Dick Cheney Is Jewish? Who Knew?

Posted on by

Mo Dowd is catching flak from some quarters, including some quasi-progressive quarters, for writing an “antisemitic” column. Let’s take a look.

La Dowd wrote of some recent hawkish statements from Paul Ryan,

Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte.

A moral, muscular foreign policy; a disdain for weakness and diplomacy; a duty to invade and bomb Israel’s neighbors; a divine right to pre-emption — it’s all ominously familiar.

You can draw a direct line from the hyperpower manifesto of the Project for the New American Century, which the neocons, abetted by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, used to prod an insecure and uninformed president into invading Iraq — a wildly misguided attempt to intimidate Arabs through the shock of overwhelming force. How’s that going for us?

After 9/11, the neocons captured one Republican president who was naive about the world. Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican president and vice president, both jejeune about the world.

That’s pretty much how it looks from where I sit, too. But Jeffrey Goldberg wrote,

Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews. (Later, Hounshell wrote, “(A)mazing that apparently nobody sat her down and said, this is not OK.”)

So we can’t tell the truth about the necons because many of them are Jewish? Who writes these rules, anyway? Oh, right. Never mind.

I’m not sure I was consciously aware that Dan Senor was Jewish, but I looked him up, and it appears he is. I do remember that Jeffrey Goldberg was a major cheerleader for invading Iraq, however. He was beating the “Saddam is uniquely evil” drum for all he was worth in 2002. Bought the neocon lies hook, line, and sinker.

Goldberg may be consoling himself with the convenient lie that people who disagreed with him then and now are just antisemitic. Mr. Goldberg — stop being a schmendrik.

However, it does seem Dowd’s comments inadvertently struck a nerve. Ben Jacobs at Washington Monthly echoed some of Goldberg’s sentiments — “Dowd, in assailing neo-conservative influence in GOP foreign policy, veered dangerously close to anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish puppet masters.”

I’m sorry, but when somebody says “puppet masters” the first “trope” that pops into my head is an old Robert Heinlein novel about slugs from outer space that invade earth. I realize the metaphor has been used in anti-semitic speech, but it’s been used in lots of other speech as well and is too good a metaphor to retire because Some People want us to forget they helped get the United States into arguably the biggest foreign policy blunder of its history. Race, creed or ethnic heritage are irrelevant.

16 thoughts on “Dick Cheney Is Jewish? Who Knew?”

  1. I think Goldberg more of a yutz or a putz, than he is a schmendrik.
    A yutzy-putz, if you will.

    I didn’t see ANYTHING anti-Semitic in her column, though Ben Jacobs, guest-blogging at WaMo did.

    She wrote a very good column, blasting these NeoCLOWN idiots.
    People who, never having fought in one, SURE LOOOOOOOOOVES them some war – as long as their cowardly asses aren’t in the line of fire.
    And it’s a good thing none of them DID join the military, voluntarily or not, since anyone with any brains would have fragged them a minute after they were sworn into the military – why wait until an actual battle to frag an obviously and incompetent moron who might get you killed?

    If these incompetent war-mongering @$$holes get offended by being called incompetent war-mongering @$$holes, the solution is easy:
    STOP BEING INCOMPETENT WAR-MONGERING @$$HOLES!!!

    Dowd’s column wasn’t anti-Semitic – her column was anti-@$$holic!

  2. So we can’t tell the truth about the necons because many of them are Jewish? Who writes these rules, anyway?

    This criticism-of-neocons = anti-semitism junk goes back years and years – a quick google found an objection to it from 2004: http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh010904.shtml (which also mentions a similar claim from 2003.)

    The Mittens campaign et alia are really reliving all the Republican crap from 1980 onwards, with a heavy dash of 1964 Goldwater.

  3. Ha ha ha, by the same weird rule, nobody* can criticize Madeleine Albright, either!

    *Nobody except the neocons, I guess.

  4. Well. when Netanyahoo addresses congress and gets one standing ovation after another, and both wings agree on NOTHING but their unconditional love for Israel, there is a problem.
    Bibi wants war with Iran, go ahead Bibi, lead the first wave.
    I don’t understand why the PNAC boys aren’t breaking rocks in a federal prison

    1

  5. Well. when Netanyahoo addresses congress and gets one standing ovation after another, and both wings agree on NOTHING but their unconditional love for Israel, there is a problem.

    erinyes…I hear ya, and I hear ya big time.. the only thing I would change about your astute comment is…We have more than a problem,we have a disease!

