The WSJ Personal Attacks on Mr. Obama Reach a New High (Low?) – The Big Gun, Norman Podhoretz

Are We Done Yet?

The Dismal Political Economist has already posted about how the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal have followed up the debt ceiling/deficit reduction “compromise” victory by Conservatives with a spate of personal attacks on the President.  The weekend after the “deal” there was a group of attacks highlighted by very personal remarks by Rep. Eric Cantor (R, Va) House Majority Leader.

WSJ Opinion Writers Getting Ready
to Pile on Mr. Obama

Then, because not everyone had gotten in on the piling on, a few days later some more columnists weighed in on Mr. Obama’s personal failings.  Now the Wall Street Journal has brought out the big gun, Norman Podhoretz.  A little introduction to Mr. Podhoretz is appropriate.

Mr. Podhoretz’s most recent book is devoted to the theme that Jews (yes The Dismal Political Economist is Jewish, yes he does take Mr. Podhoretz's attack on liberal Jews  personally) acting in their own best interests should be Conservative Republicans and not Democrats.  

The book,

WHY ARE JEWS LIBERALS?

By Norman Podhoretz

     337 pp. Doubleday. $27

is only partly condemned on the arrogance and condescension of the author, who appoints himself as “intellectual leader” of the Jewish people, someone who has to tell them how to act in their own best interests because they are too stupid to know better.   For Mr. Podhoretz the

refusal of others to assent to his beliefs is portrayed by Podhoretz not as a principled disagreement that is worthy of respect, but as a human failing. Jews are liberals, he concludes, as a consequence of “willful blindness and denial.”

The book only partly condemned because it suggests Jewish interests are somehow aligned with a group with large support from Evangelical Christians whose philosophy is that Jews and other non-Christian are condemned.  This results in situations like this, where Joe Strauss, a  Republican Jewish member of the Texas State House was opposed for a leadership position because

State Republican Executive Committee, official John Cook stressed the need for a Christian to lead other Christians in the legislature. 

"We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it," Cook said in the Nov. 30 e-mail, first published by the Texas Observer. 

Mr. Cook went on to say about a charge of anti-Semitism on his part,

"It's not true at all. I have friends who are Jewish," he said. "I have no racial bigotry."

A rare comment that needs no comment.

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No, the book is condemned because it totally fails to recognize one of the great cultural values of the Jewish religion, that helping others less fortunate than ourselves is noble task, and that consigning those who are less fortunate to a life of misery is a great failing.  A majority of Jews are Democrats and Progressives because they believe that government can be one of the tools to implement these values.

So (finally) getting to Mr. Podhoretz’s WSJ opinion piece one finds that he rehashes all of the old 2008 campaign themes about Mr. Obama’s radical nature, his hanging around with terrorists, his hatred for America and his desire to impose a European style socialist/communist regime on an unwilling American public.

we villainous conservatives do not see Mr. Obama as conciliatory or as "a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election." On the contrary, we see him as a president who knows all too well what he believes. Furthermore, what Mr. Westen regards as an opportunistic appeal to the center we interpret as a tactic calculated to obfuscate his unshakable strategic objective, which is to turn this country into a European-style social democracy while diminishing the leading role it has played in the world since the end of World War II.

And in what one hopes is the culmination and conclusion of the WSJ’s personal attacks on the President, Mr. Podhoretz says he is not fooled by the recent actions of Mr. Obama or by the criticism’s of him from his supporters

That is why my own answer to the question, "What Happened to Obama?" is that nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.

Well, you can see why the WSJ saved the best for last.  And you can see why Mr. Obama and his supporters want these type of attacks to continue, since much of his re-election depends upon the American public seeing his opponents not for what they say they are, but for what they really are.

And for those of you wondering why the WSJ even allows persons like Mr. Podhoretz to write for their opinion pages, well Mr. Podhoretz is Jewish and the WSJ has no "racial bigotry".