That Barack Obama is a distinguished Left-winger is no secret. Almost a mark of status and prestige; the little guy fighting for the common guy n’ gal against challenging odds. The story creates its own narrative and takes on its own momentum where an idyll world of soft socialism is going to make America great again. Of course, its a very ingenious spin and one typical of post-modernists very securely ensconced into the fibers of our secular establishment. Its the kind of preaching from within that fails to sympathize with or acknowledge visions that foreshadowed the Obama vision; its the classic white liberal trap of enjoying the luxury of power and the thrill and high of rebellion in which the simple people, the unwashed are viewed as oppressors and themselves as righteous and defiant, individualists, subversives, who are resisting powerful forces who are reactionary and backward. But they miss the point, the attitude is condescending, colonizing and racist and the Obama “touch” is exactly this sort of Orientalism and the “other” in Middle East politics that serves as a microcosm of the same white linen attitude on home turf.
This of course, filters down to the press, the current head priest being the venerable Thomas Friedman, and the prayer book that opens on the left and stays on the left side of the page: Dismember Israel piece by piece, and any means is fair play. They have bastardized the middle and small “L” liberalism into a form of leftist secularism that finds its kicking can in Israel, almost an obsession that can quickly flex into the anti-semitic category by playing the zionist card when those values of Zionism are deeply inculcated in the leftist democratic dialog of today; they just don’t like it that the natives are getting “uppity” the religious demographic is upsetting to the Reform Judaism crowd of genteel manners and quiet double parking length services. Its almost a mark of enlightenment to be anti-semitic in this milieu disguised as “honest and transparent straight talk”. And people like Thomas Friedman march to that drum.Reverend Jeremiah Wright light. The jews are not a superior people nor more moral than any other group, and there is no reason why they should be, and should be expected to do the heavy lifting either…
Yoram Ettinger: Swept by wishful-thinking, T.F. assumed that Bashar could liberalize Syria, attract international investors, normalize relations with Israel, end the Arab rejection of the Jewish State, thus demolishing the Iran-Syria axis and ending Iran’s involvement in Lebanon. The prerequisite for such an enterprising scenario was an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. However, as expected, Bashar chose to follow in the footsteps of his ruthless father, Hafiz Assad, slaughtering T.F.’s assumptions and Syria’s domestic opposition, irrespective of the Golan Heights, Israel’s policies or existence.
In August, 2006, T.F. told NPR Radio that Bashar Assad’s Syria was not a natural ally of Iran. He maintained that Syria could resume its traditional role as an ally of the pro-US Arab camp of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Thus, he rewrote Syria’s recent history, which has been consistently anti-US since 1946, as well as pro-Iran since 1979.Read More:http://www.theettingerreport.com/OpEd/OpEd—Israel-Hayom/Tom-Friedman-–-Mistaken-or-Misleading-.aspx
(see link at end)…“I think their feeling was that, even in this world of infinite voices, there are X number of people who shape what we do as a society,” with the columnists as a key segment of that elite, said Ronald Brownstein, a National Journal columnist who has spent time with the president and key advisors. It may be, Brownstein added, that Obama took a media-strategy page from Bill Clinton’s playbook: “You campaign in television and you govern in print.”
As part of this governance strategy, certain columnists come to be seen as political proxies, with Brooks, on the center-right, viewed as a stand-in for independent voters open to persuasion from Obama, and Brooks’s Times colleague, Paul Krugman, on the liberal end of the spectrum, seen as the embodiment of a restive Democratic base.Read More:http://www.cjr.org/feature/all_the_presidents_pundits.php?page=all
(see link at end)…There’s a thin line between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. That’s true of Muslims and the left, but it’s also true specifically of the Jewish left, whose hatred for Israel manifests itself in a general contempt for Jewish religion, culture and tradition.
Take the “Jewbags” case of Danielle Gilbert, a staffer for Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz who had been appointed the DNC’s Jewish outreach liaison. In a social media mishap, Gilbert posed along with her friends in a photo that she captioned “JEWBAGS” and that a friend of hers captioned as “Jew cash money team.” This is the sort of incident that the hip crowd that thinks “Heeb” is a great name for a magazine and “Jewcan Sam
is hilarious will laugh off. But it’s hardly the most offensive thing about Gilbert from a Jewish perspective. It’s just a symptom of the problem.Read More:http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/jewbags-and-the-democrats-anti-israel-liaison/
ADDENDUM:
But Friedman is neither anti-Semite nor self-hating Jew. Using either epithet to defame him is simplistic and offensive. If Friedman is “a dyed-in-the-wool Israel hater,” as my esteemed fellow columnist Caroline Glick called him yesterday, despite many ties to Israel and his deep, conflicted feelings about the place, what do you call Noam Chomsky? If we group his columns with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion how should we respond to the real, virulent, anti-Semitism so prevalent in the Arab press – or increasingly in the European press? My broad Zionist tent is big enough to welcome Friedman, even while slamming him for being sloppy and insensitive, letting his distaste for Bibi Netanyahu override good taste.
Twenty years ago, President George H.W. Bush called himself “one lonely little guy” facing “powerful political forces” after 1200 Israel activists lobbied Congress seeking loan guarantees to help Israel resettle emigrating Soviet Jews. Shoshana Cardin, the President of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, asked to meet Bush. As Sheila Segal recounts, when Cardin explained that implying that Jewish lobbyists outmuscled America’s President echoed traditional exaggerations about Jewish power and stirred anti-Semitism. Bush replied, “But I didn’t specifically mention the Jews, did I?” Cardin replied: “You didn’t have to. It was very clear to us and to everyone. It was offensive, and it was personally painful.” Bush, abashed, apologized. So should Friedman. Read More:http://blogs.jpost.com/content/thomas-friedman-and-others-israel-–-sloppy-not-self-hating
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These questions go to one of the murkiest corners of the media landscape—the rules and practices of political punditry. History suggests that punditry is a form of journalism that can be particularly ripe for manipulation by presidents with a natural interest in shaping opinion coverage to burnish their images and advance their goals. And Obama, it seems, for all his reputation for being somewhat aloof, is very much an actor in this game of courtship—with the pundits themselves, operating by their own personal codes of conduct, mostly willing to play along.
They shouldn’t always be.
The term pundit itself is appropriately exotic—it comes from the Sanskrit pandita, for “learned” person. The popular image of a pundit suggests a wide-bottomed sort, office thumb in mouth, conjuring political opinion from some ethereal cloud.
In fact, the best pundits do their own first-hand reporting, including visits to hot spots like war zones. Still, punditry long has been, and still is, a classic form of access journalism, with the most influential pundits scooping up valuable tidbits from high-level sources in Washington, with the president, of course, at the top of the pinnacle.
The most famous of the type was Walter Lippmann, renowned for his extensive involvements with a string of presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon Johnson. Lippmann had no compunction about offering them private advice, and neither did another bigwig syndicated columnist from the age, Joseph Alsop. At the Democrats’ 1960 convention, Alsop barged into nominee John F. Kennedy’s hotel suite to press the case for Johnson as the best pick for vice president. Alsop then, typically, filed a column on the VP choices facing Kennedy—without any mention of his own behind-the-scenes machinations. Nor was he above pulling punches in his column (written with his brother Stewart, for a time) to stay in the good graces of JFK, who supped on caviar and Moet & Chandon as a dinner guest at Joe’s Georgetown home.Read More:http://www.cjr.org/feature/all_the_presidents_pundits.php?page=all