This is brilliant—and so true!:

Americans are like the crowd at the Circus, sitting and waiting to be entertained.
While in front of them a bunch of people are chasing each other with foam bats, throwing foam bricks and buckets of confetti.
Democarts [sic], republicans, and Libertarians.
Pretty much all of whom are “clowns”
rest assured though the main event is due!
But We ain’t gonna like it.

Comment by Barry 0351

—from the comments at Austin Bay’s blog

The Forward has compiled a List of Fifty:

Membership in the 50 doesn’t mean that the Forward endorses what these individuals do or say. We’ve chosen them because they are doing and saying things that are making a difference in the way American Jews, for better or worse, view the world and themselves. Not all these people have put their energies into the traditional frameworks of Jewish community life, but they all have embodied the spirit of Jewish action as it is emerging in America, and all of them have left a mark.

Some samples:

Rahm Emanuel and Charles Schumer
No one raised an eyebrow when the Democratic Party decided, in its bid to recapture Congress this year, to name a pair of boychiks from the old neighborhood to mastermind the campaign: Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Northside Chicago, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Senator Chuck Schumer of Brooklyn, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Both are aggressive campaigners who managed to breathe some much-needed moxie into the party while avoiding the gaffes that sank fellow party leaders like Howard Dean and John Kerry.

Abraham Foxman
If a man can be known by the enemies he makes, then Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, must be one of the toughest Jews in America. Now in his 20th year as ADL chief, Foxman, 66, has become a magnet for attacks by critics of Israel, opponents of the Israel lobby and just plain Jew-bashers who like to take him on in hopes of showing how tough they are. The latest of these slapdowns came last month in a public letter addressed to Foxman, signed by 114 prominent American intellectuals, upbraiding him for a phone call - which he never made - supposedly bullying the Polish consul in New York to cancel a lecture by historian Tony Judt. Why do they pick on Foxman? Mostly because they’ve heard of him.

Also:

“Jon is driven,” his friend and producer Ben Karlin told Rolling Stone recently, “by the forces of guilt and shame and fear of being on the outside that gives Jews their comic angst.”

And one more:

Sacha Baron Cohen
Baron Cohen bought a home in Los Angeles where he’s settling down with his fiancee, Australian beauty Isla Fisher, who is preparing to convert to Judaism. The first step ― buying a home here ― qualifies Baron Cohen for inclusion in the Forward 50, which is for members of the American Jewish community. The second, conversion, tells you a lot about why he intrigues us. His shtick, first aired on HBO’s “Da Ali G Show,” leaves half of us gasping and the other half outraged. It’s riddled with the basest antisemitism, racism, misogyny and anti-Kazakh stereotypes. We know he means it as a joke, a way of holding up a mirror to our flaws. But he’s only half kidding.

Also featured on the list: Scarlett Johansson (though she’s only half-Jewish), Philip Roth, Shawn Green, and Dennis Ross. And for the piece de resistance: the four gospels of Mel.

Check it out.

Krauthammer offers some on the overall election results, which is good, because has been sorely lacking in the blogospheric punditocracy:

The Europeans fight goal line to goal line, from socialist left to ultra-nationalist right. On the American political spectrum, these extremes are negligible. American elections are fought on much narrower ideological grounds. In this election the Democrats carried the ball from their own 45-yard line to the Republican 45-yard line.

The fact that the Democrats crossed midfield does not make this election a great anti-conservative swing. Republican losses included a massacre of moderate Republicans in the Northeast and Midwest. And Democratic gains included the addition of many conservative Democrats, brilliantly recruited by Rep. Rahm Emanuel with classic Clintonian triangulation. Hence Heath Shuler of North Carolina, antiabortion, pro-gun, anti-tax — and now a Democratic House member.

The result is that both parties have moved to the right. The Republicans have shed the last vestiges of their centrist past, the Rockefeller Republicans. And the Democrats have widened their tent to bring in a new crop of blue-dog conservatives.

And here’s something that should make hard-left Dems think. (It won’t, but it should.):

In Michigan, liberal Democrats swept the gubernatorial and senatorial races, yet a ballot initiative to abolish affirmative action passed 58 to 42 percent. Seven of eight proposed state constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage were approved. And nine states passed referendums asserting individual property rights against the government’s power of eminent domain.

