George W. Bush’s Jewish Problem. By Tevi Troy.

George W. Bush’s Jewish Problem. By Tevi Troy. Real Clear Religion, November 15, 2013.

George W. Bush, Messianics, and the Left. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, November 8, 2013.

Does the U.S.-Israel Alliance Have a Future? By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Does the U.S.-Israel Alliance Have a Future? By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, November 14, 2013.

Israel Has No Alternative to U.S. Alliance. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, November 12, 2013.

Tobin:

Perhaps a week when the U.S. secretary of state told a Senate committee to “stop listening to the Israelis” and to ignore their concerns about the existential threat from the Iranian nuclear program wasn’t the best timing to write about the importance and the permanence of the U.S.-Israel alliance. But bad timing or not, my post about the rumblings from some in Israel about an alternative to their ties to the only true superpower in the world has provoked some interesting comments and led me to think a bit more about the topic as well. In fact, weeks such as the one we’re currently experiencing may be the best time for those who care about the relationship to explore how to shore it up and the stakes involved for both countries. Even as Kerry seems to be doing everything to downgrade the relationship, it’s important to point out that not only is there no rational alternative to it from Israel’s point of view but that it is of vital importance to the United States as well.

 

First, let me address the question of whether it is wise to inextricably link Israel’s wellbeing to America’s standing in the world. Martin Kramer wrote here that he agreed with me that it is dangerous for anyone in Israel to even consider trying to play China or Russia off the United States in a vain attempt to outmaneuver Washington when it comes to questions like the nuclear peril from Iran. But he disagreed with this passage from my post:

Israel’s long-term safety must be seen as linked to the ability of the United States to maintain its status as the leader of the free world. Even at times of great tension with Washington, Israelis must never forget that it is not just that they have no viable alternatives to the U.S. but that American power remains the best hope of freedom for all nations.

Kramer believes that American power, like all power, “waxes and wanes.” He goes on to write the following:

More than six years ago, before Obama even declared his candidacy, I told the Conference of Presidents that “America’s era in the Middle East will end one day,” and that “it is possible that in twenty years’ time, America will be less interested and engaged in the Middle East. What is our Plan B then?” Obama accelerated that timetable, but the long-term trend has been clear for years. And one doesn’t have to be a “declinist” to realize that the United States can lead the free world and still write off the Middle East, which isn’t part of it. That’s precisely the mood in America today.

That’s a sobering thought and the possibility can’t be entirely discounted, especially with figures such as Senator Rand Paul rising to prominence in a Republican Party that has become a bulwark of the alliance in the last generation. Moreover, he’s right when he says that the history of Zionism teaches us that in order to survive, the movement has had to be flexible in its alliances with world powers. A century ago, many Zionists were looking to tie their future to that of the Ottoman Empire. A few years later, after the sick man of Europe collapsed, they cast their lot with a British Empire. But after a few short years when London seemed ready to make good on the promise made in the Balfour Declaration, they were abandoned. Gradually America became the focus of Zionist diplomacy, but until that alliance became a reality after the Six-Day War, Israel relied on a brief yet crucial period of Soviet friendship during the War of Independence and after that a fruitful friendship with France that lasted until 1967.

 

Israel’s leaders must, as Kramer says, be prepared for all eventualities and they should not, as I wrote, be blamed for seeking to foster ties with other countries. But the problem with planning for a theoretical period of American withdrawal from the world is that the answer to his question about a “Plan B” is that there isn’t one.

 

Though he is right to assert that the point of Zionism is, to the greatest extent possible, to make sure that Israel can defend itself, no “agility” or ability to “read the changing map of the world” can substitute for an alliance with America. Without a strong United States that is engaged in the world, Israel will not disappear. But it will be weaker and far more vulnerable. For Israel there is not and never will be—at least in the foreseeable future—a viable alternative to the alliance with the United States.

 

But the key question here is not so much whether Israel appreciates how important the U.S. is to its future—and there’s every indication that Israel’s leaders understand that—but whether Americans understand how important the Jewish state is to it.

 

The flip side to this discussion is that for all the talk from anti-Zionist conspiracy theorists like those who promote the Walt-Mearsheimer “Israel Lobby” in which the Jewish state is supposed to be the tail that wags the American dog, we don’t talk enough about how Israel is a valued ally of the United States.

