I am not Jewish.
I have never been to Israel.
I am not a Democrat in Connecticut or elsewhere.
But hearing a Connecticut Democrat on the local radio across the
Long Island Sound sneering that Joe Lieberman is the Senator “from
Israel”…In truth? I almost ran off the road.
I feel sorry for Democrats. Sort of. The party of FDR, Harry
Truman, and JFK has come to this? More to the point, a member of
the party that had Harry Truman recognize Israel literally within
minutes of its announcing its existence is now of a mind to defeat
a senior Senator…because he’s Jewish?
Welcome to The Chasm. It is almost possible to feel it splitting
the common American ground as it falls away. It has happened
before.
The Chasm is the reason the 1936 Republican candidate for Vice
President of the United States against Franklin D. Roosevelt wound
up in FDR’s Cabinet as Secretary of the Navy. It is the reason
Wendell Willkie, the 1940 GOP nominee opposing Roosevelt, wound up
running missions for his successful opponent. It is the logic
behind the entire British political system melding into one as the
realization Winston Churchill had called the menace of the
anti-Semite Adolf Hitler correctly, right from the start.
But Americans in 2006 are only now discovering The Chasm, and
there are Americans aplenty who still don’t get it — starting with
Connecticut Democrats. One wonders about those continual polls that
show our fellow countrymen so historically out of it that they
think Lyndon Johnson was President during the Civil War.
There have been times aplenty in American history when the
leaders of opposite parties bonded during crisis. Lifelong rivals
Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas came together instantly when
the two political and personal rivals who had vied for everything
from the same woman to the same Illinois Senate seat and the
presidency itself realized the fate of America rested on Douglas’s
ability to support the new President Lincoln. One of the first
people President John F. Kennedy reached out to during the Bay of
Pigs crisis was his just defeated opponent Richard Nixon — who
instantly rallied across The Chasm to his old friend and recent
foe.
Much has been made by his far left opponents of Lieberman’s
willingness to play the hands-across-The-Chasm Douglas and Nixon
roles. Yet the confluence of Israel’s recent vulnerabilities mixed
in with the battle for Iraq has suddenly — or not so suddenly? —
drawn anti-Semitic venom. Is it a surprise that Lamont has accepted
campaign help from Jessie “Hymietown” Jackson or Al Sharpton, the
latter of whom has made a career railing against “diamond
merchants”? All of this while Israel is fighting for its very life
against opponents who use “ceasefire accords” as nothing more than
rest stops on the way to killing more Jews?
As this is being written, the Connecticut NBC affiliate in New
Haven shows Lieberman trailing leftist and MoveOn.org hero Ned
Lamont 52%-47%. Could Lieberman still win? Sure.
But the Democratic Party — the party of Cabinet members,
Supreme Court Justices, U.S. Senators, Congressmen, Governors, and
others who happen to be Jewish — the party of vice-presidential
nominee Joe Lieberman — has lost. The Chasm has opened, and
Democrats are burning the bridge.
Shame.
