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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. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review April 8, 2008 / 3 Nissan 5768

The hidden costs of meaning well

By Wesley Pruden


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem for Hillary: "If you can keep your head when all about you/ men are losing theirs and blaming it on you ... yours is the Earth and everything that's in it/ and which is more, you'll be a man ... . "


The lady doesn't want the Earth and all that's in it — not with Bill in the bedroom (or at least somewhere on the property) and $109 million in the bank. But acquiring real estate on Pennsylvania Avenue would be nice. Alas for her, she looks about to be run down in an avalanche. Her poll numbers are cratering in Indiana and North Carolina, tightening in Pennsylvania, and her superdelegates are chasing the rats in a panic search for a way off the sinking ship.


It couldn't have happened to a more deserving old tub and all the people in it. Since it's clear that Hillary is bored with the Senate — she only meant to stay as long as the world's oldest decrepit body was useful to her higher ambitions — maybe Bill can get her on as a guide at his library in Little Rock. Hillary has always dreamed of retiring to the kindness of strangers in Arkansas.


The Democrats contrived party rules a quarter of a century ago to make sure that losers wouldn't get their feelings hurt. But arranging primaries and caucuses to apportion delegates by sentiment and mathematical precision would inevitably one day guarantee an endless summer of misery for everybody, and this looks like it might be that summer. There won't be a winner, just a survivor. The only way the party could make things worse is to require that no candidate be allowed to win a second primary until every other candidate has won once, nobody can win three primaries until everybody else has won twice, and so on. Howard Dean no doubt has a task force working on it now.


The superdelegate firewall that Hillary counts on to save her, if worse comes to worst, is beginning to look more like a wildfire, moving toward her. With the delegate lead likely lost for good, the 10 remaining primaries no longer look like opportunities to erase Barack Obama's long lead in the popular vote. She will arrive in Denver armed only with the usual Clinton sense of entitlement, and needing all the solace Rudyard Kipling's poesy can give her.


She can thank herself, among other high-minded Democrats, for the fine mess she's in. The Obama lead in delegates is not so much a lead fairly won as the result of undisciplined democracy, wrought by a bizarre formula of allocating delegates. A complicated primary-and-caucus system in Texas, for example, gave Hillary most of the popular votes and Sen. Obama most of the delegates.


A close look at what's happened, measured by Wesley Little of the Rasmussen polling organization, shows that if the Democrats had employed the winner-take-all method of the Republicans (and once their own), Hillary would now have a comfortable cushion of delegates heading into the final round of primaries. Democrats in 30 primaries would have awarded 1,260 Obama delegates. Hillary's 14 primary victories would have yielded 1,427 delegates — maybe more if the party could figure out what to do about disenfranchised Democrats in Florida and Michigan.


But the Obamaniacs are nuts if they think all the news is good. With a mortally wounded Hillary limping toward Denver, full attention is turned to the great journey of discovery of who Barack Obama really is. His oldest and dearest friends — his crazy preacher being merely the first — are only now crawling out of the dark places in the woodwork. There was never a prettier candidate to burst onto the scene, a man who looked and sounded too good to be true. "The man has too much tail for his kite," Albert Sidney Johnston said of the fancy-feathered general Lincoln sent to oppose him in "the West" in the early months of the Civil War. Events made quick work of him. Getting a kite into a fair wind with too much tail was difficult then, and it will be difficult now.

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JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.

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