : Into the fire
Everything's Relative : Your Official Jewish Guide to the 2008 USA Presidential Election
Sept. 15, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Enabling risky behavior
Diana West:
A day that will live in ... accommodating Islam
Sept. 11, 2008
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The skeleton in my closet
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein: Persecution and systematic destruction of Christians in the Middle East must be stopped
Sept. 10, 2008
Jonathan Tobin: There's Something About Sarah
The Kosher Gourmet by Kathy Manweiler: Who needs Chili's when you have these? Recipes for Mexican that taste great and are dietetic!
Our commitment to freedom
Sept. 9, 2008
Daniel Pipes: Must counterinsurgency wars fail?
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.:
Sept. 8, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: How far must one go to help somebody out of a contract?
Barry Rubin: Waiting For Something
Sept. 8, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : How far must one go to help somebody out of a contract?
Barry Rubin: Waiting For Something
March 22, 2007
J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)
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Jewish World Review
April 22, 2005
/ 13 Nissan, 5765
To Dems, it's 1974 forever
By
David Gelernter
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced recently that he is worried about the "hard, hard right" of the Republican Party, people whose goal is to turn "the clock back to the 1930s or the 1890s." I've never met one myself. There is no such Republican in the president's Cabinet, none in the Senate, and Schumer is talking nonsense. He wants to conceal the Big Switch that has transformed American politics. Today the Democrats are the party of reactionary liberalism. Republicans are the true progressives.
Yet if Schumer is mostly wrong, he is also unintentionally revealing. He seems to believe that "hard right" Republicans pine for the 1930s when statesmen like FDR and his disciples dominated the scene. He's right: Many Republicans do admire FDR. Republicans, after all, are his spiritual heirs.
This is serious business. If you agree that President Bush has no automatic right to call himself Lincoln's successor just because they are both "Republicans," then Democrats have no automatic right to FDR's mantle either. The Democrats and Republicans switched roles while no one was looking.
Schumer is a main man for the Dems, architect of a fine new way of holding a knife to the Senate's throat. Democrats threaten to filibuster Bush judicial nominees; one touch of Schumer's magic wand and they can no longer be confirmed by majorities, only landslides. (How many Democratic senators won by landslides?) If Republicans change the rules to disallow such vindictiveness, Democrats promise to throw a fit and bring Senate business to a halt.
The filibuster scheme perfectly epitomizes modern Democrats. Republicans want to move forward, confirm some judges. The Democrats' response: Freeze! Or we talk you to death. Democrats are the Stand Still party. They adore the status quo.
Conservatives won't settle for the status quo. They want this nation to champion justice, humanity, democracy. Democrats want America to tip-toe around the globe minding its own business, upsetting no one, venerating the Earth, etc. Why did Democrats leap to label Afghanistan and Iraq "new Vietnams"? Vietnam was 30-plus years ago! But for Democrats it is always 1974. Things change but Democrats don't.
Republicans want better schools: Why not try vouchers on a serious scale? Democrats' response: Hands off! Republicans want to knock the chip off the U.N.'s shoulder and retune Social Security so that even the poor can leave assets to their children. Democrats' response: Hands off! Conservatives wonder, why not let the people's representatives in state legislatures determine the nation's abortion policy? Democrats' response: Are you crazy? The smelly masses? Why is it their business?
Today's Democrats dislike democracy on principle, like Russian nobility circa 1905. Should Bush be allowed to pick federal judges merely because Republicans won the presidency, the Senate, the House, the country? No way! And why let the people decide about homosexual marriage when left-wing judges can make the law? Connecticut's governor just signed a law approving civil unions for gays and also stipulating that "marriage" means a man and a woman. Whatever you think of the outcome, this is democracy Schumerite Democrats should check it out.
At the nation's universities, an occasional conservative wonders whether just maybe racism, sexism and "class-ism" no longer explain every bad thing in the world. Could 30 years of affirmative action be enough? There are tenured professors who can't even remember a world without it. The Democrats' response: Hands off affirmative action!
Many people have noticed that today's political scene is confusing, hard to read Republicans wanting to save the world, Dems shouting "mind your own business." Republicans worrying about poor people's stake in society, Dems muttering "wake me up when it's over." Republicans sticking up for Israel, left-wing anti-Bush rallies toying with anti-Semitism. It's all terribly confusing, until you notice that you are looking at the picture upside down. Once you understand the Big Switch, everything starts to make sense.
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.
Yale professor David Gelernter is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, Jerusalem. To comment, please click here.
04/18/05: Turning American soldiers into an out-of-sight, out-of-mind servant class who are expected to do their duty and keep their mouths shut
© 2005, Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate
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