Now I've Seen Everything

We hear a lot about republicans campaigning from the pulpit, risking the tax exempt status of various houses of worship, but I've never actually seen it before in person. Well, now I have.

This morning, Mark Kirk spoke at a district synagogue, supposedly not as a candidate, as the synagogue official introducing him said, on the topic of "Israel in the Balance." However, despite the caveat, I have never seen such blatant campaigning before in my life. His speech was very close to a campaign speech he made on May 7, 2006 at the walk for Israel. To this trickle of the post-men's-club-meeting crowd (Seals drew a much larger crowd on a Monday night last month), Kirk talked about everything HE did for Israel and how only HE can represent the Illinois Tenth because HE has been to Israel 10 times. I lost count of the number of times he used the words "I" and "me" and how many actions for which he took credit.

First, he scared everyone by repeatedly using the holocaust imagery of Kristallnacht and religious minorities forced to wear identifying labels, and capped it all off with a verbal picture of a morning where your friend calls you to turn on CNN and Israel is simply gone, wiped off the map. Mark took us back to 1939 when so many people discounted or ignored the signs of the rise of Nazi Germany and the holocaust. He said he asks himself as such: "It's 1939, and what would I do." Ohh, just a short break from Israel's impending doom for a commerical. He got the stem cell bill through...he supports a woman's..., but no mention how the rest of his party, whose water he carries and standard he bears, stops his every effort on those issues.

Note: The audience was reminded that all questions had to be on the topic of "Israel in the Balance", but he was allowed the commercial break.

Back from commercial break, Kirk started out with the near danger and the far danger. Terrorism is the near danger and HE (you'd think to hear him talk, single-handedly) stopped it by holding the large UN bureaucracy accountable for the Hamas election victory. No mention of how and why Hamas actually pulled it off and what we could have done better to have prevented that in the first place. He engaged in no actual discussion, in detail, about the introduction of HR 4681, the Palestinian Anti- Terrorism Act of 2006 by, not Mark Kirk, but Ileana Ros-Lehtinen from Florida and supported by many many Democrats. I think that is what he was talking about. I could not find any reference to any other bill he introduced as linked from his own web site. Just a bunch of bills to temporarily suspend the duty on various items from slave holding Chinese businesses and H.R.5278 which he abandoned.

But the near danger isn't all that interesting to Kirk, so he quickly moved onto the far danger--the end of Zionism. With this he moved directly to Iran and its president and all the scary stories surrounding him. No mention of the relationship between recent US behavior in Iraq and how such an extremist gets elected despite the large youth movement against religious extremism.

I did agree with one thing Kirk said. He said there was a lesson of dictatorship, that the dictators tell us what they are going to do before they do it. He's right and this lesson applies to many of the Bush signing statements, most particularly, how Bush has taken the position that US law, such as the McCain law against torture, does not apply to him.

There is much more to discuss, but I have to go for now and I'll leave you with this. Kirk compared himself to several great leaders, Winston Churchill, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. Why is it that he cannot find a single republican to bring favor to him when he is the house majority whip, the water carrier and standard bearer for the republican party?

More later including Kirk's answer to my question....