Among the many comments on last Tuesday’s race was Charles Krauthammer’s noted in  the Washington Post.  Read it here.

An excerpt:

“The ‘08 election was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.”

HKO comment- I agree with Krauthammer, but there is another dynamic. The growth of the independents shows a disaffection with party politics in general or more likely a common belief in reasonable government that is not represented yet by either party.  The problem with independents is that they rarely carefully define their principles and they are often attracted by appearances and thus quick to express disappointment or buyer’s remorse. I think this is expressed in Tuesday’s election in VA and NJ.

In 1996 the late Marge Schott, owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, was blasted for anti-Semitic remarks.  She said that Hitler started out OK  “but went too far”.  Commenting on the unimportance and excessive indignation the media gave this case Charles Krauthammer commented,

“Marge Schott is a rich ignoramus of zero consequence. Only an idiot celebrity culture- a culture in which Barbara Streisand lectures on politics at Harvard, in which the first issue of John Kennedy Jr.’s magazine features Madonna on “If I Were President”, in which Jessica Lange plays a farmer in a film and then testifies before a House committee on farm legislation- would care what these people think. .. Punish Schott on Hitler?”  the real scandal here is that what can only be called comic anti-Semitism arouses enormous indignation when the real thing evokes general cowardice.”

(Krauthammer was referring to the genuine anti-Semitism of Louis Farrakhan.)

From” Jewcentricity- why the Jews are praised, blamed, and used to explain just abou0t everything” by Adam Garfinkle