Monday, November 3, 2008

The Israel Attack

I must confess that the Republican fixation on deriding the opposition as being too weak on Israel baffles me. It has shown up a lot during this election, most recently here. Are the Republicans really that obsessed with the Jewish vote? It's more uniformly liberal than evangelicals are conservative. And the people that are really obsessed with Israel outside the Jewish community--the fundamentalist Christians--are presumably in the bag. Sure, most Americans support and like Israel, and if Obama were seriously proposing pressuring Israel into making a deal on, say, right of return or Jerusalem this might be cause for widespread concern, but he just isn't.

One must conclude that this attack is all about emphasizing Obama's "otherness", and this element of the campaign has been one of the darkest stains on John McCain's honor. One might even reasonably conclude that this was done to spread the rumor that Obama is a closet Muslim or has such sympathies. I do find it most interesting that the constituency for the most hard-core militant pro-Israel policies exist almost exclusively among Gentiles--sure, there are some neocon Jews, but you could fit them all into a medium-sized basketball arena. The fundamentalist Christians of which I am speaking make up nearly one third of the country. When the right talks about a candidate or group being weak on Israel, their audience is almost never Jews but rather their base of fundies, whose interest in Israel is mostly about eschatology. In this case, the motive for this attack is a bit different.

The Man, The Myth, The Bio

East Bay, California, United States
Problem: I have lots of opinions on politics and culture that I need to vent. If I do not do this I will wind up muttering to myself, and that's only like one or two steps away from being a hobo. Solution: I write two blogs. A political blog that has some evident sympathies (pro-Obama, mostly liberal though I dissent on some issues, like guns and trade) and a culture blog that does, well, cultural essays in a more long-form manner. My particular thing is taking overrated things (movies, mostly, but other things too) down a peg and putting underrated things up a peg. I'm sort of the court of last resort, and I tend to focus on more obscure cultural phenomena.