Monday Open Thread [3.23.15]

Dana Milbank wonders if Israel has seen its last democratic election.

Eleven years ago, I carried my infant daughter into a synagogue basement and plunged her tiny body, head to toe, underwater. … Making sure she is Jewish in the eyes of the Jewish state gives me peace of mind. If the Gestapo ever comes again, she and her descendants will have a place to go. Just in case.

Israel, the Jewish state, is the antidote to this fear. The Law of Return, enacted by David Ben-Gurion’s government in 1950, guarantees Israeli citizenship to all Jews who move to Israel. This was meant to guarantee that Israel would remain Jewish (Palestinians, controversially, are not granted this right) but it also meant that, after the Holocaust, and thousands of years of wandering, there was finally a place to which all Jews could go, and defend ourselves, if nowhere else was safe.

This is why Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions on the eve of this week’s Israeli elections were so monstrous. In a successful bid to take votes from far-right parties, the prime minister vowed that there would be no Palestinian state as long as he’s in charge. It was an unmasking of sorts, revealing what many suspected all along: He had no interest in a two-state solution.

Netanyahu backed off that position after the election, assuring American news outlets NBC, NPR and Fox on Thursday that he still backs a two-state solution, in theory. His backtracking seemed nominal and insincere, but even that gesture is reassuring, for abandoning the idea of a Palestinian state will destroy the Jewish state just as surely, if not as swiftly, as an Iranian nuclear bomb.

This is a matter not of ideology but of arithmetic. Without a Palestinian state, Israel can be either a Jewish state or a democracy but not both. If it annexes the Palestinian territories and remains democratic, it will be split roughly evenly between Jews and Arabs; if it annexes the territories and suppresses the rights of Arabs, it ceases to be democratic.

“It is a tribute to the professionalism of the Clintons — we could fight, and we could fight in some really tough ways… but we were able to compartmentalize. I have a lot of respect for her. She is very hardworking.” – Newt Gingrich, quoted by the Daily Beast, praising Hillary Clinton.

Of course, those words were made to cast President Obama in a negative light. LOL.

If Hillary Clinton runs for and wins the presidency, she would be “very hardworking” and “much more practical” than the current president, according to former Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Ted Cruz is running for President. Here is his campaign website. Go visit it. Seriously. Just take a quick look.

The New York Times says that the “roughly 300 emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private account that were turned over last month to a House committee investigating the ]Beghazi] attack showed the secretary and her aides closely monitoring the fallout from the tragedy[, but] they provided no evidence that Mrs. Clinton, as the most incendiary Republican attacks have suggested, issued a ‘stand down’ order to halt American forces responding to the violence in Benghazi, or took part in a broad cover-up of the administration’s response, according to senior American officials.”

I always wondered what Republicans thought Hillary did. That she personally ordered the attack? That she ordered a stand down order to prevent Marines or other military from responding to the attack? I suppose that is akin to those on our side of the aisle that believe that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney personally ordered the 9/11 attacks. The difference is, our crazies don’t control a political party or Congress.

Once more into the breach in this familiar argument about the need of liberals to vote as often as conservatives, no matter if they are “inspired” to vote or not, no matter if the candidate is as pure as they are. Here is an adviser to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel demonstrating his disdain for the liberal Democratic base:

Unless they get the crazy lefty money machine going nationally, it’s not going to matter that there’s a resurgent left,” said an adviser to Mr. Emanuel who did not want to speak publicly about strategy. “The liberals at Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park can think great thoughts and read poetry for Chuy, but nothing else will happen.”

David Atkins at the Washington Monthly in response:

This is why liberals who refuse to participate in politics and vote consistently are one of the biggest impediments to creating change. […] Too many progressives, on the other hand, see an imperfect Democratic Party and decide that politics is for the birds–as if there were some other alternative that will fix the system. There isn’t. Major changes won’t take place until and unless enough politicians fear the retribution of progressive voters at the ballot box. So Rahm’s arrogantly smug adviser is right. It won’t matter, not because there aren’t enough progressives, but because not enough of them vote–and far fewer still engage in the tough work of dragging likeminded others out to the polls as well.