Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Personal Aside: Israelis Embarrassed Joe Biden? How Dare They Top What He Does Best to Himself?

   Feast of St. Heribert*
              
           “Jill and I had the great honor of standing on that stage, looking across at one of the great justices—Justice Stewart” the vice president told the audience gathered at the Capitol  front on Jan. 22, 2009 after he was sworn in as vice president by Justice John Paul Stevens. 
            “When the stock market crashed,” the VP candidate told a rapt Katie Couric on CBS-TV Sept. 22, 2008, “Franklin D. Roosevelt got on television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said `Look, here’s what’s happened.’” Two slight errors.  When the stock market crashed in 1929, the president was Herbert Hoover not Franklin Roosevelt. And television while having been invented was not in operation nationally then.    
           “Look, John [McCain’s] last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the number-one job facing the middle class,” he shouted to a crowd in Athens, Ohio Oct. 15, 2008, “—and is happens to be, as Barack says, a three letter word: J-O-B-S!”  
           “Stand up, Chuck, let `em see ya!” introducing State Sen. Charles Graham who is a paraplegic and in a wheelchair, Columbia, Mo. Sept. 12, 2008. 
           Ah but now just when the vice president was in Israel declaring that the U. S. remains committed to the Jewish state’s survival, a mid-level bureaucrat in the Netanyahu government announced an initial plan involving the third stage of seven to build 1,600 housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of Jerusalem. The vice president proclaimed that he was embarrassed and Secretary of State Clinton at the insistence of President Obama declared that the low-level announcement was an “insult” to the United States.  Thus because of a minor flub the Obama administration escalated relations between the U.S. and Israel to the worst point in 50 years—all because the president has borne animus against the Likud party.  
           After her initial press statement,   Hillary Clinton shouted at Netanyahu for 45 minutes on the telephone, we are told by the White House—and we could all see the sage David Axelrod stroking his walrus mustache on NBC and describing it as “an affront.” 
             Why cause all this ruckus when the Obama-ites are counting on Israel to join those nations to halt Iran’s fast-growing nuclear supremacy?  Only a giant stretch of imagination can deduce the settlements which are within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem be considered West Bank.  Netanyahu’s unilateral concession to halt housing projects in the West Bank to encourage the Palestinians to come to the bargaining table did not and never even implicitly involved northeast Jerusalem. Beginning with the Oslo agreements in the early 1990s, Palestinians have been dickering with Israeli prime ministers from Rabin to Olmert all the while construction of new homes was occurring.  But when Netanyahu won the premiership last month the Palestinians hiked the stakes by insisting on a unilateral Israeli freeze in order to resume peace talks. 
              Why is Obama endangering the peace process with an ill-tempered outburst following a minor bureaucratic miscue?     
              The reason:  Obama’s middle name isn’t Hussein for nothing. His   place of birth is purposely shrouded in mist because of his team’s unwillingness to pony up a hard-copy birth certificate which would negate his presidency and certify his parentage as  a 3rd world figure imbued to the Palestinian cause  stemming probably from the Muslim religion embraced by the two straight fathers who deserted him and his mother…and Jeremiah Wright’s hate-spewing anti-Semitic, get-whitey “church” he attended for 20 years in Hyde Park. 
          He’s been jaunting around the Middle East placating those nations which wish us ill—Syria whose allusion to us as a colonial power he shrugged off and Libya’s Gadhafi who has called for a “jihad” against Switzerland.  He treated those with powder-puffs not the powder keg he launched last week.  
           And as for Joe Biden’s wounded feelings, someone ought to remind him that Hillary Clinton was perfectly willing to accept construction to proceed in Ramat Shliomo as a condition for the West Bank construction moratorium a few months ago.  But there’s a danger in reminding Joe Biden of anything when his mouth moves faster than his thinking process.   This statesman might well get his tongue tied around his eye-teeth and assail the uh-uh-uh Ramat Schlumiel neighborhood somewhere…let’s see   …somewhere, where is it? Oh I forget where the hell it is.   
         
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      *: St. Heibert [Herbert] [AD 1021]. Archbishop of Cologne; born to a noble family in the town of Worms, matriculated at the celebrated Benedictine abbey of Goze in Lorraine.  His father interfered with his entry into the Benedictines by calling him to Worms where in that community he was ordained to the priesthood.  He gained the confidence of Emperor Otto III and was raised to the see of Cologne. As chancellor, he aaccompanied Otto on a trip to Italy where the emperor fell ill of smallpox and died.  Heibert took the body back to Aachen where Otto was buried.  He also bore with him the imperial insignia that would be given to the successor but properly constituted sovereign. 
          But a rival to the throne, Duke Henry of Bavaria misinterpreted the action and decided that Heibert preferred to see another sovereign chosen. The Duke was crowned Henry II but there continued bad blood between him and Heibert. Heibert continued as prelate and spent a good deal of time aiding the poor and homeless as well as maintaining discipline among the clergy.  He founded the abbey of Deutz on the Rhine..  While visiting Neuss on a pastoral visit he contracted a fever which he recognized would be the end of him.

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