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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 24, 2009 / 3 Menachem-Av 5769

Obama's killer disease slips into remission

By Wesley Pruden


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The killer disease dispensed by Barack Obama slipped into remission yesterday, and we can be thankful it did. "Remission" is not "cure," but it's a start.


Harry Reid, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, led the obsequies for the rush to judgment, though he was not necessarily obsequious about it. "It's better to have a product based on quality and thoughtfulness rather than trying to jam something through." Nary a Republican in Washington could have said it better.


The president is trying to make the best of the demise of his promise to get health care "reform" on his desk for a signature before Congress goes home on Aug. 7. "That's OK, I just want to keep the people working," he said late Thursday. "I just want it done by the end of the year. I want it done by the fall." This is brave face-saving talk from the man who insisted for months that he had to have his health care "reform" by August, or the sky would fall (or at least cloud over, darkly). He took particular exception to a Republican senator's boast that the GOP would make health care "reform" the president's Waterloo. His taking the senator's bait dramatically raised the stakes in the struggle.


Then Mr. Obama adopted a curious diversionary tactic in the wake of Mr. Reid's concession of defeat, returning public attention to the controversy — and the president's contribution to making it a controversy — over the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, the distinguished professor of history at Harvard, by Cambridge cops investigating a suspected break-in at the professor's home. Mr. Gates, a black man, was arrested after he gave the cops, two white men, a bit of lip, asserting that he was an important Harvard professor.


The president said the Cambridge cops acted "stupidly," and then, when the officers objected to being called stupid, the White House said the smooth-talking president, who as we all know more or less invented the English language, didn't mean that the officers who acted "stupidly" were in fact "stupid." (It probably depends on what the meaning of "is" is.) Further explaining what he was trying to say, the president asserted that with all that's going on in the country with health care and the economy and the wars abroad, "it doesn't make sense to arrest a guy in his own home if he's not causing a serious disturbance."


Just how a private domestic disturbance, by a Harvard professor impressed by his importance on campus, relates to the national debate over whether the federal government should take over another 18 percent of the national economy, the president does not say. (The contretemps off Harvard Yard was probably George W.'s fault, anyway.) But what Mr. Obama and the Democrats know is that the longer it takes to get his "reform" through Congress, the greater the risk the entire enterprise will fall of the weight of its own bureaucratic blubber. His "reform," whatever the final details, is not likely to survive close inspection or analysis. The "reform" he wants, with the government prescribing and supervising treatment of everything from CAT scans and colonoscopies to measuring the size and design of bedpans and rectal thermometers, is a recipe for rationing. A government bureaucrat will tell you when you're sick and whether you're eligible to get well.


Mr. Obama and the Democrats object to the rationing plan being called a rationing plan, so the only way to get a scheme like this past the public, which doesn't always pay close attention early on, is to do it quickly before a lot of people notice.


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who earlier in the week was full of fire and ginger, boasting that she "has the votes," retreated Thursday to watered milk and cornmeal mush. "I'm not afraid of August," she said. "It's only a month." No one believed her boast then, nor her assurances now. The hero of the hour may be Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas, a leader of the conservative Democrat "Blue Dogs," who forced Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee who is so far out on the left as to occasionally fall into San Francisco Bay, to suspend work on his part of the House legislation. He wants to wait until his party leaders get their act together.


The president envisioned all his Democratic congressmen enacting his health care "reform" and running triumphantly home to bask in public approval. Growing numbers of congressmen, Democrat and Republican alike, have begun to examine this "reform" and are terrified of being seen anywhere near Obama care. They're not stupid, either.

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

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