“Innocent lives” is the phrase the media constantly uses as if it meant something. It doesn’t. The media portrays anyone wearing a uniform as a bad guy and anyone without one as an “innocent.” But why is an 18-year-old Jewish soldier who puts on a uniform and carries a gun to defend his family from the rockets raining down on them from the skies any less innocent than a civilian killed while walking by the facilities launching those rockets? Do their mothers grieve differently?
Innocence is not the sole property of women and children or the aged or infirm. Innocence also belongs to those who are forced to use violence against those would harm them or their loved ones. The only ones who are not innocent are those who provoke the fighting, enable it, or set the chain of events in motion that creates the pain and agony of war. The media doesn’t get this, and in all their self-righteousness uses words like “innocent lives” without thought or discrimination.

*****

One hears the words “Democratic Party loyalty” a lot when this year’s Senate race in Connecticut is discussed, but no one asks the question, “which party?” Do they mean the Democratic Party that gave Ned Lamont its nomination and the 5060 vote swing that made it happen for him, or is it the party of the hundreds of thousands of Democrats who elected Joe Lieberman to the U.S. Senate 3 times during 18 years and made him its vice presidential candidate in 2000? A big difference between those two parties is the 30,000 or so voters who became Democrats in the weeks before the recent primary.
We assume that most of those newly minted voters became Democrats so they could vote against Lieberman or for Lamont. There’s no way of knowing for sure, but it is likely that they weren’t friends of Joe.
Republicans did nothing to organize voters to become Democrats. In fact, an effort to get this going never got off the ground and was ignored completely by the Lieberman people. But the nationally funded, pro-Lamont blogs ran with this switch idea, and it was a frequent topic on their sites. These were the groups that were the impetus behind the Lamont candidacy in the primary.
All of this is legal, and it’s the way the system works. Both sides knew it and accepted it as part of the process. Party switchers have a right to do what they did in Connecticut, and Joe Lieberman has a right to ask for another judgment from all the voters in November. Lamont won a majority in the primary and Lieberman won a majority at the convention. Neither contest and their narrow sliver of voters determines who will be the next senator from our state. The November election does. Our rules allow voters to float from one party to another in the primary and they also let candidates take their case to the entire electorate for a final judgment.
Whining about the Lieberman candidacy and lack of party loyalty by those who rode to a win in the primary with thousands of brand new party members is unbecoming.

*****

The phrase “Israel lost” sounds like the fight with Hezbollah in Lebanon was some sort of game, but it wasn’t. It was, as are all conflicts between Israel and the Arab-Muslim world, an ongoing challenge to Israel’s right to exist. The journalistic rhetoric each struggle produces is shallow and ephemeral. History is the final verdict, and Israel will only have won when she overcomes all resistance to her existence. It will be quite clear too, if the unthinkable ensues, and Israel loses.
The conflicts we’ve seen over the years are like a prize fight with each contestant probing the other for a weakness to exploit or strength to overcome. Israel has come out for every round and then starts to get ready for the next one. This is not the first time Israel has had a bad round.
The disastrous 1973 Yom Kippur War saw Israel lose men, land and material like never before, and if not for the last 48 hours of that conflict when Arik Sharon aggressively crossed the Nile to surround the Egyptian third army, it would have been perceived as the disaster that it was. But Israelis responded by refocusing. They first elected a militarily competent Menachem Begin and then a stolid and determined Yitzhak Shamir, who together gave Israel the strong leadership she needed to forestall conflict in her own land for more than 20 years. That is likely to be today’s outcome as well.
Israelis will more than likely hold the current government to account, and we’ll see a stronger, more determined leadership emerge out of a coming election. And that government will have the unambiguous mandate to make Israel’s security their primary concern.
It would be nice in some future time for Israel to finally prevail and for the world to allow her that victory. But for now, it is sometimes necessary to fare poorly in order to do well. That makes all this win-lose conversation just so much babble.

–nrg

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