Month: September 2008

Obama keeps hitting the McCain-Bush relationship:

We now find out that there was a collection for Jews For Jesus in the church that Palin attended on August 17. Did Palin donate? Or is that another question we are not allowed to ask? This was also not the first time Brickner had spoken at Palin’s church. Despite radio silence on this from the right-wing media, some Jewish groups have managed to get a response from Michael Goldfarb:

A spokesman for the McCain campaign, Michael Goldfarb, said Palin did not know Brickner would be speaking that day and did not share his views. Church pastor Larry Kroon confirmed that Palin, the governor of Alaska who was chosen last week by U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to join his GOP presidential ticket, would have had no way of knowing that Brickner was slated to speak.

“Governor Palin does not share the views he expressed, and she and her family would not have been sitting in the pews of this church for the last seven years if his remarks were even remotely typical,” Goldfarb wrote in an e-mail.

Following Brickner’s sermon, Kroon took up an offering for Jews for Jesus and prayed that Jews would come to accept Jesus.

Yes, Michael Goldfarb is now defending Jews For Jesus! This is an organization the ADL describes on its website thus

Targeting Jews for Conversion with Subterfuge and Deception.

Abraham Foxman, the chairman of the ADL, who thinks you’re an anti-Semite if you sneeze into a bagel, suddenly disagrees with his own organization:

The ADL’s national director, Abraham Foxman, told JTA that Protestant evangelizing to Jews was entirely different from Catholics praying for Jewish conversion, which the ADL has sharply criticized.

“They did not have the Inquisition. They did not go on a Crusade. They did not kill Jews for 2,000 years,” Foxman said. “They have a belief; they’re entitled to their belief.”

Besides, he said, there is no evidence that Palin shares Brickner’s views.  

“If you could tell me that she approves of this guy, she invited him, I’m not aware of any of that,” Foxman said. “The fact that she belongs to a church that believes in it, I don’t have a problem.”  

The ADL has accused Jews for Jesus of “aggressive proselytizing with a deceptive message.”

Ben Smith adds:

The pastor, Larry Kroon, told me that Brickner had been to the church once before, and in his introduction described Brickner as "a leader of Jews for Jesus, a ministry that is out on the leading edge in a pressing, demanding area of witnessing and evangelism" and closed the sermon without giving any sense anybody had said anything out of line.

Still nothing from any of the sites that went apeshit over Jeremiah Wright. Nothing on Commentary. Nothing at The Weekly Standard. Nothing at NRO. Here’s the best spin I could find from a far right neocon – but at least he’s acknowledging the problem. Maybe they’ll wake up when they realize they just lost Florida.

Does Yuval Levin really believe that the truly surreal story and crazy, beyond-the-fringe record of Sarah Palin were somehow going to remain untouched by human hands? The press doesn’t matter so much any more. We all have Google. Does Yuval? All you need are the archives of the Anchorage Daily News, and an ounce of common sense. If the press had sat on its hands the last few days, the nomination of Palin would still be clearly the worst executive decision ever made by a candidate for president in the modern era. Sorry, Yuval, but this is McCain’s giant mistake and no one else’s.

Victor Davis Hanson explains why people like Palin:

Various reasons, but one I think is that millions of Americans are simply tired of being lectured at by smug elites. Jetting Al Gore made tens of millions finger-pointing at us about our global warming. Obama’s America, apparently unlike Rev. Wright’s Trinity Church, is a cruel, downright mean and dysfunctional place. John Kerry’s United States is one of the half-educated in need of Ivy-League enlightenment and tutorials.

Oookaaaaay

McCain meets Levi Johnston.

Some sanity here from Mark DeMoss, former chief of staff to Jerry Falwell and now a leading Christian public relations executive:

"Too many evangelicals and religious conservative are too preoccupied with values and faith and pay no attention to competence. We don’t apply this approach to anything else in life, including choosing a pastor." Imagine, he said, if a church was searching for a pastor and the leadership was brought a candidate with great values but little experience. "They’ve been a pastor for two years at a church with 150 people but he shares our values, so we hired him to be pastor of our 5,000 person church? It wouldn’t happen! We don’t say, ‘He shares our values, so let’s hire him.’ That’s absurd. Yet we apply that to choosing presidents. It blows my mind."…

 

To be clear, DeMoss isn’t saying Palin is unqualified. "The reality is, we don’t know – and neither does McCain if he only met her once." The other Christian leaders who rallied around her didn’t know much either. "I’m not hinting something’s amiss but we don’t know her and the people who gave her glowing response Friday didn’t know. The euphoric rush to anoint without knowing — it’s a dangerous thing."

You can say that again.

Abe Greenwald agrees with Jack Shafer:

The Left-wing attack dogs have indeed gone after Sarah Palin with a despicable indifference to truth or decency. But this, frankly, is part of the great gamble that John McCain took in choosing a 44-year-old female governor with little-to-no experience on the world stage as his vice presidential pick. The “vetting” issue is relevant, but not in the way most media outlets are suggesting. It’s not that the McCain’s campaign failed to vet Palin; it’s that she’s now being vetted for the first time by the media–with a mere two months to go before election night.

If you think all this stuff wasn’t going to come out at some point in the age of Google, you have to be … unaware of the Internet? More here:

In this dimension alone, she represents the most problematic choice McCain could have made. Other contenders have already weathered unflattering characterizations or mischaracterizations due to their geographical importance, their long records, or their own previous campaigns. Mitt Romney has already taken his hits as passionless technocrat, Mike Huckabee’s been tagged as an unserious populist, etc. Sarah Palin not only missed the season of GOP scrutiny, but has lived such a geographically obscure and personally unique political life that those looking for dirt have a ready-made framework on which to hang their findings. With its Pacific Northwest small-town setting, its guns-and-ammo, and its dark pregnancy fables, the Palin narrative is taking on a tabloidesque Twin Peaks feel. This is not only bad for John McCain and for Republicans, but it’s a rotten state of affairs for the country on the verge of a critical election. However, complaining about it will do McCain no good and in fact probably backfire.

Whining about media mistreatment, however brazenly unjust, hasn’t helped anyone in the course of this election.

Shafer tells the truth:

The press is merely doing on short notice what the McCain campaign’s vetting team should have done between March—when he clinched the nomination—and now: properly vetting his vice-presidential candidate. Does Palin have what it takes to serve as president? Do any Tom Eagleton- or Spiro Agnew-type skeletons lounge in her closet? Will Joe Biden eat her alive in their vice-presidential debate? Can she subordinate herself to McCain?

Matt Welch on last night’s proceedings:

As photographic evidence confirms, there were more empty seats even in prime-time than there are at the end of a Dodger game. At the Democratic Convention, if you didn’t take root two hours before anything important, the fire marshal wouldn’t let you in. Here, you walk right up and find a nice bar stool and table looking directly at the stage. A sign of flagging enthusiasm? Was everyone just at the Ron Paul rally? Who knows!

McCain plays defense.