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Ranking the Greatness of Barack Obama

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I disagree with President Obama on many issues, from the Trans Pacific Partnership and the overreach of the NSA and CIA to his vigorous prosecution of whistle blowers. I have no idea why our military is still in Afghanistan and keeps trying to get involved in a centuries-old civil war in the Muslim world between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and at the beginning of his Administration I thought the President was too quick to attempt to find bipartisan agreement between the Democratic and Republican Parties when the Republicans in congress had declared that their top priority was to guarantee that Barack Obama would be a one-term president, and set about trying to deny him at every turn out of fear that any sort of victory for the Obama would make him more popular and more likely to be re-elected in 2012. He made a big mistake and set a dangerous precedent by allowing the Grand Old Party to effectively hold the full faith and credit of the USA hostage by threatening to default on our national debt; while President Obama has learned from his mistake – when the GOP tried the same tactics in 2013, he called their bluff, and, by daring the Republican Party to shoot their hostage, he forced the Party’s eventual capitulation of the Republicans in congress – his initial mistake has left us with the Sequester that has resulted in lots of pain for the Americans who already have the least. But in spite of all my disagreements with the President, I think it is becoming more apparent by the day that we’re looking at one of the ten greatest presidents in the history of the United States, and the best in at least half a century.

I love to rank things, and as someone who is sort of an amateur historian, one of the many things I try to quantify is the greatness of the 43 men who have served as POTUS. The way I try to gauge our Commanders-in-Chief is to look at the condition of the USA when the president enters office and compare it to the situation on the day the president leaves office, and I primarily use the foreign, economic, and domestic states of affairs to judge the president’s success or failure. It is much harder to do this sort of thing today than it was even in the recent past, because politics has become so divisive that statistics that prove one’s argument are willingly ignored by one who feels differently. That makes it much easier to rank a historical president like Abraham Lincoln (my pick for best ever, by the way) because almost no one is arguing the basic facts that stand in his favor in the categories I mentioned before: only one month into his Administration, there were 11 states in open rebellion against the federal government, yet when he was assassinated one month into his second-term, the rebellion was over, Reconstruction had begun, slavery (its primary cause) had been extinguished first with his Emancipation Proclamation and then for good by Constitutional Amendment. Meanwhile the US economy had increased exponentially to deal with the war, most northern cities/population centers saw their economies and populations skyrocket and the US had decisively shown itself to be one of the world’s Great Powers. The contrast of the state of the United States when Lincoln took office and when he died is proof of how incredible he was.

If we use those same standards and compare the state of American foreign, economic, and domestic affairs on January 20th, 2009, the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, and compare it to today, with a year and a half still to go, the result is stunning. When President Obama succeeded President George W. Bush, the USA and the world were mired in the Great Recession (the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression); the US was stuck in the two longest wars in American history with one of them, the Iraq War, being a completely unnecessary war based on a lie; Osama bin Laden – the mastermind of the terror attacks of 9/11/2001 that had in many ways to come to define Bush’s Presidency –  was still commanding Al Qaeda, having evaded Bush for 7 ½ years;  we had engaged in a torture program under Bush that, exemplified by the Abu Ghraib scandal and the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, badly tarnished America’s global reputation; Bush had driven up a huge deficits by slashing taxes for the rich in spite of the fact that when he succeeded President Bill Clinton in 2001 the government was actually running a surplus; the integrity and legitimacy of our democracy was greatly threatened by the controversial presidential election of 2000; and many things, from the ineptitude of the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina to its inability to stop or slow down the recession had discredited government as a whole in the eyes of many Americans.

A lot of those issues are simply due to the fact that George W. Bush was one of the worst presidents of all-time (I have him 3rd worst, and at the bottom for all two-term presidents), but the wreckage W. left behind makes it easier to view the successful Administration of his successor. In January 2009 the unemployment rate was at 7.8 and it quickly grew to 10 % before the 2009 Stimulus fully kicked in, and today it sits at 5.3 %. When President Obama took office we still had 150,000 American troops fighting the unnecessary Iraq War, and when the last US troops left the nation in 2011, over 4,000 Americans had died fighting in that war with tens of thousands more wounded either physically or emotionally, and that does not even touch on the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed or wounded or the millions who lost their homes. And it was President Obama who gave the order to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, doing in under 2 ½ years what Bush could not do in the 7 ½ years he was in office after 9/11. President Obama’s bailout of the American automotive industry was also a huge success, with GM and Chrysler paying back their loans way ahead of expectations. There has been a great leap forward in LGBT rights, which is all the more impressive when one remembers that part of the reason Bush won the 2004 election over John Kerry was by campaigning against gay marriage, with many states across the nation putting gay marriage bans on the ballot that same day, and seeing those bans pass with huge margins. And yet today, only 11-years after that contentious 2004 election, gay marriage is now legal in all 50-states and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed, allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military for the first time.