 

After the end of the Cold War, the value of having what many consider to be a regional superpower allied with the United States has been largely ignored. But the notion that the U.S. doesn’t need strong allies in an era in which it is challenged by Islamist terrorism as well as rogue states like Iran is farcical. Moreover, the traditional meme of critics of the alliance—that Arab states are hostile to the United States because of its friendship with Israel—has been exploded both by the Arab Spring and the regional concerns about Iran that have made it clear that they fear Tehran more than they do the Jewish state.

 

Israel’s intelligence capabilities have long been a boon to the U.S. But its technological resources—both in terms of military and commercial applications—are now just as if not more important. Israel, the “start-up nation,” is a vital partner for the U.S. economy.

 

But even if we ignore the utilitarian aspects of this friendship, it should be remembered that the core of American foreign policy has, contrary to the slanders of the left, always primarily been moral rather than a nation bent on conquest or empire. As such it needs nations that share its democratic values. That means Israel remains part of the select few countries that will always be natural allies. It is true that Israel cannot always count on the U.S. to do the right thing at the right time. Nor can the U.S. assume that Israel will disregard its interests in order to serve American convenience. But the relationship is both mutual and rooted in something stronger than Lord Palmerston’s famous dictum about permanent interests. Support for Israel is part of the political DNA of American culture. The same is true of Israel’s affinity with its fellow democracy.

Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber: Genetic “Lottery Winners” Have Been Paying an “Artificially Low Price.”

Obamacare Architect: Genetic “Lottery Winners” Have Been Paying an “Artificially Low Price.” Video. Real Clear Politics, November 13, 2013.

Are You a Genetic Lottery Winner? By alanjoelny. RedState, November 15, 2013.

Obamacare Architect Introduces Eugenics: “Genetic Lottery Winners” Must Pay. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, November 15, 2013.

White America and the Burden of Slavery. By Vincent Intondi.

White America and the Burden of Slavery. By Vincent Intondi. The Huffington Post, November 13, 2013. Also at the History News Network.

Slavery Isn’t Just Black People’s Burden. By Natalie Hopkinson. The Root, November 11, 2013.

Chris Christie’s Tea-Party Problem. By Richard Cohen. NJBR, November 12, 2013. With related articles.

12 Years a Slave: What Art Says About the Past. By Richard Cohen. NJBR, November 5, 2013.

America’s Original Sin: The Legacy of White Racism. By Jim Wallis. NJBR, October 24, 2013. With related articles.

In Hookups, Inequality Still Reigns. By Natalie Kitroeff.

In Hookups, Inequality Still Reigns. By Natalie Kitroeff. New York Times, November 11, 2013.

A Critic Takes On the Logic of Female Orgasm. By Dinitia Smith. New York Times, May 17, 2005.

Sexual Hookup Culture: A Review. By Justin R. Garcia, Chris Reiber, Sean G. Massey, and Ann M. Merriwether. Review of General Psychology, Vol. 16, No. 2 (June 2012). Also here, here, here.

Abstract:

“Hookups,” or uncommitted sexual encounters, are becoming progressively more engrained in popular culture, reflecting both evolved sexual predilections and changing social and sexual scripts. Hook-up activities may include a wide range of sexual behaviors, such as kissing, oral sex, and penetrative intercourse. However, these encounters often transpire without any promise of, or desire for, a more traditional romantic relationship. A review of the literature suggests that these encounters are becoming increasingly normative among adolescents and young adults in North America, representing a marked shift in openness and acceptance of uncommitted sex. We reviewed the current literature on sexual hookups and considered the multiple forces influencing hookup culture, using examples from popular culture to place hooking up in context. We argue that contemporary hookup culture is best understood as the convergence of evolutionary and social forces during the developmental period of emerging adulthood. We suggest that researchers must consider both evolutionary mechanisms and social processes, and be considerate of the contemporary popular cultural climate in which hookups occur, in order to provide a comprehensive and synergistic biopsychosocial view of “casual sex” among emerging adults today.

Reality Catches Up to President Obama. By Jim Geraghty.

Reality Catches Up to President Obama. By Jim Geraghty. National Review Online, November 15, 2013.

Why Liberals Are Panicked About Obamacare. By Charles Krauthammer.

Why Liberals Are Panicking. By Charles Krauthammer. National Review Online, November 14, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

The right’s wild, new fantasy: “Obamacare is killing liberalism!” By Elias Isquith. Salon, November 14, 2013.

The Entrepreneurs of Outrage. By Michael Gerson.

The Entrepreneurs of Outrage. By Michael Gerson. Real Clear Politics, November 15, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

The New Face of European Anti-Semitism. By Daniel Schwammenthal.

The New Face of European Anti-Semitism. By Daniel Schwammenthal. Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2013.

