Monitor

Jack Kemp, who died on Saturday at the age of 73, was, in the words of longtime public official Alan Steinberg, “not only a friend to the Jewish community – he was a true brother to us.”

In this week's Jewish Press front-page essay, Uri Kaufman takes a look at the seemingly unbreakable bond between American Jewry and the Democratic Party. It's something that's been pondered, discussed, debated, and written about for decades, and still the question remains: Why are Jews wedded to the Democrats, years after it stopped making any economic or political sense for them to remain in the marriage?

If you're a liberal who can't stomach President Bush's constant references to God; if you clench your fists every time the president refers to America's religious heritage; if you fear the imminent imposition of a Christian theocracy whenever Mr. Bush speaks of how the country has been divinely blessed - if any or all of this describes you more or less to a tee, then you're sure to have conniptions reading this passage from a certain wartime commander-in-chief's Inaugural message:

Koch became a chronic – some would say compulsive – critic of Giuliani.

Last week the Monitor considered the matter of radio host Don Imus’s firing and the hypocrisy that infused the affair throughout its eight-day life. Ironically, Bernard Goldberg – the veteran television newsman who with his 2001 surprise bestseller Bias blew the whistle on how liberal journalists routinely slant their reportage – has a new book out, Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right, that includes an amusing, counterintuitive, anecdote about Imus.

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.

If George F. Will comes across to some as a starchy combination of ministerial and professorial, he can blame it on his genes: The longtime columnist is, after all, the grandson of a Lutheran minister and the son of a philosophy professor.

About The New York Times it has been possible for a number of years now to declare, comfortably and without risk of contradiction, that relying on the once-formidable newspaper as one’s sole, or even primary, source of information can be hazardous to one’s intellectual health.

The Democrats and their lapdogs in the news media really do expect George W. Bush to campaign for reelection with one hand - possibly both hands - tied behind his back. Witness the largely media-manufactured outrage over the Bush ads that dared make reference to 9/11 - only, after all, a watershed in American history and the signature event of the Bush presidency.

Since returning to private life some three decades ago, Henry Kissinger has doggedly attempted to restore some luster to a rather badly tarnished image. Lionized by the press in the mid-1970’s as “Super K,” the unprecedentedly powerful secretary of state and mighty architect of American foreign policy during the Nixon-Ford era, Kissinger saw his stock fall rapidly in the 1980’s and 90’s as conservatives criticized him for what they saw as his defeatist policy of détente with the Soviet Union and liberals lambasted him for what they viewed as his amoral, Machiavellian sacrifice of American ideals on the altar of pragmatism and realpolitik.

George W. Bush has been getting some positive media coverage lately, with recent polls showing him at least as popular as his successor, Barack Obama, and a big new book about the Bush presidency by New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker (Days of Fire, Doubleday) portraying Bush as a much more hands-on chief executive than his detractors ever imagined.

Dave Love of Sunburst Kosher Tours had a look of unmistakable disgust on his face as he handed the Monitor a copy of Heeb magazine. "Can you believe this garbage?" he asked, referring both to the publication's content and some of the sponsors listed on its masthead.

TimesWatch.org is a website every serious consumer of news should have on his or her 'favorites' list.

The New York Times last week confirmed - yet again - what a decidedly unreliable news source it's become, particularly for readers old-fashioned enough to put a premium on careful and accurate reporting.

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.

Going through some old issues of The Weekly Standard magazine on a recent rainy day, the Monitor was struck by a November 9, 1998 cover story from the acclaimed columnist Charles Krauthammer that fairly shouted Crystal Ball.

Roughly 30 percent of those Jews who had voted for Reagan in 1980 went for Mondale in 1984.

Democrats and their allies in the media who thought they could use those pre-Sept. 11 intelligence reports and FBI memos to diminish President Bush's standing with the American people were in full retreat this week, as a slew of polls gave Bush continued high marks, both for his overall job performance and his handling of the war on terror.

Trolling the Internet these past couple of weeks has served to quash any lingering, hopeful doubts that the post-Zionists have indeed won the battle over how Israel is perceived – by Jews as well as non-Jews, Israelis as well as non-Israelis.

The charade is played out every evening on election day. Television news anchors and beat reporters, on local stations and the networks, come on the air full of breathless anticipation, seeking to build an atmosphere of nail-biting uncertainty.

As was remarked upon here last week, The New York Times has for the past eight years been what can best be described as maddeningly ambivalent, when it hasn't been fighting mad, about Rudy Giuliani.

The Monitor lately has been on the receiving end of a number of e-mails that either contain or link to a hit piece on Jonathan Pollard by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that appeared nearly nine years ago in The New Yorker (Jan. 18, 1999 issue). While the article is not accessible on The New Yorker’s website (the archives section of which is almost non-existent), it’s easily found on the Internet.

The Hillary Clinton presidential campaign is getting louder and uglier by the minute as racial and gender politics threaten to fracture the Democratic base, and even those media outlets that in the past had defended or at the very least tolerated the Clintons give every indication of having finally lost patience with the shopworn act.

Yes, another piece on The New York Times – and those who don’t understand why the Times warrants constant scrutiny probably have no business reading a media column in the first place.

The transformation of The New York Times is more or less complete. The newspaper long known for a liberal sensibility that sometimes bled from the editorials into the news stories has, over the past decade or so, essentially become the media auxiliary of the Democratic Party.

Ditzy Dowd: Kudos to Andrew Sullivan for exposing the hypocrisy of Maureen Dowd, who, along with fellow New York Times op-ed columnists Nicholas Kristof and Paul Krugman, eats, sleeps and breathes hatred of George W. Bush.

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.

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.

"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..."

George W. Bush will leave office as one of the most unpopular presidents in history, battered by years of non-stop criticism, scorn and derision – a good deal of it deserved, but much of it politically motivated, hypocritical and unfair.