Monitor

The Monitor will return to the subject of Joe Lieberman (or Senator Twister, as we've renamed him) next week; after all - and here we're paraphrasing the Sage of Saddle River, the late and lamented Dick Nixon - we will have Joe to kick around for the foreseeable future.

When five-term Alabama congressman Earl Hilliard, widely considered one of Israel's most implacable foes on Capitol Hill, was defeated in a Democratic primary last June, the news was greeted with unconcealed glee by pro-Israel organizations and activists across the country - many of whom had worked hard to unseat him.

Anyone who still doubts the mainstream media?s left-wing bias should study the coverage of last Saturday's anti-war rally in Washington. Even as jaded a media watcher as the Monitor finds it difficult to recall an event as outlandishly whitewashed, as outrageously skewed, as this one was by print and electronic journalists clearly sympathetic to the demonstrators.

David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who coined the "Axis of Evil" phrase for President Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, is out with an engaging behind-the-scenes look at his time in the White House.

Tell Us Again About Liberal Patriotism - The date: Dec. 27. The setting: Neal Cavuto's Fox News program. Liberal commentator Ellen Ratner was chatting with Brenda Buttner, who was sitting in for Cavuto. The gist of the conversation, until Ratner briefly took off her mask of civility, was that President Bush appears almost impossible to beat in 2004.

The Media Research Center is out with its annual "Best Notable Quotables" list of what it calls "the year's worst reporting." Here are just a few examples of the liberal bias and stupidity that come pouring out of the mouths and word processors of media types on a daily basis. (Visit www.mrc.org for the complete list.)

Here we are fourteen weeks into our series on Jewish voting habits, and the Monitor admits to having no single satisfactory answer to why Jews are still, after all these years, in such utter thrall to the Democratic party.

Before concluding our series on Jewish voting habits in next week's Monitor, we devote this week's installment to some of the more colorful responses we've received from die-hard Democrats. Wear your helmets.

Al Gore's surprise choice in August 2000 of Joseph Lieberman as his running mate electrified American Jews, and seemed to foreclose any possibility that George W. Bush would even approach the poor numbers put up among Jewish voters by his father in 1992 (15 percent) and Bob Dole in 1996 (16 percent).

There is every reason to believe that had Bill Clinton been on the ballot in the 2000 presidential election, American Jews would have voted in overwhelming numbers to return him to office for a third term.

Jewish voters gave Bill Clinton 78 percent of their votes in 1992 and again in 1996 - at the time the best showing by a presidential candidate among Jews since Hubert Humphrey won 81 percent of the Jewish vote in 1968 - and their love for Clinton never dimmed during the course of his tumultuous presidency.

The 1988 presidential election - unlike those of, say, 1972 and 1980 - was notable for its lack of sharp differentiation between the Republican and Democratic nominees on the issue of Israel and the Middle East.

A majority of American Jewish voters had deserted Jimmy Carter in 1980, leading to speculation that the Jewish community perhaps was moving away from its longtime loyalty to the Democratic party and rendering obsolete Milton Himmelfarb's famous observation that "Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans."

The 1980 presidential election, like the Nixon-McGovern matchup eight years earlier, offered a clear choice between a Republican candidate who was unambiguous in his support of Israel and a Democrat whose record was something less than sterling. Only this time, the pro-Israel candidate was the challenger, former California governor Ronald Reagan, while the more problematic candidate was the incumbent, James Earl Carter.

Although it played out more than two years after the fact, the 1976 presidential campaign was overshadowed by the Watergate scandal, with voters still angry over President Gerald Ford's pardon of his predecessor, Richard Nixon, who resigned the presidency to escape impeachment.

We left off last week in the midst of the 1972 presidential campaign, one of the more interesting in terms of Jewish voting behavior. On one hand you had the incumbent, Republican Richard Nixon, whose relationship with Israel during his first term was quite solid; on the other you had his Democratic challenger, South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, a leading dove on Vietnam with a not especially inspiring record on Israel.

There never was much doubt that Jews would vote in large numbers for Democrat Lyndon Johnson over Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 - a year when even many moderate members of his own party were high-tailing it away from the GOP's outspokenly conservative standard bearer.

The presidential election of 1928 is seen by most political historians as something of a demarcation line in the history of Jewish voting loyalties. It was in that election that the Democrats first began polling landslide numbers among American Jews, as New York governor Al Smith, a Roman Catholic of immigrant stock (whose campaign manager happened to be Jewish) captured 72 percent of the Jewish vote.

Why are Jews still wedded to the Democratic party, years after it stopped making any economic or political sense for them to remain in the marriage? It's a question one hears often from bewildered non-Jews and Republican Jews (Democratic Jews - i.e. the vast majority of American Jews - seem oblivious to the question, let alone any possible answer).

The front page story in last week's Jewish Press ("Israelis Sing Bush's Praises") - coming as it did almost simultaneously with the release of a Gallup poll that, on the surface at least, seemed to dash any Republican hopes that American Jews might be warming to the GOP - inspired a batch of letters and e-mails from obviously intelligent readers who just don't get it.

A few items of interest as the Monitor catches up after a break from the regular routine: Reporting on the defeat of Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in an Aug. 20 Democratic primary, the Prince of Palestine, aka Peter Jennings, once again exhibited his bias and unreliability on all matters pertaining to Israel.

"The incredibly shrinking" New York Times is how George Will describes the one-time paper of record, a formerly respectable journalistic enterprise that, in Will's words, is "reinventing itself along the lines of a factional broadsheet..."

The responses are finally slowing to a trickle, but the columns on Israel's friends in the media certainly elicited plenty of feedback from readers. Here's a sampling, followed by the Monitor's very own Media Friends Top Ten list (as distinguished from the earlier two lists which reflected the votes of readers).

Due to the heavier than anticipated response to our Top 25 and Top 10 "Media Friends" lists as voted on by the public, the Monitor will wait another week before sharing a last batch of comments from readers and unveiling the Monitor's own list.

The responses are still coming in to last week's Top 25 (alphabetical order) listing of "Media Friends" of Israel as nominated by the Monitor's faithful readers. Most of you who've e-mailed or faxed your reactions agree with most or all of the names, though a number of readers were livid over the appearance on the list of long-time radio host Bob Grant (see this week's Letters to the Editor section for a taste of their wrath).

A hundred and thirty four. As in 134. Not submissions - those numbered close to a thousand (951 when we stopped the count, with more still coming) - but names. It quickly became obvious that the Monitor had some serious whittling down to do if this Media Friends List was going to work at all.

This week the Monitor concludes its extended look at the anti-Israel proclivities of "60 Minutes" stalwart Mike Wallace. As we've noted in our earlier installments, Wallace has always displayed a palpable ambivalence - some would say that's too charitable a word - when dealing with Jewish issues, never more so than when he downplayed the plight of Soviet Jewry in the 1980's and Syrian Jewry in the 1970's.

"You and your friends won't like what you'll see on my program in a couple of weeks," Mike Wallace told an acquaintance in Jerusalem in November 1990, referring to a forthcoming "60 Minutes" report on the Temple Mount riot staged by Palestinians earlier that fall.

As the Monitor reported last month, veteran "60 Minutes" hatchet man Mike Wallace has, after a brief respite, resumed his familiar role as one of the media's most consistent Jewish critics of Israel. During a number of interviews in recent months Wallace seemed to go out of his way to inject an anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian perspective into the conversation, most notably during a May 22 chat with Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution.

For the best indication that President Bush's June 24 White House speech indeed amounted to what several Israeli officials described as the most pro-Israel statement ever made by a sitting U.S. president, one need look no further than the reactions it stirred in the American punditocracy.