I just threw away my copy of The New Republic and read with delight and excitement my latest copy of Commentary.
I subscribed to The New Republic for one reason: the Leon Weiseltier section of book reviews has been an enlightening masterpiece. The rest of the magazine is generally boring political rant, except when Marty Peretz recently said he has known John Kerry for thirty years as a personal dork.
Weiseltier fell out of my favor, earning moral boob status. It is hard to believe that a good mind can be a moral boob so I have been forced by cognitive dissonance theory to down grade his good mind to average. The magazine has lost all of its former luster for me.
Weiseltier a moral boob? Yes. He is a Jew who snuck in his endorsement of Kerry in the last issue without any explanation.
A Jew? President Bush is the first prominent person in two thousand years to help the Jews, to stand up for the Jews, to aggressively fight against anti-Semitism and Leon Weiseltier never explains why he would vote against this first prominent friend of the Jews. That is why I call him a moral boob. He has a responsibility to explain his outrageous insult to a good samaritan.
Thumbs down to The New Republic. I am likely to cancel my subscription if this bad behavior continues.
Thumbs up for the November Commentary. I'm proud to subscribe to Commentary. Two superb articles on the international scene. The End of the Right of Self-Defense? by Andrew C. McCarthy is a gut wrenching discussion of the abomination of the International Court and The Case Against the UN by Joshua Muravchik explains why the Republican Senate needs to abandon the UN and start a decent international organization. The UN, as I have pointed out several times in the past, is the most powerful anti-Semitic force in history, exceeding the influence of Germany and the Third Reich. It has other problems too.
The article On the Origins of the Mind by David Berlinski is the most brilliant piece I have ever read on the absurdities of genetic, computer and evolutionary biological models of the mind. (I didn’t say human mind --- because I have no evidence that there is any other kind of mind).
If you are a Jew or Israeli American (as I am) you can’t miss Telling the Story of America's Jews by David Gelernter. (I read one of the books he writes about, the Hasia Diner history. It is so bad I never mentioned it to my blog readers. The rest of the article is an outline of what a good history of Jews in Amerirca would be about. Gelernter is a genius who describes the way America is truly the new Israel, just as the Puritans wanted it to be. Did you know that 75% of Americans were Puritans in 1776? I didn't either.