This bizarro period in American politics reminds me somewhat of the 1850s when both national parties more-or-less collapsed or imploded. The difference is that that period gave us Abraham Lincoln to shepherd us through the crisis. This period may give us Donald Trump!
Hillary Clinton’s political woes have worsened from a case of the flu to double pneumonia with the release of the State Department’s Inspector General’s Report on her e-mail follies. Nothing may be criminally actionable, but the damage to her electability is none-the-less extreme.
The panicky buzz has resumed among Democratic pols about replacing her, not with the socialist poison pill Bernie Sanders, but with a helicoptered-in Joe Biden-Elizabeth Warren ticket. This is slightly reminiscent of 1948 when the panicky Democratic Convention—including many Jewish progressives—fantasized about nominating anybody-but-Truman, including especially General Eisenhower.
Jewish Democrats with any self-respecting regard for Israel have to be horrified, not only by the appointment of the Sanders’ members to the Democratic platform Committee—“Mr. Palestine” James Zogby, Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison, and hippy-dippy Professor Cornel West who wants to indict the Israeli PM as “a war criminal”—but some of the Clinton appointees including Congressman Luis Gutierrez who is jetting off to a “fact-finding” trip to “occupied” Palestine sponsored by a pro-Palestinian lobbying group. One wonders whether this year’s Democratic platform plank on Israel, yet unannounced, has already been written in the West Bank or Gaza’s “Hamastan.”
And then there is Donald Trump smiling like a Cheshire cat as he purrs hints about humiliating Hillary by debating Bernie Sanders in California while he meets in New York with Henry Kissinger for a tet-a-tet. According to Trump, Herr Kissinger is now his back channel to world leaders who are already making nice to the Orangefuhrer just to cover their bets if he’s elected.
In the late 1500s, Protestant Henry of Navarre converted to Catholicism as the price to become France’s King Henry IV. His explanation: “Paris is well worth a mass.” If Trump is smart, he will abandon his Border Wall folly as the price of the White House. Indeed, I would not put it passed him to convert, if necessary, to Islam! I would not yet right off Hillary, but this country is showing signs it’s getting ready to go merrily down the road to perdition.
