Jews and Republicans

I ran across a well-written piece over at a blog I would not normally visit today. It’s nice to see that at least a few people on the other side of the blogosphere grok why many Jews do not feel comfortable voting Republican.

In brief:

The first is that Jews tend to be very intimidated by evangelical Christians. Jews as a whole don’t really try to convert people and evangelicals are all about evangelizing and converting. Big culture clash there.

[snip]

The second is that Jews are a minority culture. When Christians start talking about faith-based initiatives, Jews realize that anything they do is going to be overwhelmed by the vastly Christian majority.

Indeed. These are not the only reasons, of course, but they are very pertinent ones. (Yglesias offers a few more).

It would be nice if more folks in Red-State Blogville “got it”. Volokh twice suggests that Jews have some racial or genetic predisposition to be liberals, a suggestion I find offensive and even potentially frightening. But expecting rationality from far-right wingnuts like him is probably too much to ask.

This is Bizzare

You know things are seriously messed up when even Pat Robertson is telling President Bush “I told you so” about Iraq:

“I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, ‘Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.’ ”

Robertson said the president then told him, “Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.”

[snip]

“I mean, the Lord told me it was going to be A, a disaster, and B, messy,” Robertson said. “I warned him about casualties.”

But I thought God talked to Bush too? I guess he got the message garbled.

UPDATE: WH spokesman Scott McClellan called Robertson a liar. Heh.

Pattern Recognition

I’ve been meaning to post a review of William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognittion” for quite a while now and still have not done so. It’s a book that moved me deeply in some ways and left me really annoyed in others, and I find it hard to wirte about that contradition. Hopefully I’ll get it finished eventually.

Good news today, though — Peter Weir wants to make it into a movie.

Time Passages

It has rained twice in the last few days — looks like the winter rainy season is starting a little early this year. It’s time to pack up the summer stuff and break out the sweaters.

Also, 10 years ago today Scott and I went out on our first date. Dinner and a movie — “Ed Wood” of all things. To commemorate the occasion, he surprised me with 2 dozen roses.

I’ve got a really wonderful guy.

Al Gore on GWB

The man who should have been President, Al Gore, gave a good speech recently about the problems with the Bush crew. Given the recent Suskind article this is worth a read.

There are many people in both political parties who worry that there is something deeply troubling about President Bush’s relationship to reason, about his disdain for facts, his incuriosity about new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he wrestles with on behalf of the country.

One group mistakenly maligns the president as not being smart enough to have a normal active curiosity about separating fact from myth. A second group seems to be convinced that his personal religious conversion experience was so profound that he relies on religious faith in place of logical analysis. But I disagree with both of those groups and reject both of those cartoon images. I know President Bush is plenty smart, and while I have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine, and it’s an important motivation for many things that he does in life, as it is for me, and for most of you, I’m convinced that most of the president’s frequent departures from fact based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible. And it is crucially important to be precise in describing exactly what it is he believes in so strongly, and then insulates from any logical challenge or even debate. It is ideology, and not his religious faith that is the source of this troubling inflexibility.

Most of the problems President Bush has caused for this country stemmed not from his belief in God but his belief in the infallibility of the right-wing Republican ideology that exalts the interest of the wealthy, and of large corporations over and above the interests of the American people. It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency.

Good stuff.

Good News Bad News

Good News: The US Supreme Court told Tom Delay today that his redistricting scheme in Texas need to be reconsidered.

Bad News: By not summarily affirming the lower court’s ruling and issuing their ruling two weeks before an election, chaos ensues.