JFK Was a Political Conservative. By Ira Stoll.

How the Left Spun the Kennedy Myth. By Ira Stoll. The Daily Beast, November 10, 2013.

JFK Was a Political Conservative. By Ira Stoll. Time, October 14, 2013.

Stop calling JFK conservative: The right’s favorite new lie is filled with historical flaws. By Paul Rosenberg. Salon, November 3, 2013.

JFK Was an Unapologetic Liberal. By David Greenberg. The New Republic, November 11, 2013.

How Jackie Kennedy Invented the Camelot Legend After JFK’s Death. By James Piereson. The Daily Beast, November 12, 2013.

JFK—Casualty of the Cold War. By James Piereson. Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2013.

JFK, a presidency on a pedestal. By Doyle McManus. Los Angeles Times, November 17, 2013.

Can conservatives stake a claim to JFK’s legacy? By Peter Boyer. FoxNews.com, November 15, 2013. YouTube.

The Right JFK. By James Piereson. National Review, November 25, 2013. Review of JFK, Conservative. By Ira Stoll. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2013. 288 pp.

The Right Stuff. By Ronald Radosh. The Weekly Standard, November 25, 2013. Also here. Where was John F. Kennedy on the ideological spectrum? Review of JFK, Conservative. By Ira Stoll.

Will We Never Be Free of the Kennedy Assassination? By Jacob Cohen. Commentary, December 2013.

Is Confucius the Voice of Reason China Needs? By Michael Goldfarb.

Is Confucius the Voice of Reason China Needs? By Michael Goldfarb. Real Clear World, November 12, 2013. Also at the GlobalPost.

New Yorkers Paying Through the Nose for Electricity. By Walter Russell Mead.

New Yorkers Paying Through the Nose for Electricity. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, November 14, 2013.

The Enterpreneurs of Cynical Sectarianism in the Middle East. By Marc Lynch.

The Entrepreneurs of Cynical Sectarianism. By Marc Lynch. Foreign Policy, November 13, 2013. Also here.

Why the Middle East’s identity conflicts go way beyond the Sunni-Shiite divide.

John Kerry Is Mistaken About Israel’s Settlements. By Alan Baker,

Open letter to John Kerry. By Alan Baker. Israel Hayom, November 11, 2013.

We Pay, Iran Promises. By George Jonas.

We pay, Iran promises. By George Jonas. National Post, November 13, 2013.

Nuclear Peace with Iran in Our Time: Is This Our Chamberlain Moment? By Alan M. Dershowitz. The Algemeiner, November 12, 2013.

We must not capitulate to Iran over its nuclear programme: the sanctions are working. By Con Coughlin. The Telegraph, November 12, 2013.

Israel Reacts With Alarm at What Its Leadership Sees as a Bad Deal. By Natan Sachs. Brookings, November 11, 2013.

Franz Rosenzweig Rediscovers His Judaism on Yom Kippur. By James Winchell.

A Great Thinker Rediscovers His Judaism on the Day of Atonement. By James Winchell. Tablet, September 10, 2013.

Franz Rosenzweig. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, February 27, 2009.

How Netanyahu Plays the Settlement Game. By Michael Omer-Man.

How Netanyahu Plays the Settlement Game. By Michael Omer-Man. The Daily Beast, November 13, 2013. Also at +972 Magazine.

Potential settlement plans would create first blocs outside barrier route. By Tovah Lazaroff. Jerusalem Post, November 14, 2013.

In Egypt, Hope and Despair. By David Ignatius.

In Egypt, Hope and Despair. By David Ignatius. Real Clear Politics, November 14, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

Murder and the Settlement Distraction. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Murder and the Settlement Distraction. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, November 13, 2013.

The Democrats’ Worst Nightmare. By Robert W. Merry.

The Democrats’ Worst Nightmare. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, November 13, 2013.

The Middle East After a U.S. - Iran Deal. By George Friedman.

The Middle East After a U.S. - Iran Deal. By George Friedman. Real Clear World, November 12, 2013.

Bill Clinton Chases the ACA Unicorn. By Walter Russell Mead.

Bill Clinton Chases the ACA Unicorn. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, November 13, 2013.

Bill Clinton Is Wrong. This Is How Obamacare Works. By Jonathan Cohn. The New Republic, November 12, 2013.

ObamaCare and the End of Civilization. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, November 13, 2013.

Regime Sells Obamacare to Millennials with Promise of Sex Without Consequences. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, November 13, 2013.

