Israel Insults the U.S. with Go-It-Alone Tactics?

 

 

 

By DeWayne Wickham

Yes.  You are reading the title correctly, “Israel Insults the U.S. with Go-It-Alone Tactics!

Mr. Wickham does a bit of magic here.  Now Israeli leader, Netanyahu, is isolated into a room by Mr. Obama who has given his ungrateful friend a list of 13 demands and leaves the room to let the Prime Minister think about them.  

So we are to believe that Americans should feel  insulted when  Mr. Netanyahu goes  back home alone without capitulating to Israel’s bosom, long time friend, Barack Hussein Obama.   No one but the dead, Israel’s enemies, and the unknowing in the world could expect the Prime Minister to accept his own political suicide.  But, America is supposed to be insulted.   Well, this certainly is the world of Obama.

Here is how Mr. Wickham explains it:

“The unspoken message that the Obama administration appeared to send Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week is this: Stop behaving like an ungrateful friend.

Ever since Netanyahu’s government blindsided Vice President Biden during his recent visit to the Jewish state with an announcement that it will build 1,600 housing units in East Jerusalem, the Obama administration has been smarting.

And for good reason.

Of all the hurdles to an enduring peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, the fate of Jerusalem — which both claim as their capital — is the most daunting. Every time Israel breaks ground on more housing there, the peace lamps flicker.

Reeling from Israel’s announcement, the Obama administration urged Netanyahu to rescind the decision. In a phone call, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the prime minister that the new construction was “a deeply negative signal” about Israel’s relationship with the United States. The Israeli government “needed to demonstrate not just through words but through specific actions” its commitment to that relationship and the peace process, Clinton said, according to State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley.

But in a speech last week in Washington to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Netanyahu thumbed his nose at these concerns. “Jerusalem is not a settlement; it’s our capital,” he proclaimed.

Israel’s benefactor

The United States is Israel’s oldest and closest friend. And since its creation in 1948, Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of American foreign aid. In addition to now receiving nearly $3 billion annually in grants from this country, Israel has gotten billions of dollars worth of loan guarantees since 1972 to help build housing and shore up its economy.

While Israel is forbidden from using any of this money to construct housing in its occupied territory, the largesse frees Israel to use other parts of its budget to fund such projects. Not to mention that without U.S. military assistance, Israel would struggle to fend off its enemies.

A costly commitment

Our support of Israel is costly in non-monetary ways, too.

“The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests” in that part of the world, Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, told the Senate Armed Services Committee this month. “Arab anger over the Palestinian question” hurts this country’s relationship with other governments in the region and “weakens the legitimacy” of moderate Arab leaders, he said.

And while unemployment in Israel dropped to 7.4% in the last quarter of 2009, joblessness during that period in the U.S. hovered around 10%.

The investment of treasure, and as Petraeus hinted, perhaps U.S. blood, on behalf of Israel should evoke deep gratitude. Instead, Netanyahu’s government takes a go-it-alone approach when it serves Israel’s interest — the rest of the world be damned.

The United States is right to champion Israel’s right to exist, of course, and to provide an umbrella of protection to help ensure the Jewish state’s survival. But the Netanyahu government strains this longstanding friendship when it pursues a course of action that unnecessarily inflames passions in the Arab world and weakens the ability of moderate Arab leaders to talk peace.”

Comment:  It is good that Mr. Wickham reports that “the United States is right to champion Israel’s right to exist”….which is very generous for Obama folks to grant.  But, I am insulted that he does not emphasize that it is our American duty to guarantee Israel WILL exist, rather than play adversary with our friends in Jerusalem. 

This Obama administration is a government of topsy-turvy without much delightful humor or music.   The president pretends the world will be safer without nuclear weapons.  He may be that stupid, and would be if his primary interest has been to represent the country in which he has been elected leader.  The president pretends Netanyahu can concede Jewish Jerusalem to a Barack Hussein Obama for future negotiations with folks who want to irradicate them. 

Is Obama that stupid or is he gaming for an allegiance with the Arab bloc at Israel’s expense.  I am wondering how  the 78% of American Jews  who voted for  this Obama are going to spin this insult to America?

Obama slurs his own nation and its friends frequently…..while cuddling their  enemies.

More Catastrophe for the Tax Payer

The National Center for  Policy Analysis sent  the following digest of Mark Steyn’s prognostication recently in the Washington Times:

“In 2003, Congress passed the Medicare prescription drug benefit.  However, in order to discourage American businesses from immediately dumping all their drug plans for retirees, Congress gave them a tax break equivalent to 28 percent of the cost of the plan.

Fast-forward to the dawn of the Obamacare utopia.  In one of many little clauses in a 2,000-page bill, Congress voted to subject the 28 percent tax benefit to the corporate tax rate of 35 percent.

