When I was a kid growing up in a French colony, we used to
play a game on the 14th of July every year. This was the anniversary of the
1789 French Revolution that did away with the monarchy and replaced it with a
republican form of government.
The game consisted of splitting ourselves into two groups,
one calling itself Monarchists; the other Republicans. Each of us would give a
speech proclaiming which side of the divide we're on – not by
self-identification – but by denouncing the other side as forcefully as we
could. That is, if I'm a Monarchist, I tell why it is bad to be a Republican …
or the other way around.
That was many decades ago, something I had forgotten about
till recently when the event popped into my memory as I watched modern
Americans play the game of politics. In using the word 'recently,' I mean it
was within the last decade or two that I began to sense a change in the way
that the Americans played the political game. It seemed to shift from being a
specialty of mature grownups to that of immature juveniles.
The first indication of the transformation I remember
vividly is someone complaining that the letter “W” was torn off the White House
computers shortly after the Supreme Court had ruled George W. Bush to be the
winner of the 2000 election. It signaled that his team, and not that of then
Vice President Al Gore, will be moving into the White House, and those already
in there thinking they will be for Gore did not like the Court's ruling one bit.
Their behavior was the closest thing I had seen to the game I used to play as a
kid.
Eight years later, Barack Obama moved into the White House,
and because I never detected anything he did deliberately to distance himself
from the policies of his predecessor, I was surprised to see the media consider
almost every move he made to be a repudiation of the W. Bush presidency. The
more I tried to interpret what he did as being a repudiation of the Bush
policies – to see things from the opposite point of view – the more I found
them to be not that at all. In fact, they always proved to be policies that
cohered and that fell in line with Obama's overarching philosophy of peaceful
coexistence.
Given that the W. Bush years were managed by his hawkish
Vice President Dick Cheney, it made sense that I should consider the contrast
between the two administrations to be a reflection of the differences between
dovish Obama and hawkish Cheney. And then, the passage of time simplified the
rules of the game the media contributors were playing. They came to see every
situation as being a simple binary choice: either Obama was repudiating the
Bush approach or he was imitating Bush. They could not see Obama as himself
doing what he believed was the right thing for the country.
We now have a new administration in the White House, and the
media is at it again, playing that same game with a vengeance. You have the
Progressive Liberals saying that after only two weeks in the White House,
Donald Trump is beginning to imitate his predecessor Barack Obama. And you have
the Conservative Republicans rejecting this interpretation. You can see an
example of this shenanigan in the article that came under the title: “Trump
Isn't Repeating Obama's Middle East Mistakes,” written by Jonathan S. Tobin,
and published on February 3, 2017 in National Review Online.
Look how Tobin starts his discussion: “Contrary to
mainstream-media reports, the new president is already taking [similar] stances
as his predecessor [but] President Donald Trump has discovered it is actually
possible to garner applause from the mainstream media.” In other words,
Jonathan Tobin is trying to have it both ways for Trump. He is saying: yes,
Trump may look like he is imitating Obama, but that's only because he is shrewd
enough to get the mainstream-media to applaud him.
To understand the game that Jonathan Tobin is playing, you
need to see him as the fanatic Zionist that he is. What he did here is race
ahead of the mob of Jewish pundits, conveying to the Jewish rank-and-file
(those still on Israel 's
side and those who left it) the news that under Trump ,
America is back in Israel 's
corner. The message is that they should rally around Israel
no matter their political stripe because great days are ahead for the Jews and
for Israel .