Gotta love the Arab News, and by "love" I mean "really don't like." For example, here's a column titled "Portrait of a Miserably Undecided US Voter" by Richard Curtiss. (More on him below.)
I don’t know how I got into this fix. There I was, with only six months to go before the November election. But then things happened, unexpected things, and each one seemed to upset me more than the previous event. A year ago I had decided that President George W. Bush had betrayed me, in particular, and therefore probably a very large bloc of similar-thinking voters.
After the eternal procrastinating of President Bill Clinton, at almost the last moment of his term, in the fall of 1998, he really tried to end the Israeli-Palestinian problem. But it was too late and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made mincemeat of him. All he had to do was make up a story that the United States had almost reached a deal and then that Yasser Arafat had welshed on it. All lies of course since if Netanyahu had agreed, the problem would have been solved.
Thus it was easy for me and thousands of other American voters to decide to give Bush a chance to solve the Israeli-Palestine dilemma. Our votes made the difference and it was right down to the wire in Florida that Bush won and candidate Al Gore lost. Then, less than a year later Sept.11 came along and everything seemed to change, particularly when it came time to do something about the Israeli-Palestine problem.
Curtiss goes on to condemn the Patriot Act comparing it to Japanese internment and not teaching German in schools during WWII. He also makes a reasonable criticism of Kerry as attempting to be on all sides of every issue. Then we get to his central thesis and probably the real reason why he voted for Bush in 2000 and not the ticket of Gore-
Lieberman.
It turned out that Kerry’s blue-blooded ancestors and the Bush family tree were pretty much alike. But there was one difference, probably a minor one, but still it stuck out like a sore thumb, at least to me. On his father’s side a Kerry had converted from Judaism to Catholicism when the family came to the United States.
No one had paid much attention to this until recently when Kerry himself began to bring up the subject. It seems that there have been many rabbis in the family tree and Kerry was exploiting this on the campaign trail, at least when it served his purposes. I suppose most Americans paid little attention to this but it certainly did not escape Kerry’s handlers who wanted to make sure that Kerry was going to be suitably pro-Israel.
Perhaps Kerry was trying to make the point that if you wanted a pro-Israel candidate you’d do much better with Kerry than with Bush, who didn’t have any such lineage at all. Kerry’s brother Cameron converted to Judaism when he married a Jewish woman. It’s also a fact that Cameron has been an adviser and political strategist for Kerry’s campaign.
John Kerry is a detestable political animal, almost without peer, who tries to be everything to everyone, but it really got to be too much for Curtiss when Kerry tried to exploit his Jewish heritage.
Apropos of nothing, Howard Dean’s wife, Judith, is Jewish and no one used that fact either for or against her husband. The truth of the matter is that in the American melting pot you can find a Jewish ancestor and probably just about any other kind of ancestor one wants. So what?
Exactly, "so what?" Who cares if Howard Dean's wife is Jewish? Curtiss is writing in the
Arab News so he must feel the need to explain his audience that just because you may be related to a Jew doesn't disqualify you from public office. You get the impression that Curtiss wishes it did. And you realize why he couldn't vote for Gore-
Lieberman.
And back to real life. Here we all sit, along with thousands of other undecided voters. Bush, for whatever reason, does not have a single adviser who is Jewish in his Cabinet, unlike Clinton who had an extraordinary number of advisers and appointees who were Jewish. Which candidate’s group is the best bet for solving the Palestine problem, which in my case, is the key to peace in the Middle East?
Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who was a major confidante of Clinton’s, is still tangled up with his advisers four years later. Now Berger seems to have “lost” some keynotes that he should have disposed of at the time he left office. The notes have disappeared and they are highly classified. Do Americans want another Sandy Berger who may well have been handing over classified materials to Israelis for years? I don’t think so.
What? This guy is insane. After listening to 4 years of "neo-con" talk about Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, all current or past members of the Bush administration, plus the cadre of columinists, Kristol, Krauthammer, Podheretz, Goldberg, et al, all we've heard was how Bush foreign policy
was in the control of a Jewish cabal. Now Curtiss. who
appears really hate Jews puts it out there that Sandy Berger lifted classified documents from the National Archive to give to Israel. This is unbelievable. It was really Clinton who allowed the Zionists wolves into the henhouse!
As I read this I figured this Curtiss guy must have written previous stuff of this sort so I searched on LGF. Ah, yes now I remember. He was part of the group of former ambassadors to Arab countries who sent a letter to President Bush back in May.
Former US diplomats and government officials are collecting signatures on a letter urging President George W. Bush to reconsider US support for Israel. The diplomats, some of whom belong to the American Educational Trust (AET), plan to release the text at a press conference in Washington on Tuesday. ...
There's also
this post about the group of terror-enabler-apologist that Curtiss is running. Now it makes sense.
I'm really glad that the Arab News has such insightful American minds on their pages which can only bridge the gap between our two cultures.
/sarcasm.
