The Third Way

President Obama is finding that he has to adapt to reality. He put an end to his lofty rethoric and is now facing tougher realities. If he wants to achieve his main goals, fixing health care, education and the energy, and perhaps go back to Congress for a second Stimulus Package, he must please his opposition. And he is more than ready to oblige: Already he has announced that the war criminals who ordered, condoned or practiced torture, hmmm, "harsh treatment", will not be accountable. For Education, he will not change NCLB which was a major coup against teachers unions from the Right. In terms of Health Care, he will keep a market based system, although shareholder profits, execs bonuses and advertising add tremendously to the cost and will not help the 50 million without any insurance. For Energy, he condemns US carmakers to building clown cars that nobody will want and that they have never been able to build (Pinto, Pacer, or Chevette anybody?)

Obama's strategy is called the Third Way. It was attempted by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and resulted in failure for both. Barack Obama was elected by an electrified electorate who wanted to run the Vulcans and the Wall Street bandits out of town , tarred and feathered. They wanted to finally enjoy a single payer, universal health care system and guaranteed pension rights, like the rest of the advanced countries. Instead, the new president, has decided to sacrifice most of these aspirations by navigating a middle way. Is he pleasing his opposition? "NO" as they themselves keep telling him. Is he disappointing his base? Yes.
Dick Cheney's virtual immunity, Big Pharma secure profits, Detroit forced to import wound up cars from China rather than to keep jobs (Obama wants to retrain them for green jobs...... gardening?), Goldman Sachs at Treasury, thousands more troops to Afghanistan, and Military Commissions reinstated, all that does not pass the smell test.

Anyway, all this will be quickly forgotten when Israel bombs Iranian nuclear centers and our friend Kim Jong Il prepares more of his firework.

The "Barbarians"

In February 2006, a gang of 27 young French "barbarians" kidnapped a 26 year old Jewish student, Ilan Halimi, near Paris, and after torturing him for several days in an appartment, murdered him. The cause of this rampage? The leader of the gang, Youssouf Fofana, a young French Moslem of African origin, wanted to avenge the killing of palestinian kids he saw every night on French television. Today Fofana went on trial. He entered the court insulting the judges, and the public and yelling Alahu Akbar, Allah is great!
The French are right when they say that the Israeli-palestinian conflict is a domestic problem for them. Most French media is biased against Israel and readily displays the "crimes" of the Israeli military in Gaza and West bank. For the young, mostly unemployed young French moslems, parked in soulless high rises in grey suburbs, the constant viewing of dead Palestinians on French, Algerian, Morroccan or AlJazeera TV (they all have satellite dishes) acts as a red rag on a bull. Seen from the US one could think that it is a resurgence of French anti-semitism . Far from me to say his scourge has fully disappeared, but in this case it is wrong. True, the murderers are French nationals. But they are also second generation of an immigration that has never adapted. They are moslem first and last. Worse, they have scapegoated the French Jewish population (second largest in the world) for what they perceive as prsecution of Islam.
The Middle-East conflict has entered our courts. But France knew it had a problem, when, several years ago, at the opening of a soccer game that opposed Algeria to France, the young French-Moslems booed the French national anthem.
Fofana's gang of the barbarians is only the beginning.