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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review July 31, 2009 10 Menachem-Av 5769

A Shooting Star Dims

By Suzanne Fields


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Barack Obama was a rock star on the campaign trail and his aura went undimmed in his first few months of office. But then he began taking too many curtain calls. The applause subsided, but he kept coming back to center stage to try harder to wow us. He forgot what every star must learn, that you've got to know when to get off that center stage. If you don't have anything new to say, shut up. This applies even to presidents.


He's reaching for applause lines with the same ol' same ol'. So his poll numbers begin to shrink. He pushes, and pushes, a flawed health care scheme without having anything new to add. Then he goes off script to accuse the Cambridge, Mass., cops of behaving "stupidly" in the arrest of professor Henry Louis Gates, and loses the applause of fans in the second balcony.


When Obama replaced George W. Bush as the top banana, his speech if not his politics was dramatically refreshing. We were relieved to listen to someone who wouldn't muff his lines, miss a cue or garble the English language. Even those who disagreed with what the new president had to say appreciated his speechifying skills. We became a collective version of Moliere's "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme," delighted to discover a leader who could speak prose.


But we also discovered that a golden-tongued devil could deceive us with the alchemy of smooth talk at a time when we need straight talk. Great rhetoricians inevitably betray a weakness, small though it may be. That's why the poet John Milton gave Satan the best lines, sprinkled with vivid similes and sparkling metaphors, in "Paradise Lost." All the better to deceive. By comparison, God in His heaven is plain to the point of boring, but the smart reader gets the divine meaning.


Nobody likes being deceived. When the Congressional Budget Office said Obama's health care numbers were wrong and his scheme would cost a lot more than we had been told, some of us grew suspicious. When the accountants at the celebrated Mayo Clinic said the cure was worse than the disease, more of us decided that we didn't want the president's medicine. When the Blue Dog Democrats vowed not to be rushed to such an important decision, a lot more of us began to listen closely to other sides.


The Clinton administration knew Hillarycare would be a tough sell, so they kept it secret while they worked on it. That scheme crashed, anyway, when we discovered that it would make health care worse, not better but more elusive. The Obama administration has gone to the other extreme, turning it over to Congress where everybody wants to get an oar in, and we're frightened on a daily basis. Meanwhile, the president keeps repeating his defensive rhetoric, defying the drip, drip, drip of hard, cold facts. His health care scheme promises change, but it's hard to see how both quantity and quality of care will not be compromised. Can the president deliver both? He no longer sounds like a man who thinks he can.


The frightening facts are sometimes subtle and can't be found in presidential press conferences. Will the new emphasis on bureaucratic control mean that the medical schools will attract mediocre applicants from a diminished pool of bright young men and women, who are willing to enter a profession that will tie them up in a tangle of endless red tape? Does it mean that the scientists who've produced miracle drugs through a capitalist system, which rewards accomplishment, will take their inventiveness somewhere else? As old people increasingly outnumber the young, will health care be increasingly perceived as an expensive burden to be avoided?


There's another wrinkle that's difficult to straighten out. The push to require giving insurance to people regardless of pre-existing medical conditions may lead young men and women to opt out of paying for health insurance, until they find themselves with a medical condition that requires expensive care. They'll risk gambling that they can pay for it themselves when they need it.


The president likes golf because the greens provide refuge from the public. Just as he wants to get away from us, more of us feel the urge to get away from him. Too many press conferences and speeches without anything new to say bores us, too. While he works on his backswing and short putts, he might think about the tough questions that so far he can't answer. He can take his time getting back to us.

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