On the day President Obama signed Obamacare into law, Verizon sent an e-mail to all of its employees warning that the company’s costs “will increase in the short term.” And in the medium term?  U.S. corporations that are able to do so will get out of their prescription drug plan and toss their retirees onto the Medicare pile, says Mark Steyn, author of New York Times best-seller America Alone: 

• About 3,500 businesses presently claim the 28 percent tax break.
• The cost to taxpayers of that 28 percent benefit is about $665 per person.
• The cost to taxpayers of equivalent Medicare coverage is about $1,200 per person.
• This means adding more to the ranks of Medicare as corporation’s drop their retiree drug plans will roughly double the cost of covering an estimated five million retirees.

This single component of health care reform neatly encompasses all the broader trends about where America is headed — not just in terms of increased costs and worse care, but also in the remorseless governmentalization of American life and the disincentivization of the private sector, according to Steyn.”

Source: Mark Steyn, “Steyn: A healthy dose of catastrophe,” Washington Times, March 27, 2010.

What’s the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh of Salon

I have never read an article written by a white Lefty entitled “What’s the Matter with Black People” .  Ms. Walsh had race on her mind.   She writes for Salon.   She’s writing “What’s the Matter with White People”.

Beyond this point Ms. Walsh is remarkably clueless about the half of the American population which does not see themselves as snobs born and bred to micromanage nonMarxist grunts   She cannot understand why these folks aren’t thrilled about being bribed.

I am a grunt.  I work for a living.  I am white and have championed black causes even before it became chic.  Several of my American heroes this very moment are black.  But, I am not interested in living in a one party plantation culture  run by political hacks bribing and muscling folks who don’t fit their proscribed station in life. 

Joan Walsh, I am certain, went to college.    Read her writing below.  Joan Walshes are a penny a dozen among the college “learned” Left.   Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman….and all of the other Leftwing racists need to be read regularly.  Why do they think the way they write?  Where did they learn to write what they write?      What are their assumptions?  Where is their proof ,  their truth?

Piece together the world from which they have grown, these people who have been programmed to form  the New Order of Americans.  They are the overseers of the community plantation.   Know them well.  Know them for what they value.  Know them for what they are planning for your future.

Ms. Walsh writes:

“ Thinking about race this weekend, I got more out of a column by Ron Brownstein, which examined poll data showing that white voters — wrongly — tend to believe healthcare reform helped “other people,” not themselves.

Even though the Obama administration tried to stress the bill’s benefits to all families — insurance for folks with preexisting conditions, restrictions on companies dropping you when you get sick, letting kids stay on parents’ policies until they’re 26, as well as subsidies that will mainly go to middle- and working-class families (the poor are already covered by Medicaid) — a Gallup survey found that 57 percent of white respondents said that the bill would help the uninsured, and 52 percent said that it would improve conditions for low-income families. Only a third of whites thought it would benefit the country, and shockingly, only 20 percent thought it would benefit their family. (Nonwhites polled were more likely to say the bill would help their families.)

Those doubts were especially pronounced among white voters with less than a college education, Gallup found — the group that most resisted candidate Obama in 2008. They’re the least likely to say the plan would benefit the country, even though they’re more than twice as likely to lack health insurance as college-educated whites. We can shake our heads at their ignorance, perhaps even racism, or we can try to understand the roots of their doubt. Brownstein points to a Stanley Greenberg poll that found these whites are reaching a tipping point that could send them even more enthusiastically toward Republicans this year. He also notes that among the 34 House Democrats who opposed the healthcare reform bill, 28 percent come from districts with a higher than average percentage of non-college educated whites in their districts.

I’ve written before about Lane Kenworthy’s research tracing the decline of Democratic support among white working-class voters between the mid-’70s and 1990s. “Beginning in the mid-to-late 1970s,” Kenworthy and his collaborators found, “there was increasing reason for working-class whites to question whether the Democrats were still better than the Republicans at promoting their material well-being.” By the time of the Clinton recovery in the late 1990s, those voters were already too down on Democrats, and taken with divisive GOP us-vs.-them rhetoric, to give Democrats any credit for the improved economy.

So there’s a long history here of Republicans preying on white working-class insecurity, and Democrats mostly ignoring it, that shapes the response to healthcare reform. That’s why, to me, it was so important for Democrats to pass the bill, flawed as it was. Democrats need to deliver on their promises, with tangible benefits for their voters, and if whites remain suspicious now, maybe watching the bill’s colorblind protections help all groups can change white opinions about social spending. Maybe not. But Democrats are going to have to do a better job of selling the bill’s benefits to everybody to prevail in November, and Brownstein’s column framed the problem without name-calling.”