Thursday, August 12, 2010
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
George Will: Netanyahu, the anti-Obama - '...Israel, with its deep sense of nationhood, is beyond unintelligible to such Europeans; it is a stench in their nostrils. Transnational progressivism is, as much as welfare state social democracy, an element of European politics that American progressives will emulate as much as American politics will permit. It is perverse that the European Union, a semi-fictional political entity, serves -- with the United States, the reliably anti-Israel United Nations and Russia -- as part of the "quartet" that supposedly will broker peace in our time between Israel and the Palestinians...' [Excellent.]
You pretty much nailed it, George.
Obama already acts like he's been running for Secretary General of the U.N., the same way he was running for President before he had warmed his senate seat.
He may have been starting his "President of the World" campaign while a senator when he proposed a tax on Americans for about $250 billion/year to be paid to the U.N. for the IMF to give to other countries.[The--"Global Poverty Act"]
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In 2008, after being rebuffed about using a military hospital in Germany as a backdrop and our wounded soldiers as props, Dear Leader gave a campaign speech in Berlin. His campaign team seeded the crowd with lots of small American flags for the spontaneous displays of affection for America (and support for Obama.) It was clear then that he was running for President of the World.
First he refused to just quietly visit wounded GIs as a Senator, without cameras and a media entourage, then he campaigned in Berlin, as if Berliners could vote for him.
Will is laser-like spot-on. And, again, nationalist/nationalism here reflects not any type of "nationalism" in scare quotes, to the contrary, it reflects a nationalism qua realism as applied to sovereignty and a warranted and necessary respect for borders - the difference between a properly conceived realism vs. a deluded and indulgent "post-nationalism, indulgent both in ideological terms, and narcissist terms as well.
"Netanyahu, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obama, the former professor and post-nationalist.
"One photograph is of Theodor Herzl, born 150 years ago. Dismayed by the eruption of anti-Semitism in France during the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century, Herzl became Zionism's founding father. Long before the Holocaust, he concluded that Jews could find safety only in a national homeland.
"The other photograph is of Winston Churchill, who considered himself "one of the authors" of Britain's embrace of Zionism. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 stated: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Beginning in 1923, Britain would govern Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.
"Netanyahu, his focus firmly on Iran ..."
The writing is not yet on the wall. Not yet.