One of the most amazing features of his Presidency has been that Barack Obama accomplished all the things I mentioned before with a dedicated Republican opposition to him that is one of the most sustained and vehement in US history. The Republicans have even abandoned their own bills when those bills were supported by President Obama, and they have ground Congress to a halt, leaving it incapable of doing almost anything. None of this has been an accident, as it has been the part of an almost nihilistic effort to deprive Obama of anything that might have been perceived as a victory for him, and while this was just as despicable early in Obama’s Administration as it is today, at least then the GOP was doing it as part of a plan to keep Obama from being re-elected in 2012. However, even though President Obama won big in his 2012 re-election bid, the Republican resistance has not weakened at all. Even when the President has gotten strong bi-partisan support for a bill, as he received with is proposal for comprehensive immigration reform (it received 67 votes in Congress), it failed in the House because Speaker John Boehner refused to bring the bill up for a vote in spite of the fact that the vocal support of many Republicans in the House seemed to show that the bill would pass and become law. Congress also killed multiple proposals from the Obama Administration to raise the national minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hour, and left without the help of Congress, President Obama took Executive Action on both issues to try to save as many immigrants from deportation as possible, while raising the minimum wage for all government employees and contractors to $10.10.

Perhaps the most lasting achievement of President Obama will be the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, more commonly known as ‘Obamacare,’ a name Republicans had coined in an effort to kill health care reform, just as they had successfully been able to do in 1993-94 when they labeled the Clinton Administration’s proposal ‘Hillarycare,’ and made it so unpopular, it fell apart before it even got a vote. However this time the GOP was unable to kill Obamacare (though it is not for lack of trying), and it is now the law of the land, expanding health care coverage to millions of Americans and ending pre-existing conditions. While many liberals (including myself) were upset that Obama tried to compromise with Republicans by not aiming for single-payer health care or at least propose a public insurance option, especially because his alterations to the plan – which actually made the plan almost identical to the health care reforms the Republican Party had championed in the fight against ‘Hillarycare’ as being the free market solution to universal health care – refused to get a single Republican vote in either House of Congress anyway. The Republicans in Congress desperately tried to kill Obamacare, but were unable to do so and so brought the law to the Supreme Court, which in a surprise 5-4 ruling (a surprise because the Court is currently divided 5-4 in favor of conservative, Republican-appointed justices) declared that the law was constitutional, and they made it a huge focus of the 2012 presidential election, but President Obama won re-election by 5 million votes over Republican nominee and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. And while Healthcare.gov got off to a rocky start and many states with Republican legislatures and governors have actively worked to sabotage the law at the expense of their own people, so far the law has been a huge success, has expanded health care to people who have never before been able to afford it, and has led to the smallest rise in health care costs in decades. However, the obvious success of the law has not led to any more Republican-controlled states expanding Medicaid to make sure that some of their poorest citizens can still get health care, purposefully hurting many of their own citizens, and Republicans tried again to kill the law at the Supreme Court based on a ludicrous technicality, but were again rebuffed, this time 6-3. All of it means that Obamacare is here to stay, and it is likely to be the crowning achievement of the Obama Presidency.

