Benjamin Netanyahu Just Might Lose Tomorrow

Recap by Jim Geraghty.

Likud is behind in the polls.

The final round of opinion polls Friday showed Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party facing a surprisingly strong challenge by Isaac Herzog, leader of the center-left Labor Party, and his running mate, former peace negotiator ­Tzipi Livni, who hold a small but steady lead. Their campaign has emphasized economic issues and the soaring cost of living.

Netanyahu charged in a radio interview Sunday that hostile Israeli journalists and shadowy "foreign powers" were behind an anti-Netanyahu campaign that could be his undoing.

Usually leaders who invoke shadowy foreign powers as being arrayed against them are stirring up anti-semitic animus. In this case, it's actually true, and he's referring to an anti-semitic foreign government, to wit, the United States.

AP: Silly Demagogue Netanyahu Tells Voters That Israel's "Most Sinister Enemies Lurk Around Every Corner." Don't they?

This is the left's, and anti-war right's, favorite tactic: To pretend that people who mere acknowledge actual threats are silly, "fearful," or demagogic, rather than people who simply recognize actual reality. Meanwhile, the very ideological on the left and the anti-war right do what zealous ideologues always do: Pretend inconvenient reality away so as not to mar their pristine, simple ideological fairy tale.

You know which cheap, shallow ideologue is the biggest promoter of this Danger Doesn't Exist fantasy? Barack Obama.

When subjected to a line of leading questioning from Vox’s Matthew Yglesias as to whether or not the press "overstates the level of alarm people should have" about terrorism and understates it when it comes to issues like "climate change and epidemic disease" (Ebola, presumably, not included), Obama agreed that the media "absolutely" embellishes the threat posed by Islamist terrorism.

"What's the famous saying about local newscasts, right? If it bleeds, it leads, right?" Obama said. The insinuation here is that the media’s focus on the war on international terrorism precipitated by the September 11th attacks is just ratings-grabbing sensationalism. After insinuating that, Obama went ahead and said it outright.

"You show crime stories and you show fires, because that’s what folks watch, and it’s all about ratings," the president insisted. "And, you know, the problems of terrorism and dysfunction and chaos, along with plane crashes and a few other things, that's the equivalent when it comes to covering international affairs."

The left is fond of claiming that other people are Big Fraidy-Cats about silly things like terrorism, while, in the same breath, telling people they should be Super-Scared of the items on the left's list of Holy Panics, such as global warming, or "T-slur."*

* The "t-slur" can no longer be mentioned, nike the "n-word," after which it is patterned. The "t-slur," the worst word in the English language, refers to transexuals via the typical method of nick-naming, that is, shortening the word and adding a "-y" or "-ie" suffix. Why this should be the Worst Word in the World, I don't know, but I do know that we should all be Afraid to so much as see it in print.

Now that's a real concern, unlike all this foolishness about terrorism.

posted by Ace at 01:07 PM

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