    1

  7. Well, I’m not saying Goldberg was right, but I think Dowd gave him a huge opening. See, I never saw George W. as a naif – I’d assumed he wanted to invade Iraq if and when he had a chance. So why say that he was “captured”? Similarly, I don’t think Romney is messing up due to naivete or lack of understanding – I think he wants to sound tough.

    Does that mean he’s *right*? No. But he has grounds to be suspicious, and I think it’s fair for him to say “you know, we’ve heard the evil Jewish puppet-master gig before; you should be careful about using that image.”

    • Well, I’m not saying Goldberg was right, but I think Dowd gave him a huge opening. See, I never saw George W. as a naif – I’d assumed he wanted to invade Iraq if and when he had a chance. So why say that he was “captured”?

      Being a naif and being predisposed to invading Iraq are hardly mutually exclusive. The entire neocon philosophy is built on a particular sort of naivete.

      Similarly, I don’t think Romney is messing up due to naivete or lack of understanding – I think he wants to sound tough.

      Again, same thing. Because of his naivete and lack of understanding, he mistakes sounding tough with a foreign policy.

      But he has grounds to be suspicious, and I think it’s fair for him to say “you know, we’ve heard the evil Jewish puppet-master gig before; you should be careful about using that image.”

      Oh, bullshit. I don’t associate “puppet master” with “Jewish” and I doubt most people do. Goldberg was clutching at an excuse.

  8. Maybe I am not reading the right sources, but nobody is speaking the bald truth.

    1) Netanyahu is chomping at the bit to make a military strike against potential sites of nuclear weapons fuel production.

    2) Obama has blocked every sanction of Israel in the UN, but he’s warned Netanyahu against unilateral action against Tehran. Sanctions are working, and a military strike against an unpopular Iran has the potential to unite the Arab world against Israel and the US.

    (IMO – and this is opinion – Obama has told Netanyahu in clear terms that his administration will NOT automatically back Israel if they pick a fight. We can’t prevent them from taking unilateral military action – but they have to be prepared to pay the consequences alone. If they want a guarantee the US will save them, they have to do things OUR way. Sanctions FIRST! So Netanyahu was making the talk show circuit today for Romney.)

    3) Israel can kick Iran’s butt – however if Egypt, Iraq, the Saudis and Libya side with Iran – and the governments of those countries might have to in order to survive – only the US military could save Israel. I’m not thinking diplomatic brinksmanship – I mean real war with thousands dead. And the US would win.

    4) The result of that conflict would be an oil embargo – a complete oil embargo – by the mid-east. Remember the 80s? Gas lines. Even – Odd days – 55 MPH speed limits – a crushing depression. It wasn’t Carter’s fault – it was the result of an embargo we are in no better shape to survive.

    Any thinking person will side with Obama – we have to ramp up sanctions – and tell Israel to chill out. The racial situation in the mid-east means there is a HUGE risk of uniting an Arab mob against Israel if Israel makes an offensive raid. The risk outweighs the benefit.

    When we invaded Iraq, I know there were online neocons who advocated that the oil was the spoils of war which justly belonged to the US oil companies. We would ‘pay’ what we thought the oil was worth – the profits to US corporations would offset the cost of the invasion. Granted, these were online idiots but…

    There’s a line from ‘Braveheart’ where the King declares, “The problem with Scotland is, it’s full of Scots.” If the US faces a a depression (not recession) and the cause (according to the puppet masters) is evil Muslim jihadists standing between the US and the oil we need, I fear what they might consider legitimate military action.

  9. I think Nietzsche described Goldberg best when he wrote,

    “No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.”

    And who is more indignant than a neocon exposed to the light of day.

    1

  10. Does anyone else find it interesting that the right dives into claiming nonexistent antisemitism of its enemies at the same time denying the obvious and ever present racism in its ranks.

    Then the complacent “liberal” media trots them both out as equivalents…

  14. gulag …I know I’m going to be despised and rejected among Maha’s commenters, but I am God*..

    *If God is a sentient being.

  15. Oh, bullshit. I don’t associate “puppet master” with “Jewish” and I doubt most people do. Goldberg was clutching at an excuse.

    Well, I have seen the stereotype, in nasty, ugly form. It *is* rare but I know it’s real. I’m not surprised that not everyone thinks about it or knows about it, but I have seen it.

    But you’re right – do I think “Jewish” when I think of “neo-cons”? No. And I think that’s the more important point. Is discussion of neo-cons a discussion of Jews? I don’t think it is… which makes Goldberg’s complaint irrelevant.

Comments are closed.