The one true thing you can say about Andrea Mitchell is she has never met and liked anyone like Sarah Palin in her life. It's not her culture. And her disdain for Palin is evident every time she interviews anyone about Palin and begins to run down the backwoods parts of her character: "she's very socially conservative," she says, shaking her head, then speaks about creationism and choice as if these are the most signal aspects of policymaking in America.
On MSNBC, Mitchell and Rachel Maddow are making hay of the fact that McCain didn't choose Joe Lieberman, and so the Republican convention is turning itself into Houston '92 all over again, with Pat Buchanan foaming at the mouth about abortion.
Fine. I'm with them. I'm pro-choice, pro-stem-cell, the whole thing, and I love Rachel Maddow.
But why are they completely unable to talk about the exile of Jimmy Carter at the Democratic convention, a more important gesture than the failure to appoint a turncoat Democrat as V.P. nominee, out of fear that the Dems would alienate the Jewish vote/Jewish donors? We're only talking about the Middle East, which could detonate the world. We're only talking about Iraq, where our neocon-ultra-Zionist-fed policies have already destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives.
Do Jews in the media have anything to do with this? Of course we do. There are cultural prohibitions at work, which are indefensible. It is one thing to discuss these issues in the Forward or in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, among ourselves. But no one is talking about them on mainstream air, though there's a frikkin cavalcade of Jews on mainstream air, and they know this issue damn well, and how strongly many older Jews feel about it. Don't Americans have the right to know about this? The right to know–the basis of the press's power.
I know I'm repeating myself. And why not? No one seems to get it. No one's ashamed of having failed their job. No one's ashamed of having permitted dual loyalty to pervade the American Jewish community, no one's ashamed of displaying a thoroughgoing and unprofessional inability to talk about the religious Jewish agenda for Jerusalem, greater Israel, the settlements, the whole thing, which has now isolated the Democratic Party from world opinion and defiled the reputation of a great man, Jimmy Carter.
No: Just beat up on ignorant Christians in the heartland, all night long, because they–oh my god– mix religion and politics!