However, it is President Obama’s recent impact on the world stage that led me to write this article, and while his recent climate change agreement with China, and his starting to normalize relations with Cuba – something that a majority of Americans have been in favor since at least the end of the Cold War in 1991 – have been very impressive, the major story has been the initial agreement that his Administration has reached with Iran concerning its nuclear program. There is a lot to the tentative Iran deal, and it still has to make it through congress and past the hardliners in Iran, if the agreement works out, it will cement Obama’s legacy as the greatest president of at least the last half century and one of the best ever. The plain logic of the deal with Iran is hard to ignore, as it acknowledges that American, Israeli, and other leading nation state’s regimes are in nearly entire agreement that Iran possessing nuclear weapons is a threat that we can’t really live with. Once it is accepted as a truth that we will not allow Iran to attain nuclear weapons, the question then is how we stop that from happening, and the only realistic options are diplomacy (such as the deal the Obama Administration just worked out) or war. It is that simple, and the fact of the matter is that it has been true at least since the Bush Administration that we cannot just wipe out Iran’s nuclear capability in one blow, which means they would still retain the knowledge of how to build a bomb and have enough centrifuges and enough enriched uranium to build a bomb. We would then have the choice of either using our own nuclear weapons against Iran OR of waging a conventional war against the country, which would entail fighting a nation with around 80 million people who live in a nation the size of Alaska – which is contrasted to an Iraq we invaded in 2003 that had around 25 million people in a nation the size of California, and that war did NOT go well. There is almost no American support for a war with such a huge nation, as it would entail years and would result in the deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands and maybe even more in a war we would largely be fighting for the benefit of our ally Israel, a nation which has under 7 million people, meaning that if we do not choose to try to wipe the nation of the face of the earth with an instant nuclear strike, we would be doing most of the fighting and the dying in that war. I find it hard to imagine that the American people, upon learning the true size, scope, and difficulty of a war with Iran, would not swiftly turn on both the war and on Israel itself, for how many lives are we willing to sacrifice to support such a small nation? Anyone who peddles a potential third option outside of diplomacy or war is being dishonest, and it is easy to see how serious the opposition to this agreement is by seeing what the opponents are selling; most of them understand that there is no support for a huge war against Iran, so they are instead selling some nebulous ‘better deal,’ without any specifics except that if not for the ‘weak’ Obama Administration, we could get Iran to give up ALL of its nuclear program instead of dismantling almost all of it, agreeing to constant inspections, and making it so that the soonest they can produce a bomb is 10-15 years from now. The options are peace or war and there is no support for war, which means that the Obama Administration just got the best deal we could get, and if it makes it through Congress, it really will be a crowning historical achievement for Barack Obama.

There is still a year and a half to go in President Obama’s term, and anything can happen in that time, but he is on the cusp of locking up the position as the greatest US president of the last half-century, and with all that time left, he has a real chance to even pass Eisenhower and become the best President since Truman. With how divisive our politics are today, I know that there are many conservatives who earnestly believe that Barack Obama has been a horrible president (and some think he is actively working to hurt America, which is ridiculous, but no less of a real belief for being so) and who believe that Ronald Reagan is the single greatest president in American history, but I am not really writing this for them, as they mostly had their minds made up on the Obama Presidency before he even took office. I am not writing it for the person who asked me (with absolute sincerity) if I was ‘ready to admit’ that Obama was the ‘worst president since Jimmy Carter,’ and potentially the worst ever, less than six months into his first term in 2009. Instead, I am writing this for those who did not have their mind made up already, and who can appreciate the historical significance of a national health care plan, a saved economy, the expansion of LGBT rights, and the potential for a real and lasting peace. I am writing this for those who still have faith that government can have a positive role in making peoples’ lives better, and can see that President Obama has done a lot to restore that faith, which is a hell of an achievement when one remembers how little trust in our public institutions was left after a Bush Administration that lied us into a seemingly endless war, could do nothing to help the people devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and left amidst the greatest world-wide recession since the Great Depression. Neither government, nor a president, can do everything, and both governments and presidents can do bad things, but once in a while, when the right person comes along, he or she can restore your faith and make you remember why you had that faith to begin with. Barack Obama has done that, and his legacy will only grow because of it. He truly is one of the greatest of all-time.

2015 Israeli elections, Adolf Hitler, Anti-Semitism, Dreyfus Affair, Foreign relations, French anti-Semitism, German anti-Semitism, History, Holocaust, International Politics, Jewish people, Nazism, Peace, Pogroms, Political scapegoats, Politics, U.S.-Israeli relations, War, World War I

Playing with Fire: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is Risking the Future of Israel and the Jewish People

