Jewish ingratitude

#1

I don’t know if Paul Krugman reads Cross-Currents or what, but that far-left NY Times writer had a column today seemingly in reply to my post of a few weeks ago. I wrote that Bush won Florida, and today Krugman is singing that tired old song, “We should have won, oh woe is us.” The link was sent to me by an acquaintance today.

#2

Krugman wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/opinion/22krugman.html

“One answer is that many editorials and op-ed articles have claimed that no possible recount would have changed the outcome. Let’s be charitable and assume that those who write such things are victims of the echo chamber, and believe that what everyone they talk to says must be true.” –Krugman

To which I replied:

Everyone I personally talk to believes the same thing that Krugman believes, namely, that Gore “really” won and the Supreme Court “stole” his election. But that is because I talk to Jews all the time.

I have not seen one single article or editorial claiming that “no possible recount would have changed the outcome” in the mainstream media, quite the contrary, I have seen literally HUNDREDS of references to the totally false “fact” that a recount would have given the election to Gore and that the Supreme Court decision somehow illicitly gave Bush an unearned victory.

I read the NY Times report at the time very carefully. Every vote in Florida was painstakingly counted over a period of months. The Times report was many pages long, published over a period of five days, and it concluded that Bush won, and would have won by any count of all the ballots as they were cast (without mind reading).

Krugman is now lying, as he so often does, totally misrepresenting what his own newspaper and the Miami Herald reported in 2001. He is such a dishonest person that you can never trust anything he writes without independent verification. It is his idea of integrity: he totally believes in the Orwellian principle, “THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS” and he truly, totally, in his heart of hearts believes that Gore SHOULD have won and DESERVED to win. And therefore in the tradition of leftists since the French Revolution, he believes that rewriting history is the most honorable course of action for a man of principle.

#3

My correspondent (“MC”) wrote in response:

“he totally believes in the liberal principle, ‘THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS’ ”

Oh, sorry. I thought that was Bush’s policy when he lied about WMD’s to pull us into war.

#4

I replied:

You are a walking cliche.

Everyone on the left has “forgotten” that EVERYONE was terrified of Saddam. Everyone believed that he had nuclear, biological and chemical weapons–certainly he had attempted to buy the materials to make WMD — and perhaps you have forgotten those hair-raising pictures of Kurds he killed? Saddam was the most terrifying dictator in the world, more famous and more scary than Osama, now he’s a paper tiger, defanged and conquered, Baruch Hashem a million times for George Bush

When he ran against Gore, it was not a campaign in which the Gore side said that Saddam was harmless and the Bush side lied and said that Saddam was dangerous. BOTH sides thought he was dangerous, and the campaign fight was over what to do about it. One side wanted to go in and clean him up and save the world from the threat he posed, and the other side wanted to give sanctions a chance to work — ie, as we now know, to keep giving Saddam and Kofi Annan billions of dollars while Saddam impoverished his own people. Remember the Food-for-Oil scandal?

The idea that Bush “lied” because he believed what the whole world believed (and what there was ample evidence for — e.g., why did Saddam kick out UN inspectors?) is itself a lie that has been deliberately propogated, knowingly, by the likes of Krugman — and then mindlessly picked up and echoed by “useful idiots” like yourself.

Neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton has ever accused Bush of “lying about WMD” because they remember how Bill spent eight years sweating bullets and quaking in his boots for fear that Saddam would unleash anthrax or chemical weapons in the New York subway system, or would lob a nuke over towards Israel. The Clintonistas didn’t know that Saddam had no WMD, they thought he did, and they already knew from the Kurds that he was capable of using them.

But B”H thanks to the fact that the media monopoly has been broken, the useful idiots of the left are not as useful as they used to be. You are too young to remember — but I am old enough to remember — when there were no conservative radio shows and no conservative internet writers, and the ONLY alternatives to the media monopoly were small intellectual monthlies like National Review and Commentary, kept aloft due to the generosity and idealism of people like William F. Buckley, may G-d grant him many years of life and good health.

In those days it seemed utterly hopeless to think that conservative ideas would ever have a mass audience, or that there would ever be a way to break through the stranglehold that the chattering classes held on the country.

#5

I also wrote to MC:

BTW Krugman’s ploy of pretending that everyone thinks Bush won (when really everyone falsely thinks Gore won), of pretending that the mainstream leftist media echo chamber is somehow a lonely voice in the wilderness, is a classic leftist disinformation ploy. The Bolsheviks perfected it, wielding power while pretending to be the persecuted underdog.

#6

MC wrote back:

I think you have that backwards. The conservatives are the ones who control all three branches of the government, yet whine about how oppressed they are.

And the echo chamber, these days, is talk radio and the cable news which is heavily GOP (And the liberals never gave us anything as reprehensible as Fox News or Rush Limbough.)

#7

MC in talking about cable news seems to have forgotten CNN. Rush mentioned the NY Times findings only once (that I heard–possibly he mentioned it other times when I wasn’t listening, but he certainly didn’t dwell on it). I think Michael Medved may have mentioned it once. That’s it for media. If I heard once I heard 500 times that the election was “stolen” — it’s a perennial anti-Bush whiners’ favorite.

Republicans “control” the government (i.e., have a majority of seats) only because this is a democracy, B”H. The left dominates the print media, radio and TV news (as opposed to talk radio), book publishing, academia and Hollywood, and apparently, big chunks of the blogosphere. Fox is not conservative but it is not stridently anti-American and anti-Israel, the way CNN is, which is why Fox has been tagged with the conservative stigma. But the left still has the AP, Reuters, NPR, ABC, CBS and NBC news, not that too many people under the age of 65 watch such biased news sources anymore.

Rush Limbaugh is an ohev Yisrael who is very vocally pro-Israel. He has an audience of millions, compared to Buckley’s readership of hundreds of thousands, and I thank G-d that people like him have a strong voice in the national debate. If it were not for people like Rush, the media would be uniformly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. Here in Miami, even on Rush’s own station, the news every half hour is very leftist and anti-Israel.

One very ugly midah I see in Jewish Democrats is a complete and utter lack of hakaras hatov. It’s one thing to say you disagree with conservatives on this or that issue, quite another thing to label our friends with epithets like “reprehensible” — an adjective that could only be used against Rush Limbaugh by someone who does not listen to his show. Listen to him for six weeks and you will be convinced that he is one of the most decent men in the public forum today. It behooves us to be grateful to our friends, not to spit at them.

And Bush won Florida. With, by the way, close to 70% of the Orthodox Jewish vote.