Hillary, we hardly know ye.
As you carpetbagged your way through New York, we had you pegged as a quintessential mid-American, with your flat R’s and corn-fed earnestness and bland ambition. Now, only now, do we learn that you’re Jewish! Sort of. But, hey, a little can get you a long way in a close Senate election, right?
Welcome to ethnic politics gone wild. In yet another clumsy ploy by the First Lady’s ham-handed New York advisers, Mrs. Clinton has suddenly remembered that her maternal grandmother’s second husband was Jewish. The revelation was first published in The Forward, a weekly newspaper covering Jewish issues in New York. The news came as a surprise to many politicians, including some who have worked closely with the First Lady for years. Apparently, she hasn’t had much to say about her Jewish step-grandfather … until now, that is.
If Mrs. Clinton’s operatives believe that somehow the New York Jewish community will embrace the First Lady as family, well, then they’re even more ignorant than they already seem. In any case, Jewish New Yorkers don’t vote as a bloc; and her newfound roots do nothing to obscure the fact that despite her staged “listening tour,” she is deep down a left-wing radical feminist in favor of intrusive government.
It’s awfully heartwarming, by the way, to see how Mrs. Clinton uses dead relatives to score political points. Last week, we noted that the First Lady blamed her husband’s deceased mother and grandmother for Mr. Clinton’s inability to resist thong underwear on 21-year-old Government employees. Now the First Lady ventures forward into the land of the no-longer-living (and no-longer-available-for-comment) to give us a story about sort-of Jewish roots. Given that she comes from Illinois, where the dead regularly cast ballots in tight elections, perhaps her political grave-robbing is to be expected.
Stay tuned. With the First Lady’s advisers working overtime at the genealogical charts, can a link to Thomas Jefferson’s mistress be far behind?
Anti-Semite for City Council?
by Jeffrey Hogrefe
It’s been almost a year since the bigoted anti-Semite Khalid Muhammad scurried like a coward from the stage at his “Million Youth March” in Harlem, after his own incendiary words had prompted some in the crowd to hurl chairs at police officers. Afraid that the march was going to end peacefully, with no big headlines for himself, Mr. Muhammad took the microphone, gestured toward the police, and shouted, “If anyone attacks you, beat the hell out of them.… If they attack you, you take their guns. If any one of these bastards attacks you, take their nightstick.” When a small number of those assembled started taunting the cops and throwing objects, Mr. Muhammad fled, having brought violence to the very neighborhood the march was supposed to help.
Now the word in the city’s political circles is that Mr. Muhammad wants to run for a City Council seat in Brooklyn. It’s no surprise he doesn’t dare try for a seat in Harlem-after his performance at the march, Representative Charles Rangel said, “We don’t need anybody preaching hatred in Harlem.” And preaching hatred is all Mr. Muhammad does. Like his allies Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton, he panders to anti-Semitism, referring to “hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating so-called Jews,” whom he calls “bloodsuckers” and “the slumlords in the black community.” After Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, Mr. Muhammad told college students in Queens, “I cannot be sad when my enemy is struck down.” He also attacks gay men and women and Catholics, whenever anyone-usually tenth-rate colleges desperate for any kind of attention-gives him a forum.
There is a cruel irony here: The City Council seat Mr. Muhammad wants is occupied by Mary Pinkett, who became the first black woman Council member in 1973 and who must leave office because of term limits. Mr. Muhammad’s loathsome diatribes would be a sorry follow-up to Ms. Pinkett’s hard work.
It would be startling if someone of this vicious and racist mindset were elected to the city’s principal legislative body. One wonders if Mr. Sharpton will have the integrity to discourage Mr. Muhammad from bringing his road show of hate to this city.
Forgive Me, Dear!
by Jeffrey Hogrefe
After you and your spouse have spent tens of thousands of dollars-the equivalent of, say, five or six romantic trips to Europe-on couples therapy, poring over every hurt feeling and resentment and spat, making sure you’ve both strip-mined your gut feelings and gotten your anger out, well, it turns out that two little words might have saved you a lot of time and money. Those words? “I’m sorry.” In other words, rather than blast your mate with your rage after he or she has done something so unspeakable, so vile, that you’re mentally speed-dialing your lawyer, just take a breath and … forgive.
So says new research from a recent issue of the Journal of Personal and Social Psychology, which found a direct correlation between forgiveness and a couple’s chances for staying together. Spouses who forgive each other achieve real satisfaction. According to Michael McCullough of the National Institute for Health Care Research, “Forgiving reduces avoidance and desire for revenge and replaces it with a desire to restore the relationship despite the personal hurt.”
If one needs more proof, just look at a certain would-be Senate candidate, who if nothing else has shown she’s mastered the art of forgiveness, at least as long as her husband is still President.