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is playing with fire by imploring Jews all over the world to leave their homes and move to Israel. His recent statement that he speaks for ALL worldwide Jewry is not only arrogant, but absolutely untrue, and regardless of whether or not Netanyahu and Likud win re-election in two weeks, the fact that many Israelis – both Jewish and otherwise – will vote against Bibi (as Netanyahu is also known) shows that a good many Israeli Jews don’t want him to speak for them either. Anti-Semitism is nothing new, and it has existed as long as there has been a Jewish people, but the most dangerous threats to the Jewish people have mostly come about since the rise of the modern conception of the nation-state during the 19th century. The birth of nationalism (which, throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, became increasingly fanatical) led to dark questions about whether the Jewish people were truly loyal to the nations that they called home, or if they had extra-national ties to other Jews that trumped any true national devotion. Desperate and failing regimes had an easy scapegoat to explain any societal ills, and whether the populace was poor, starving, or angry about a corrupt government, the response was often the same: ‘Blame the Jews! Those dangerous and untrustworthy others are the cause of all of our problems!’ I believe there are three major historical examples where the loyalty of the Jews of different nations was questioned and where it led to dangerous consequences for the Jewish people: those are the Dreyfus Affair in France, the publication of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ in Tsarist Russia, and perhaps worst of all, the ‘stabbed in the back’ legend that planted dark seeds in the soil of Germany after its loss in World War I that grew into the Holocaust under one of the infamous fallacy’s true believers: Adolf Hitler.

The Dreyfus Affair that would soon expose a deep, calcified anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of French society, began in France in 1894 when Jewish French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested (and rapidly tried and convicted by a military court and sentenced to life in prison) on the charge of treason for selling state secrets to Germany; the only problem was he was absolutely innocent of all the charges. The complete and utter lack of proof did not matter to the French officer corps that decided Dreyfus’s fate: it had simply decided that because Dreyfus was Jewish, his allegiance to France was tenuous and he must be guilty. The Officer Corps even refused to alter its opinion when it discovered in 1896 that Dreyfus was innocent and that the real traitor was Major Ferdinand Esterhazy; the resulting attempt by the army to cover up the exculpatory evidence exploded in the French press, as famous writers like Emile Zola lined up behind Dreyfus and accused the Officer Corps of blatant anti-Semitism for its attempt to hide the evidence which proved his innocence. France was split between liberals who rallied to defend Dreyfus and conservatives who either were members of the Catholic, traditional officer class or who sympathized with them, but the pressure grew to the point that the French President pardoned Dreyfus in 1899 even though it would take seven more years before the anti-Semitic officers would finally clear Dreyfus’s name and withdraw the conviction and all the charges. However in spite of Dreyfus’s vindication, the reflexive reaction of the elements of society who sought to bury him and tar his name laid bare the dark and powerful vein of anti-Semitism that lay in the heart of France and that has never truly disappeared even to the present day.

Published in Russia in 1903, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” may be the most infamous forgery in history. Purporting to reveal a secret meeting of powerful Jews in which they discussed plans for Jewish global domination, the book was popular among anti-Semitics all over the world, including among Americans like Henry Ford, who helped expose the book to a wider audience in the US. While the book was revealed as a forgery as early as 1921 – when it was proven to have plagiarized many of its passages directly from Maurice Joly’s “Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,” – the fact that it was a lie did not lessen its popularity in anti-Semitic circles, and even today the translated book is still a bible of sorts for Jew haters everywhere. The lies put forward in “Protocols,” have remained fruitful into the present and whenever one hears comments (either serious or joking) that the Jews dominate the world through secret control of finance, the media, manufacturing, and more, he or she is feeling the continuing ripples of this century-old canard. In its day, “Protocols” helped spark many Russian pogroms in the final decade and a half of the Tsar’s rule and led  to violence, death, and destruction for Jews all over Eastern Europe; needless to say, it was also quite popular with Hitler and the Nazis

The ‘Stabbed in the Back’ legend in post-World War I Germany is perhaps the most deadly lie about Jewish disloyalty in history. Because of the brutal effects that Germany endured as a result of losing World War I and signing the Treaty of Versailles, many angry and ashamed Germans needed to come up with a reason to explain their hardships, and they found one in the lie that the ‘undefeated’ German Army was on the brink of winning the war in 1918 when Jewish traitors in Berlin betrayed Germany and sold it out to the Allies. Since the German army was still on French soil when the war ended and no Allied forces had set foot in Germany, the people chose to ignore the myriad causes of Germany’s loss and convinced themselves that the only reason that they lost the war was because they had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by traitors at home; specifically, they were betrayed by Germany’s Jews. For angry veterans like Corporal Hitler, it was far more convenient to blame the Jews than to look inwardly and admit the failures of the Kaiser, the generals, and themselves. Hitler bought into the ‘stabbed in the back’ lie without reservation and it confirmed for him the belief that Jews were not and never would be true Germans, but rather an internal enemy of the state itself, which caused Hitler to resolve to remove the Jews from all phases of German life.

