PONTEFICATIONS

“IT’S NOT OUR PLACE TO TAKE SIDES” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said Democratic presidential frontrunner Howard Dean days ago in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  But then he promptly took sides, saying that peace would require the dismantling of an “enormous number” of Jewish settlements.

This, historians may record, was the moment the wheels started to come off the bandwagon that had been speeding the former Vermont Governor to his party’s nomination….and perhaps into the White House.

“Howard Dean’s statements break a 50-year record in which presidents, Republican and Democrat, members of Congress of both parties, have supported our relationship with Israel based on shared values and common strategic interests,” said Dean’s rival Senator Joseph Lieberman (D.-Conn.) in this week’s Baltimore Democratic candidate debate.

In the verbal fistfights that happened during and after this debate, Dean accused Senator Lieberman of trying “to demagogue this issue” in a “despicable” attempt to divide the Democratic Party. 

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reports that Senator Lieberman afterwards released to the press this statement: “While Dean claims he’s ‘not taking sides,’ he specifically called for Israelis to leave the West Bank.”

“To dictate to Israel the terms of concessions on any issue [like settlements] is inappropriate,” read a Fax sent to Dean by the Anti-Defamation League asking for clarification of his position. As of Thursday, September 11, reported Deborah Orin of the New York Post, the ADL had received “no response from Dean-land.”

Both the ADL and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, reports Orin, have called Dean’s remarks on Israel “’troubling’ and a break with U.S. policy.”

“This is not a time to be sending mixed messages,” read a letter signed by more than two dozen Democratic Members of Congress (several of whom support Dean rivals), including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.).

“On the contrary,” the Congressional letter continued, “in these difficult times we must reaffirm our unyielding commitment to Israel’s survival and raise our voices against all forms of terrorism and incitement….It is unacceptable for the U.S. to be ‘evenhanded’ on these fundamental issues.”

“My position on Israel is exactly the same as Bill Clinton’s,” insisted Dean. “I think America needs to be an honest broker. We desperately need peace in the Middle East.”

Following the Baltimore debate this week, Dean called on President Bush to “swallow his pride” and dispatch former President Bill Clinton to the Middle East as a peace envoy.

“I think Bill Clinton is the president who has come the closest to bringing Israelis and Palestinians together,” Dean said. “Bill Clinton may just be the person we need to put those negotiations back on track.”

Is it any wonder that supporters of Israel are repulsed and made to feel insecure by Howard Dean? Bill Clinton is the President who had Yasser Arafat at the White House 13 times, more than any other foreign leader, and who in his lust for a Nobel Peace Prize exerted tremendous pressure on Israel to make dangerous concessions to Arafat.

Hillary Clinton as co-President kissed Sua Arafat and gave her a supportive embrace before the world’s TV cameras moments after the Palestinian “First Lady” gave a speech accusing Israelis of poisoning Palestinian children. Hillary has been an eager fundraiser for the PLO and has repeatedly exhibited anti-Semitic behavior.

Imagine being a supporter of Israel and facing the possibility of Howard Dean as America’s President and Bill Clinton as his “evenhanded” peace negotiator.

Perhaps Howard Dean secretly recognizes that major factions within the Democratic Party nowadays are marinated with anti-Semitism.  Hispanic politicians such as California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante imbibed their political values from MEChA, a racist organization whose motto is: “For the race, everything. For those outside the race, nothing.” Those outside the “bronze” Hispanic race include Jews. Many young Mechistas find themselves being seduced by the sizeable anti-Semitic Hispanic subculture that surfaces in websites of toxic virulence such as La Voz de Aztlan, a sample of whose writing from this week you can read here. 

When the now-Chairman of California’s Democratic Party “Art” Torres expressed his glee at what he called the “last gasp of White America in California,” rest assured that he includes Jews among the whites whose power he and his racist Mechista allies are scheming to take away.

For a leader of African-American anti-Semitism, say his critics, Howard Dean needs to look no farther across the debate floor than his rival candidate Rev. Al Sharpton. As this column documented, Sharpton has called Jews “diamond merchants,” led a protest at a Jewish store that hours later was fatally burned down, and led a march through a New York Jewish neighborhood during which some of his incited followers smashed windows in a mini-Kristalnacht of hate.

The Democratic Party has done more than tolerate anti-Semitism. It has effectively condoned and coddled it. During its 1984 National Convention, the Rev. Jesse (New York City is “hymietown”) Jackson was a serious Presidential contender, bolstered by his campaign co-manager Rev. Louis (“Judaism is a gutter religion”) Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. 

When a handful of delegates asked to present a short resolution for a vote that read simply “The Democratic Party condemns anti-Semitism,” they were denied the right to present it or have any vote.  The reason, they were told, is that any such resolution might “offend” the Reverends Jackson and Farrakhan and their followers.

The Democratic Party – whose very success is proof that half the American population has an I.Q. of 100 or below – continues to appeal to the simple-minded, which is probably why it lobbies for votes for those in mental institutions.  Among such traditional Democratic simpletons are those who joined the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that long has preached hatred not only of African-Americans but also of Jews.  Prominent Democratic members of the Klan have ranged in our time from President Harry Truman to current Senator Robert Byrd (D.-West Virginia).  The terminally stupid, easily controlled by emotional demagoguery and appeals to hate and envy, are perhaps the largest part of the Democratic Party constituency.

But this columnist doubts that Howard Dean is angling for the anti-Semite vote. One reason seems obvious – his wife and two children are Jewish. 

His own wife and children, therefore, are de facto citizens of the Jewish State with the right to make Aliyah to Israel, the ultimate refuge of the Jewish People.  About risking the survival of Israel he feels “evenhanded?”