Book publishers have posted their anemic 2006 results in the last few days.Today, blazing into the future (only five to ten years late), one division of a Giant Publisher posts this job listing [emphasis added]:

The [Illustrious] Publishing Group seeks a New Media Manager for the [Very Illustrious] and [Equally Illustrious] imprints. Responsibilities will include updating both imprints’ websites and working with the Marketing and Publicity teams to devise creative ways to market hardcover books online. Additional responsibilities include creating and executing online marketing plans for major frontlist titles. Building out publisher websites to help [Very Illustrious]and [Equally Illustrious] promote backlist titles and utilize e-commerce capabilities. Overseeing the process by which all basic content is posted to publisher websites and feeds to online retail partners in a timely manner. Overseeing the process by which content is scheduled to appear on the [GiantPublisher.com] website and in corporate newsletters. Managing website redesigns as needed. Gathering and sharing metrics. Writing and editing e-newsletters, blog posts, and homepage and category page promotions. Attending all imprint marketing meetings and corporate Internet Marketing Forums. Staying abreast of trends in the interactive industry, and educating publishing colleagues about current opportunities.

Imagine that! The Very Illustrious and the Equally Illustrious have discovered that the internets can help sell books.

This is the question for American supporters of Israel—not to mention American supporters of lobbying, and lobbyists—to raise, and in a public way. And soon. It’s a fair question, if you assume that any one lobby can have “too much” influence and if you can all agree on what just the right amount of influence is. And if you can decide what “influence” is, anyway. And how it’s exerted. Overtly? Covertly? How, exactly? By making phone calls? threats? offering bribes? How do you know? What did you see? If you didn’t see anything, how do you know? Who told you? You don’t know the guy who told you?…

You get the picture. Or so I hope.

So: Attack the growing creepiness head-on. Don’t let it fester.

What “growing creepiness?” you ask. Er…um…this growing creepiness, reported by the Forward: a DVD featuring recent appearances by Professors Walt and Mearsheimer expounding their “Israel Lobby” theories and recommendations (to cut Israel loose). The DVD was produced by the Council for the National Interest foundation:

Seeking to capitalize on the publicity swirling around a high-profile report attacking the role of the “Israel Lobby” in shaping American foreign policy, an advocacy group that opposes America’s close relationship with the Jewish state is hocking a DVD on Amazon.com of two recent public debates involving one of the paper’s authors.

This is the same group I wrote about here, when I first noticed them riding Walt and Mearsheimer’s coattails. They’re still riding.

The Council for the National Interest Foundation, which Sunday published its third full-page ad in the New York Times this year condemning America’s alliance with Israel, is poised this week to market “The Tipping Point: Changing Perceptions of the U.S.-Israel Relationship,” according to the foundation’s director, Eugene Bird.

If you want to check out this self-proclaimed “grassroots non-partisan” foundation, here’s their website.

This is the kind of danger Alan Dershowitz wrote about in his rebuttal to Walt and Mearsehimer:

What would motivate two recognized academics to issue a compilation of previously made assertions that they must know will be used by overt anti-Semites to argue that Jews have too much influence, that will give an academic imprimatur to crass bigotry, and that will place all Jews in government and the media under suspicion of disloyalty to America?

Some of Walt and Mearsheimer’s defenders*** have said they are not, personally, bigoted. The professors were, they said, made uncomfortable by the early enthusiastic reception they received from David Duke. Likewise, the editor of the London Review of Books wasn’t pleased with Duke’s endorsement. The professors and the magazine weren’t looking for those kinds of endorsements.

Here’s the thing, though: when you move into the arena of political operations—where the two activist professors find themselves now—you can’t choose your supporters. Lie down with dogs and all that.

———
***I have written about this subject ad nauseam, or so it seems to me, and don’t feel like linking. Here’s a post with lots of links.

James Baker, the same man who secured the White House for Bush in the post-election period of 2000, is being greeted as a liberator by the Democrats. Apparently, they are so hysterically opposed to using American power to defend Enlightenment values and so bankrupt of ideas that they actually think it’s a good thing that Baker is back at the White House, that Scowcroft will have the ear of the president, and that the insufferable Brzezinski has reason to gloat.

Here’s the scorecard from The Times (London):

GOING UP. . .
# James Baker

# Robert Gates

# Brent Scowcroft

# George Bush Sr

# Condoleezza Rice Mark I and Mark III

. . . GOING DOWN

# Donald Rumsfeld

# Dick Cheney

# John Bolton

# George Bush Jr

Missing from this list, of course, is the eminence gris. (Pundits conveniently seem to have forgotten Bob Woodward’s recent revelation that Henry the K has been a frequent guest at the White House.)

For a refresher course on the coldhearted, hard-headed crew that will now be running our Iraq policy—the same folks who abandoned the Shi’ites last time—here’s a piece in the New Yorker that probably had a lot to do with Dubya’s post-election change of course.

America is a selfish, self-involved, narcissistic giant, and it wants to go back to doing what it does best: working hard and playing hard. We’ll see how that works out.