The Race in NY District 23 has become a pivotal fight for the soul of the Republican Party.
Dede Scozzafava was run by the Republican machine but has been so thoroughly rejected by the Republican grass roots that she has effectively resigned from the race rather than face the disgrace of coming in third. Republican Doug Hoffman has run under the Conservative party label in an effort to give the voters a truer conservative choice, given Scozzafava’s very liberal voting record. Hoffman now faces Democrat Bill Owens.
Sides were selected and the Republicans split their support. Dick Army, Fred Thomson, and Sarah Palin have stumped for Hoffman while Newt Gingrich supported the official republican candidate.
This episode mirrors the campaign Joe Lieberman waged to retain his Democrat seat in Connecticut. The liberal leg of the Democrats took his nomination for his support of Bush and the war in Iraq, but he ran as an independent and won.
Most impressive in this race is the impact of Erick Erickson, an A-list conservative blogger at Red State (and other sites) and a city councilman in our own Macon, GA. If you stop and think of the impact that a young conservative city councilman in Macon can now have in a NY district race you must appreciate the way the political landscape is changing.
Many conservatives were caught off guard by the effective use of the internet and social media by the Obama Campaign. They wished for that power but most did not really understand how to use it. Erick Erickson understands how to use it. It was probably an alarming lesson for the Republican Party elite. The lesson is that that the era of top down party leadership is over.
The media will probably play that the Republican Party has now been hijacked by the ‘wingnuts’ and populist demagogues. While that may seem a risk it is not a certainty. More likely it will force the party apparatus to listen to those who feel they are without a political home.
Like all new sources of power this may come with a learning curve, but that is price of real change.
Woodrow Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to create the League of Nations. The United States did not join the League of Nations . This precursor to the United Nations was powerless to stop the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the other events that led down the road to WW II.
Unlike the Nobel prizes in the sciences and the arts which are decided by peers in the field the Nobel Peace Prize is clearly political and always has been. To get a prize in literature you have to actually write something. To get one in science you have to actually produce research or a theory that is valuable or unique.
But the Peace Prize is often justified by hope and hope is Obama’s middle name. But Woodrow Wilson actually had an organization to show for his efforts and it was given at the end of his term not the beginning.
Perhaps he should have been given the award for helping to bring WWI to an end by sending troops to Europe (toward the end of the war) and tilting the balance of military power toward the Allies. Perhaps General George Patton deserved a Peace Prize for driving the German Army back to Germany. Perhaps General Matthew Ridgway deserved a Peace Prize for fighting the Chinese and North Koreans toward a truce after Douglas MacArthur stumbled and was removed from command.
There are those who hope for peace and those who actually make it happen. It is clear who the Nobel Peace Prize committee prefers.
Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe
Peace vs the ‘peace process’
October 14, 2009
Excerpts:
In an important article in the current Middle East Quarterly, Daniel Pipes reviews the terrible failure of the 1993 Oslo accords, and homes in on the root fallacy of the diplomatic approach it embodied: the belief that the Arab-Israeli war can “be concluded through good will, conciliation, mediation, flexibility, restraint, generosity, and compromise, topped off with signatures on official documents.’’ For 16 years, Israeli governments, prodded by Washington, have sought to quench Palestinian hostility with concessions and gestures of good will. Yet peace today is more elusive than ever.
“Wars end not through good will but through victory,’’ Pipes writes, defining victory as one side compelling the other to give up its war goals. Since 1948, the Arabs’ goal has been the elimination of Israel; the Israelis’, to win their neighbors’ acceptance of a Jewish state in the Middle East. “If the conflict is to end, one side must lose and one side win,’’ argues Pipes.
Diplomacy cannot settle the Arab-Israeli conflict until the Palestinians abandon their anti-Israel rejectionism. US policy should therefore be focused on making them abandon it. The Palestinians must be put “on notice that benefits will flow to them only after they prove their acceptance of Israel. Until then – no diplomacy, no discussion of final status, no recognition as a state, and certainly no financial aid or weapons.’’
So long as American and Israeli leaders remain committed to a fruitless Arab-Israeli “peace process,’’ Arab-Israeli peace will remain unachievable. Let the newest Nobel peace laureate grasp and act upon that insight, and he will do more to hasten the conflict’s end than any of his well-meaning predecessors.
HKO comments: our unwillingness to tolerate short term pain has again led us to longer term pain. Ralph Peters has noted that short term ferocity is the most humane way to fight a war. The unwillingness to acknowledge that there can be no peace until Israel’s right to exist is both acknowledged and respected has been the common thread to many past well intentioned failures. Every day that goes by with out this acceptance should cost the Palestinians – otherwise it pays to delay peace inevitably. If Israel’s existence is not accepted there is no substitute for victory.
Much was made of Olympia Snowe being the sole Republican to sign on to the Senate health care bill.
Harry Reid has emerged from a closed door session with a health care bill WITH a public option despite the Senate Finance Committee’s vote not to include a public option.
Olympia Snowe now no longer supports the bill.
So much for a new era of bipartisanship……and transparency. This is as partisan as it gets.
“More than that, no country in the world, not even Germany, would respond “proportionately” if some nonstate militia started rocketing their towns from across some border and killing German citizens. If a government could not get the state from whose territories the rockets were being fired to take responsibility for ending the threat, then it would have no choice but to silence the threat itself. Why do German intellectuals, journalists, and politicians expect Israel alone to act differently? And why do they, of all people, insist that the use of force must always be a last resort in any political confrontation among states, when that kind of thinking is exactly what allowed Hitler to cause the Second World War? Germans frequently talk like Neville Chamberlain at Munich, when they ought to realize that it was Winston Churchill who was right: the readiness to use force in an appropriate and judicious manner is not what causes wars; it is often what prevents them.”
Adam Garfinkle in “Jewcentricity”
