MJ: The rabbi story never gets old. Please link every day. It should be an automatic response to every Krauty utterance....."Did you hear what he said to my rabbi?"

Krauthammer and his ilk have the unfortunate (unfortunate for us who opt to read him) habit of seeing, reasoning and evaluating everything through their singular, glazed-over eyes - the glaze of the idiotlogue. Hopefully he/they will soon retire from the media scene.

Krauthammer's praise for McCain was certainly overdone, but surely it should be interpreted as a rhetorical screen behind which he is walking back from his earlier extreme positions. It seems to me that the divisions in the GOP boil down to one big question: was Palin a big mistake or is she the future of the party? The diehards, who espouse the second position, are attacking as traitors and turncoats all the realists who adopt the first. Krauthammer, as he reminds us today, called Palin a mistake, and he's not retreating from that view. So he's declaring himself a member of the realist camp. The exaggerated praise of McCain serves to mitigate the divisiveness of that choice. He's hoping not to break with all his friends on the right, while his generous praise for Obama prepares the way for him to find positive aspects in Obama's presidency. So maybe we should expect a more conciliatory Krauthammer.

I'm usually skeptical about the Rabbi story because I've been in the same congregation for years and simply do not remember an outburst from Krauthammer. But I'll admit to being really distracted during services in 2001. I'm commenting now, because I agree with everything else in the story; I love the Rabbi, but tune out most of his politics, I try to avoid the visiting Rabbi on the High Holidays, and I can't stand sitting in the same service as Doug Feith. But it is also the shul my kids are growing up in, and so much about it is a warm family community. I'm sure you know that lots and lots of us are not neocons. And we never feel shy about chatting amongst ourselves. I will be so proud in two years when my oldest son becomes Bar Mitzvah with the Rabbi he has known since preschool, regardless of his politics.

Note to Josh:

"I swore to never be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides, Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim, silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

Elie Wiesel, in spirit, on Prop 8.

It reminds me this satirical rendering of British history:

"...by this time the Saxons had all become very old like the Britons before them and were called ealdormen; when they had been defeated in a battle by the Danes they used to sing little songs to themselves such as the memorable fragment discovered in the Bodleian Library at Oxford:
Old-Saxon Fragment

Syng a song of Saxons
In the Wapentake of Rye
Four and twenty eaoldormen
Too eaold to die....

and now our neo-cons, like conservatives before them, became very old and sing little songs to themselves...

And so the revisionist history begins;
ah, what a noble campaign McSame ran, he fought the good fight, he was a hero to the end.......
BULLSHIT!!!

Let us NEVER forget the slimey depths McCain and his campaign went to, to try and smear Obama. Yes, we can move forward with a spirit of bipartisanship but that doesn't mean we have to be fucking idiots and pretend that "it wasn't that bad" because Obama won. Mccain tried the same tricks that Bush & Rove used in 2000 and 2004. Fortunately, and finally, the American public was fed up with them and didn't buy into the politics of fear. But trying to re-write history says so much about chuckie.

Malarkey!

Any good will or measure of respect I had left for McCain vanished over a month ago.

There is not one drop left.

A Machiavellian pimp for the right and a complete and utter failure, both as a father, husband, and human being.

And his agony and pain a losing AND being so soundly rejected are completely earned.

As will be his final retirement in 2010 when he is ousted by a far more worthy politician.

RIP John McCain. You have reaped precisely what you have sown.

Without doubt Henry Wallace was the best candidate for President who did not win.

From Wikipedia: His platform advocated an end to segregation, full voting rights for blacks, and universal government health insurance. His campaign was unusual for his time in that it included African American candidates campaigning alongside white candidates in the American South, and that during the campaign he refused to appear before segregated audiences or eat or stay in segregated establishments.

That was in 1948. An end to segregation and Jim Crow 16 years *before* the Civil Rights Act. Universal health insurance *that we still do not have*.

Where was the Hammer when McCain was denied the "prize" in 2000 by Bush and Rove? Pounding on the Rabbi? Given how carefully he weighed the choice of a nominee for VP, one can readily imagined why McCain denied himself that prize in 2004.