His wife Judith Steinberg, 49, from Long Island, New York, is a Princeton-educated physician and the daughter of two doctors.  She and her fellow Medical Doctor husband, like the Clintons a graduate of Yale but also of the Albert Einstein Medical School, used to practice medicine together.

“I’m a very methodical person; I do all the tests,” she told New York Magazine’s Meryl Gordon. Howard tends to jump to conclusions. He’s usually right, but he just leaps.”

“Dean was baptized Catholic (as was his mother), was raised Episcopalian (his father’s denomination), and became a Congregationalist. (“I don’t go to church a lot, but I pray at night.”), writes Gordon. “But because Judaism is important to his wife, the family celebrates Jewish holidays…the kids consider themselves Jewish…[and] A menorah is perched on a living-room shelf.” 

How odd it is that son Paul weeks ago acknowledged his role as getaway driver in a burglary. Apparently he took more after his father than his mother.

Stranger yet, Howard Brush Dean III is in many ways the ultimate WASP. Unlike working class Democrats, he “is the proud patrician product of Park Avenue and 85^th Street,” writes Gordon, “the son, grandson, and great-grandson of investment bankers.” (Joe Lieberman’s father, by contrast, was a liquor store owner.)  He, however, says he was never obsessed with money. His and his wife’s estimated personal net worth today is about $4 million.

Howard, incidentally, is an aristocratic British name that in Anglo-Saxon originally meant “guardian of the home,” a classic White Anglo-Saxon Protestant name.

As a Yale undergraduate Dean was a Political Science major.  After he and his wife moved to the State of Ben & Jerry’s, tiny Vermont where the only member of Congress is self-proclaimed Socialist Bernie Sanders, Dean dabbled in politics enough to get himself elected to the irrelevant post of Lt. Governor that almost nobody else wanted.

In a government whose total annual budget would fund the Federal Government for only a few hours, this all seemed like a hobby. But then on a day in 1991 while examining a patient he was interrupted.  Republican Governor Richard Snelling had just died of a heart attack, Dean was told, and he was now Governor of Vermont.

Dean likes to depict his years as Vermont’s Chief Executive as successful and reflective of the state’s independent spirit. He was liberal and imposed something akin to socialized medicine, yes, but he also balanced budgets, cut taxes, and defended the rights of gun owners.  For a more critical, “evenhanded” picture of Dean’s shortcomings and high-handedness as Governor, read what rival Vermont politician John McClaughry wrote in the September 6^th Wall Street Journal.

Having developed a taste for political power, Dean has spent years making himself available for national TV talks shows on CNN and elsewhere.  Congressional Democrats at first tried grooming him as a healthcare expert, but their enthusiasm cooled when he proved arrogant, abrasive, and less than cooperative in advancing their political games.

But Dean persisted, putting all his chips on a strong anti-war stance in Iraq while other ambitious Democrats voted to authorize the war. In winning over the leftist hard-core of Democratic activists, Dean until now seems to have won with his high-stakes gamble.

Dean’s anti-war feeling might be sincere. He avoided service in Vietnam via a medical deferment. In 1974 his younger brother Charlie, then 24, was taken prisoner by Communists in Laos and has never been seen since. Dean traveled to Laos in February 2002 and talked to a witness who says he saw Charlie’s body dumped into a foxhole.

“It gave me closure,” he told Gordon in a voice choked with emotion. “It never goes away. It gets better, but it never goes away.”  One is left wondering if he thinks Charlie somehow died in his place in Southeast Asia. God only knows what distorting demons haunt the soul, mind, heart and dreams of hard-eyed Howard Dean.

Lately, as he glimpses a possibility of seeking the votes of America’s centrists, Dean has been starting to smooth the sharp edges of his extreme positions on a variety of issues, much to the consternation of his most zealous leftist supporters. He is, e.g., no longer so eager to lift the embargo against Communist Cuba, knowing he might need votes of Cuban-Americans in Florida. He has backed off his proposal to save Social Security by raising the retirement age to 70. And although he opposed war in Iraq, he now says we should not risk “losing the peace” by bringing our troops home too precipitously.

And under pressure he has begun to back away from his intemperate remarks about Israel and the Middle East, now saying he supports our “special relationship” with Israel. He was not only under fire from Democrats and Republicans alike, but was faced with the even heavier burden of being praised by an Arab-American leader who applauded his call for dismantling Jewish settlements.

“I have since learned that [even-handed] is a sensitive word to use in certain communities,” says Dean. “So perhaps I could have used a different euphemism. But the fact of the matter is, at the negotiating table, we have to have the trust of both sides.”

He was raised and educated in New York City and married for decades to a devout Jewish wife from Long Island. And Howard Dean now says he “did not know” that advocating the tearing down an “enormous number” of Jewish settlements and ending America’s special relationship with our democratic ally Israel would irritate the sensitivities of Israel’s supporters?  How gullible does Governor Dean think his fellow Americans are?

This much we know – he is neither steadfast nor reliable nor principled enough to stick by his views (or allies like Israel) when doing so becomes politically inconvenient. Nor is he willing to order troops into battle against those like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden who support terrorism against Israel and the rest of the civilized world.

He seems feisty and hot-tempered, perhaps as a substitute for courage or as compensation when 5’8” tall Howard Dean must stand on a box to appear the equal of 6’4” Senator John F. Kerry (D.-Mass.).  Is Dean now trying to recruit Gen. Wesley Clark as his Vice President to make himself appear taller, stronger, or more reliable? Or is this because Dean is beginning to sense that his 15 minutes of fame are running out?

In reality, Howard Dean is a WASP who lost his sting. A more honest name for him might be Coward Dean, a man unsuited to wage or win the life-and-death struggle of our ongoing War on Terrorism.