My word, there's certainly been a load of huff and kerfluffle over whether Jews critical of Israel's response to Hezbollah are
conflicted in their Jewish identity. But for
Rabbi Marc Gellman, that question surely pales next to the
cardinal sin of failing to support good ol' Joe.
You see, apparently Holy Joe lost not because he did anything wrong, not because he failed to represent the interests of voters in Connecticut, but because faithless Jews betrayed one of their own:
He lost because Barbra Streisand's highly publicized contribution to Lamont and because of the number of Jews who hated Bush and the war more than they loved Joe. That's why he lost, and I don't get it.
Ah, the evil Mecca-Streisand, the worst of the lot! Abandon all hope! (Where's that damned Leonard Maltin when you really need him?)
Lemme see here...Innocent martyr from their own ranks...mobs of hateful Jews calling for a political bloodletting...Now, what does that remind me of?
Oh well, at least they didn't nail Holy Joe to anything wooden.
Now, according to Gellman, these Bush-hating Jews wandering the wilderness of Connecticut have most definitely lost their vital connection to the Judean Hive Mind. Their processors are all fucked up; their information trays are JAMMED:
I am also bewildered about why Jews do not support President Bush more than the pathetic 22-26 percent he received in 2004. Bush would win a landslide in Israel
Would he, now.
Special offer for our readers from Israel: I hear Olmert is on thin ice these days. Georgie is all yours if you want him! He's great with bombs (hurricanes, not so much) and of course he draws a mean picture of a cat.
I can't promise he'll keep kosher, but you can look deep into his soul and know he'll never EVER nip into the Mogen David behind your back. (Oh, and...Dick's included too, guaranteed to put the fear of Republican JesusYHWH into the Hezzies with his patented Birdshot Facelift. No charge! No layaway!)
...but back to Gellman:
...among reasonable non-rabid people, the differences over Iraq are just not that big.
Let's first just get clear on who we're NOT talking about here:
"...the differences over Iraq are just not that big." Well, they just aren't! Iraq is a nation in the Middle East. It is different from Iran whenever we want it to be. It has lots of sand. Sand, and rape rooms. And OIL.
See? We agree on tons of Iraq stuff.
Except for, y'know, that one minor issue of Bush lying to start a freakin' war there with Joe's full backing. (What's a little "Nigerian uranium" yarn among friends? Relax, guy! Take a rest!)
And, yeah, ok, maybe also the ability to open one's fucking eyes and change one's mind when visions of flowers and cakewalks turn into bloody 3-year occupation-cum-civil-war clusterfucks.
And I guess there's always the basic desire to end it on our own terms rather than keep it going until whenever "the Iraqis" (now there's a monolithic bloc for you!) decide to quit massacring each other and pass the peace pipe while quoting James Madison instead. But hey, are we gonna split hairs here over flypaperflyspecks???
And for this we dumped Joe? It just makes no sense to me and it ought to be a huge embarrassment to all card-carrying Jews whether they agreed with Joe or not.
"makes no sense"..."embarassment"...yep, Gellman's definitely on to
something, alright. But:
card-carrying Jews? Well, land o' Goshen! Why didn't I ever think to ask my Jewish friends for their papers? I always just assumed they were for real, but how could I
really know if they were True Jews, or some whacked-out Canadian imitation?
REAL AMERICAN JEW FAKE CANADIAN "JEW"
Perhaps what is needed is something more conspicuous than the card, something worn that doesn't need to be dug out of the wallet. What's that star thingy Israel has on its flag? Hmmm, but maybe something other than blue/white, since that's taken...perhaps a nice yellow...
That way, if we should ever chance to see any card-carrying Jews misbehaving--thinking for themselves, voting their own imagined, misguided "interests"--why, we can all just give them a polite nudge back into line. The ever-helpful Gellman even gives us an idea of where we'd need to focus our efforts:
There are and have always been only two kinds of Jews: tribal Jews and cosmopolitan Jews. Tribal Jews love anything Jewish. Cosmopolitan Jews love anything but Jewish. Tribal Jews are not trying to pass, assimilate or deny their tribal roots, their attachment to Israel and their love of other Jews no matter who they are. Cosmopolitan Jews are trying to pass and assimilate and become an undifferentiated member of the majority culture. The problem with tribal Jews is that they have trouble loving non-Jews. The problem with cosmopolitan Jews is that they have trouble loving other Jews.
Cosmopolitan Jews, undifferentiating right here, in the untamed Connecticut Outback, in public? Disgraceful! Better wise up, you self-abnegating bastards, you carpet-bagging big-city
schmucks--this is
America{tm} (
CA, NYC & MA excluded, see electoral map for details)! We can't have any of this "passing" and "assimilating" and independent-thinking "democracy" nonsense here in the
VaterHomeland as we fight to protect our American values from terrorists who Hate Our Freedoms!
STEPFORD, CT JEWS FOR LIEBERMAN! RESISTANCE...IS...FUTILE.
Keep it up, and we'll have to set aside a special Jewish slumdistrict in every town that'll keep you high as a kite on pure Jew-ness and Jewish free-love through proximity to your own kind. 'Cause like Rabbi Gellman says, You gotta love Jewish, and Jewish means Joe. He's got Jew-mentum! He's jew-bilantly Jew-esque! If you're a loyal member of the tribe, nothing else should matter. (Incidentally, on my more cynical days, I'm amazed it took you self-loathers 18 years and 4 Senate elections to uncover Joe's "big secret" and turn on him.)
Actually, with all our wonderful face-recognition and cyber-genomic technology, we could probably even set up Jew-screening stations at every polling place, and ferret out those wayward cosmo-sexual deviant head-flapping Canadian Jews who would dare shame their race by pulling the wrong lever and nominating that deranged AlQaedophile Jew-hater Ned Lamont, formerly of the Greenwich Town Board of Selectmen.
Mind you, there's no need for a new, bloated bureaucracy--remember the Faith-based Initiative? With just a smidge of Federal funding and passage of a few common-sense Rassengesetzeelection laws, I'm sure the genial folks over at the so-called "Christian Party" would agree to put on their jack-boots and help out with implementation, and perhaps this noted wordsmith and expert in the field of semitic craniometry would be willing to design the scanning criteria.
But all in good time. For now, we can thank Marc Gellman for sending such a powerful message to all those mentally deficient Jews who can't muster the clear-thinking political integrity to support both George Bush (the hard-line Republican who'd "win a landslide in Israel") and Holy Joe (an extremely Jewish sort of Jew who "voted the Democratic line 90 percent of the time").
And just what is that clarion message?
True acceptance means that we as Jews can be delighted that he was nominated and then vote against him because we do not agree with his politics. Voting for Lieberman because he is Jewish is just as wrong as voting against Lieberman because he is Jewish. Acceptance means being considered for public office because of where you stand on the issues, not where you stand on the sabbath.
Whoops! Sorry folks, that was Rabbi Gellman way back in the Year 2000. Pay no attention! "A foolish consistency..." and all that. 9/11 changed everything, and Jews now undermine the credibility of Joe at their own peril!