Bill Clinton: Obama Should Honor His Keep Your Plan Promise. Video. GOPICYMI, November 12, 2013. YouTube.




Mead:

Bill Clinton is making waves with his comments that President Obama should honor his “like it, keep it” promise, even if it means changing the Affordable Care Act. Clinton isn’t only the one saying this: Democrats nervous about the future of the law have been increasingly taking this line over the last week. But Clinton is the most prominent person, besides, arguably, Obama himself, to say it, and Jonathan Cohn has a thoughtful piece at the New Republic about the problem with this position. In brief, Cohn argues that you can’t actually reverse the insurance cancellations without also crippling the law itself. There’s no world in which the ACA could do what it has set out to do—expand access to relatively comprehensive insurance—without disrupting plans people already have.

 

This is because insurance is a risk-sharing enterprise, and you can’t expand access to high risk people without raising prices on some other sub-set of the population. Forcing young men to have maternity care in their health insurance, for example, helps subsidize that care for women. And you can’t do that unless you eliminate plans that don’t help subsidize that care. More:

Is that a worthwhile tradeoff for reform? Obviously that’s a matter of opinion. The fact that some people—even a small, relatively affluent group—are giving up something they had makes their plight more sympathetic. They are right to say Obama could have made clear his promise might not apply to them. And there’s a principled argument about whether people should be responsible for services they’re unlikely to use presently, whether it’s fifty-something year olds paying for maternity care or twenty-something year olds paying for cardiac stress tests.

 

But the principle of broad-risk sharing—of the healthy subsidizing the sick, of the young subsidizing the old, and everybody paying for services like pediatrics and maternity care—is one built into the insurance most Americans already have.

Read the whole thing; Cohn is right that Clinton and Obama can’t eliminate the disruption to pre-existing plans without also rolling back the other beneficial effects of the law. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way to balance the tradeoffs here, as a truly consumer-directed health care reform would do, but it does mean that as long as the ACA is law, Clinton is asking the near impossible.

 

But all this ignores the essential problem that is making the rollout such a headache for the administration: this law would never become law if Obama hadn’t made the promises he did. Clinton may misunderstand what’s possible at this point, but he is reacting to more than just the number of people affected. The law has never been popular, and the twin discoveries that the people who pushed it can’t organize a website to make it work and that politically important promises about the law turned out to be wrong will deepen its unpopularity now. It’s almost 100 percent certain that if both the public and the Democrats in Congress had understood the fine print as well as they do now, the ACA would never have passed Congress. Obama could never “have made clear his promise might not apply to [some people]” because if he had been totally transparent and upfront about how the law would work and what it would do, he could never have gotten it passed.

 

Cohn wants Clinton to stand up and argue that the cancellations are just the expected process of a good law working itself out. But Bill Clinton’s political instincts point him to a different course. Clinton understands what a deep political hole the law is in, even if he doesn’t have a workable fix.

 

The 2014 election is still a long way away, but many in the MSM seem at this point to be underestimating the danger that the ACA fiasco poses to Democrats in the midterm. It isn’t just that specific ‘promises’ have been broken or that the early rollout has been a fiasco. It is that the differences between the law-as-experienced and the law-as-described are deal-breakers. Without the false impressions about how the law would work, the law would not have been passed. This is the danger that Democrats must address, and it has the potential to be extremely damaging.

 

Proposals to allow people to keep their plans probably seems like a much needed lifeboat for distressed Democrats. We should expect to see more and more people take the Clinton line as the public becomes aware that the law they’re getting isn’t anything like the law that was pitched to them.

 

If voters have made some unpleasant discoveries about Obamacare, Democrats are about to have an unpleasant epiphany of their own. Passing Obamacare, Democrats are discovering, wasn’t the end of the national conversation about health care. We are now beginning a conversation about how to fix what is wrong with Obamacare, and in many ways this conversation will make it more difficult, not less, for Democrats to steer health policy in the directions they prefer.

In Aleppo I Only Survive by Looking Syrian. By Francesca Borri.

In Aleppo I only survive by looking Syrian. By Francesca Borri. The Guardian, November 12, 2013.

Borri:

In this war, to be a foreign reporter is to be hunted by Islamists and the regime. My helmet is a veil, my hijab a flak jacket.

 

Since the rise of the Islamist resistance, parts of Syria have become off-limits to journalists – 30 of us are now missing. Today my helmet is a veil, and my flak jacket a hijab. Because the only way to sneak into Aleppo is by looking like a Syrian.