Now we have Benjamin Netanyahu claiming to speak for all of the world’s Jews and calling for the Jews of Europe and elsewhere to undermine their home governments by recognizing his status as the true voice of the Jewish people and then moving to Israel. What reason could he possibly have for suggesting that non-Israeli Jews basically become the insurgent element that the anti-Semites of the recent past have vilified us as? I believe it is all for his immediate political survival and that he either does not notice or does not care that his short-sighted actions – and short-sighted actions have been a hallmark of Netanyahu’s rule – are bringing back many of those old lies about the lack of patriotism and loyalty of Jews. Bibi seems to be saying, “You Jews may live in the USA, Europe, or elsewhere, but in truth you’re all Israelis and your first loyalty must be to us,” which is untrue, subversive, and dangerous. He is pumping life into the old myths that were so catastrophic for the Jewish people, and forcing every Jew to make a choice by basically asking: “Are you an American Jew are a Jewish American?” The order of the words may not matter to some, but there is actually a difference between being an American (or European, or anywhere outside of Israel) Jew and a Jewish American. An American Jew is someone who is an American above all, in spite of his or her religious or cultural identification as Jewish, views Israel as a foreign country that takes a backseat to the United States; he or she may support Israel, but the USA comes first. A Jewish American is someone who is Jewish first and, and while he or she may not necessarily support Israel over the USA (or at all), their loyalties might indeed be tested if the alliance between the United States and Israel was dissolved. A Jewish American may agree with Bibi and feel that a preemptive strike against Iran is preferable to peace talks, and that the USA must be involved in such a military action from the start. An American Jew is more likely to side with President Barack Obama than Bibi, and to feel that going to war as a first option against a nation with almost 80 million people in order to aid the war-mongering Administration of a nation of just over 8 million people (not all of them Jewish) is a terrible idea.

If the peace talks with Iran fail – which, based on his speech to Congress last Tuesday and all his past statements and deeds, is what Bibi is aiming for – it would mean that a military ‘solution’ to dealing with Iran’s nuclear program would become far more likely, and Israel simply cannot fight that battle alone and win. Due to that fact, it means peace is by far the best option here, because the only way Israel even might win a war with Iran without active U.S. involvement would be to use nuclear weapons against Iran, and if Israel were to launch first strike nuclear warheads against Iran, it would completely end American support of Israel while simultaneously turning it into a universally despised rogue state trailing even North Korea in the eyes of the international community. However, as long as Bibi believes that all Jews are in favor of every action that his regime takes, he will continue to act as if there will be no negative repercussions to trying to destroy any legitimate chance at peace, undermining President Obama’s attempt to negotiate a peaceful settlement, and encouraging Jews to leave their homes for Israel. Netanyahu seems to believe that his political future, the future of Israel, and the fate of the Jewish people as a whole are the same thing and that only his victory can secure them.

I am Jewish, I support Israel, and I have many friends there; I believe its survival is as vital today as it was in 1948, but I am an American, my brothers serve in the American military, and regardless of how much I care for Israel, I believe that heading into war with a nation of 80 million on Israel’s behalf would be catastrophic. I think the best course for the USA is to make it absolutely clear to Netanyahu that we are not giving him a blank check of support and that if he chooses to initiate a war with Iran, he’ll be on his own; maybe if we make that clear to him, he might think twice before pursuing aggressively pro-war policies. Israel cannot go to war with a nation as large as Iran without U.S. help and, unless Iran strikes first, we must deny Bibi that help if we are to have a legitimate chance for peace. If Iran strikes first then Israel should be able to count on vigorous U.S. support, but not only would a U.S.-Iranian war be a disaster for Americans, such a war would be far worse for Israel because it would devastate the nation in the short-term and threaten the long-term U.S.-Israeli alliance since, once the bodies start to pile up, how long will it be before Americans turn against the war and then against Israel entirely? How long after that will it be before Americans start looking for a scapegoat and find one in the millions of Jewish people who live here? Bibi is playing a very dangerous game here, and if he’s not careful it will be the Jewish people, whether Israeli or not, who are going to get hurt.