Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to Israel I go

It seems that for every Republican presidential candidate it is a prerequisite to visit Israel. They've all gone over in recent months, including Ben Carson, who apparently made quite an ass of himself, showing a blissful ignorance of the region, including the time span of Islam, charting it back to the Old Testament.

Now, we have Scott Walker fresh from his "listening tour" of the Holy Lands, excluding the Palestinian territories. He even managed to book a date with Bibi Netanyahu, pledging his unequivocal support of his government.

Like all the other candidates, Walker believes that the President is letting Israel down, and that we need to reaffirm our relationship with the country. I guess he didn't take time to read of the current infighting in the Knesset, where Bibi just barely was able to cobble a coalition of religious right wing parties and the Likud together. It is not Obama who is openly critical of Netanyahu, it is his own country, and for good reason.

Back in March, Bibi drove a wedge in the politics of the nation by urging religious conservatives to come out to vote as the liberal parties were bringing Israeli Arabs to the polls in bus loads. He later apologized for this inflammatory rhetoric but the damage was done. It took Bibi all the way up to the 11th hour and 59th minute to get the 61 seats in the Knesset he needed, which few believe will hold together.

Yet, Walker, like all the GOP candidates, tells us every chance he gets that it is Obama who is inflaming tensions in the region. The Republicans have made the President into a straw man for everything that is wrong in the world, and continue to present the notion that the biggest single threat to the United States is ISIS, refusing to acknowledge the chain of events that lead to this radical new terrorist group.

Scott Walker has gone a step further than his rivals, vowing pre-emptive strikes if elected President to prevent these existential threats. He missed the sad irony in giving this inflammatory speech in Oklahoma City, where the Alfred P. Murrah Building was bombed by homegrown religious extremists 20 years ago. Instead, he revives the Bush Doctrine, no doubt as a result of the support he has garnered from hard line factions in the GOP. Walker has zero foreign policy experience, much less tact.

The trip to Israel was designed to give him some kind of "street cred" among Republican faithful. This was also true for Carson and Christie and Huckabee, who have all made the pilgrimage. Christie cut quite a profile on his 2012 visit. Being governors and neurosurgeons doesn't make you privy to White House or Congressional foreign policy briefings. These guys garner no more of what is going on in the world than we do scanning the headlines. Yet, to a man they think that having made this trip they are eminently qualified to lead the nation on the global stage.

What we get is the kind of bellicose rhetoric you would hear from any religious conservative spouting off on facebook or some other chat group, hoping to get "likes" from an all too gullible audience. We went through this before with George W. Bush, and we all saw where that got us. I would hope voters, even conservative voters, would be more circumspect today.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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