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The Election Aftermath Barry Farber The elections of Nov. 7 made me feel like the Jewish grandmother in an old joke that deserved a longer shelf-life than it got.
Her granddaughter approached her gingerly and said, "Grandma. I really have to talk to you even though what I have to say may upset you terribly." The grandmother says, "What is it, my child? "You know you and I have always talked about important things."
"Well," tremulated that young woman. "I'm in love and I intend to get married and he's not Jewish!"
The grandmother, rupturing all stereotypes, nodded meaningfully and said nothing. "How do you think this will affect my mother?" asked the granddaughter. "Well," the grandmother said, "Your mother will be devastated, but thank God it's the kind of devastation one can recover from. A few little grandbabies in her arms will assuage her pain. In the long run I think she'll be OK."
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"And how about my father?" pressed the younger one. "Your father will learn from your mother. They'll get support and strength from each other and, besides, he's got his work to immerse himself in and over time, I'm sure he'll be OK, too," replied the sage adviser. The earnest query of the granddaughter proceeded through siblings, aunts, uncles, the rabbi, the synagogue's cantor, and even close friends of the family. In each case Grandma gave a hopeful, upbeat evaluation of how the healing powers would conquer the pain over sufficient time.
Finally the young woman said, "And, Grandma; how about you? How are you going to take this?" "Don't worry about me," insisted Grandma. "I'm going to commit suicide!"
That's an accurate caricature, if not a description, of my own mode and mood since the election. I'm counseling forward chins and stiff upper lips and jutting jaws and good attitudes, but personally I believe just about every bit of the scare rhetoric the Republicans pressure-pumped vainly into the electorate in their losing attempt to avert a "thumping."
I believe, for instance, the terrorist world will take every bit as much momentum out of Bush's rejection and Rumsfeld's downfall as the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, Red China, and the Soviet Union took from Lyndon Johnson's decision not to run again in 1968; or Walter Cronkite's perverse interpretation of the communist Tet Offensive which he portrayed as our defeat and the final portent that we'd lost in Vietnam.
Offer a million dollars for the correct true-false answer to this question: The Tet Offensive was an overwhelming American victory; and you'll have very few new American millionaires. That, in spite of the fact that Tet was a commuist disaster is no longer controversial.
I believe our terrorist enemies finally have the recruiting tool Bush's enemies insisted the Iraq campaign was all along. The measurement of America's failure of will is stark and digital; twice as many House seats as were needed to take control of that chamber and exactly enough to take the Senate.
I believe Iraqis openly loyal to America's ambitions of a new, free Iraq are beginning to wonder how to get to the roof of the American Embassy in Baghdad and how to grab on to the helicopter from the bottom so you don't fall off.
Maybe you're not as familiar with Old Testament animal sacrifices as our Jewish grandmother, but they were quite similar to the way Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was offered up to "the choice of the people" so abruptly before the final votes were even counted.
There was an army in World War II distinguished by its comic-opera failure to fight for its ally, Adolf Hitler. The joke goes, a general in that army issued the order to his troops, "Don't surrender, unless they attack!" President Bush failed even that simple show of stand-up-edness.
Rumsfeld could have resigned with dignity a little later on.
In 1950 American troops were fighting and dying in far greater numbers than in Iraq in the defense of South Korea.
It was contemptuously called "Truman's War" and Truman never lived down his calling that war a "police action." President Harry Truman's personal ratings were lower than Bush's and in his second midterm election the Democrats lost 29 House seats and six in the Senate.
Sound familiar?
But Truman's policy presisted and prevailed without hesitation or apology and as a result we won a free, democratic and astoundingly prosperous South Korea while Communist North Korea remains locked in a struggle with Zimbabwe for the distinction of "The Worst Country in the World." And Harry Truman keeps on looking better and better in America's rear-view mirror.
Unlike our Jewish grandmother, I'm not going to commit suicide. I am, however, going to watch closely to see if Bush's appeasement works any better with Democrats than it did with Nazis and communists and Islamic fundamentalists. (Offer another million dollars to any American who could tell you where we gave American lives and treasure to rescue and/or liberate Moslems since 1980. How many could rattle off Afghanistan, Kuwait, Bosnia, and Kosovo?)
Press forward with your Bush Doctrine, Mr. President. The world needs another democracy besides Israel in the middle east more than we need happy vibrations from Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin.
Are you laughing at the thought of democracy in Iraq? More people were laughing longer and more loudly after World War I at the notion of a democracy in Czechoslovakia. It turned out to be a gem of democracy until overrun by Hitler and then Stalin and its two parts — the Czech Republic and Slovakia, are democracies again today. There are 500 percent more democracies in the world today than there were in 1945.
So, please get that smile off your face, or at least decrease its wattage.
Truman never gave up the Truman Doctrine, and, as a result, freedom wound up with Greece, Taiwan, and South Korea.
President Bush does not have a Jewish grandmother. If he did, I would work to forestall her self-destruction by reconnecting Bush with the Bush doctrine.
Editor's note:
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