 

Locals here don't refer any more to “liberated areas,” but to east and west Aleppo – they don’t show you pictures of their children, or of siblings killed by the regime, but simply the pictures of beautiful Aleppo before the war. Because nobody is fighting the regime anymore; rebels now fight against each other. And for many of them, the priority is not ousting Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but enforcing sharia law.

 

Aleppo is nothing but hunger and Islam. Dozens of threadbare children, disfigured by leishmaniasis, walk barefoot in the steps of mothers, covered in black from head to toe – all bowl in hand, seeking a mosque for bread, their skin yellowed by typhus. In the narrowest alleys, to dodge mortar fire, boys are on the right with their toy Kalashnikovs, while the left is for girls, already veiled. Jihadi fathers push with their beards, djellabas and suicide belts. In July, Mohammad Kattaa was executed for misusing the name of the prophet. He was 15.

 

And so there are only Syrians now to tell us what’s happening. They work for the major media, and contribute to articles written from New York, Paris and Rome. They are the famous citizen journalists, glorified by those who probably would never trust a citizen dentist.

 

And the outcomes are cases similar to that of Elizabeth O’Bagy, the analyst mentioned by John Kerry during the days of the chemical attack. In fact, she had just published through the Wall Street Journal a piece that essentially made you believe that the rebels were all good guys: that hardliners, here, are but a handful – because the problem for the US is that Assad might be replaced by al-Qaida. A few days later, while Human Rights Watch uncovered evidence of rebels responsible for war crimes against the minorities, it was revealed that O’Bagy was on the payroll of a Syrian lobby group whose goal was to pressure the Obama administration towards intervention. In the Twitter and YouTube era, when many newspapers save on correspondents on the ground by raking up somebody who will summarise for them what's going on in his own backyard, it’s on the O’Bagys that we then base foreign policy, base our wars: on the accounts of a recent graduate, born in 1987.

 

It’s not that the war has become more dangerous. Early on we were with the rebels, and the rebels were those who were fighting for freedom: and we journalists were those who witnessed for the world the crimes of Assad. But we suddenly realised (especially my generation) what a war means when you are not embedded. Today we are also here to witness the crimes of the rebels: and both the rebels and the regime hunt us. This war isn’t more dangerous; it’s only truer: a war where nobody is innocent, where nobody is immune; a war where nobody is welcome – we have all run away.

 

Do we as journalists have any responsibility? Our role is to question. So why are we targeted? Perhaps because many of us were here only for money, only for the single article – here for an award, or a contract, so that for Syrians we became just a matter of business.

 

Or perhaps because when Abdullah Yassin, the activist who made possible the work of many of us, was killed, and killed for protecting us, for bringing to the police two kidnappers, none of us left a flower on his tomb? Or perhaps it is because we have reported only the blood, because it was easier, because it was cheaper – and so we delivered to the world a misleading portrait of this country – that now generates unsteady and mixed-up policies? Perhaps because we all jumped here, in the aftermath of the gas attack, just to vanish in disappointment when Obama opted not to strike?

 

Why, if we are around or not, today do Syrians see no difference? Perhaps because we are but the mirror and expression of the international community, and its cynicism on Syria.

 

A few evenings ago I was on Twitter, when a jet swooped overhead. In a heartbeat, a flurry of followers – many of them, I am afraid, waiting for my last Tweet from under the rubble. And my reaction in that moment was only: Go to hell. And I turned everything off.

Francesca Borri

Looking at the Pew Study Through the Wrong End of the Telescope. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Looking at the Pew Study Through the Wrong End of the Telescope. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, November 12, 2013.

Requiem for a Movement. By Daniel Gordis. Jewish Review of Books, November 11, 2013. Also here.

New Analysis of Pew Data: Children of Intermarriage Increasingly Identify as Jews. By Theodore Sasson. Tablet, November 11, 2013.

Conservative Judaism: Not dead yet. By Rabbi David Wolpe. Haaretz, November 20, 2013. Also here.

Misreading the apocalypse: Orthodoxy won’t save American Jewish life. By Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie. Haaretz, November 25, 2013. Also here.

Loving Us to Death: How America’s Embrace Is Imperiling American Jewry. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, October 24, 2013.

Why Bother Being Jewish? By Caroline Glick. NJBR, October 8, 2013.

American Jews: Laughing But Shrinking. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, October 1, 2013. With related articles.

To Fight Assimilation, Stop Dumbing Down Judaism. By Evelyn Gordon.

To Fight Assimilation, Stop Dumbing Down Judaism. By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, November 12, 2013.