Obama Season!

When Mike is in town, discipline goes out the window. I eat too much. I forget to water my plants. And yesterday, I didn’t spend nearly enough time acknowledging God. On the plus side, Mike and I had a long and productive conversation about our beliefs. That was worth a lot.

I got behind on my blogging, too, which is sad, because Hillary Clinton apparently threatened to shoot Barack Obama. Do I have my facts wrong? Details have never been my thing.

I think now we know what she really wants to do to staffers who look her in the eye when she passes. On the up side, it looks like she is making a twisted sort of progress with regard to her views on gun control.

We can’t let this woman become President. Her staff hung condoms on the White House Christmas tree. Condoms! OUR tree! If we’re going to elect a person like that, why don’t we just paint big bullseyes on our roofs, along with the words “Plague and earthquake here, please”?

People tell me God doesn’t punish people like that any more. He doesn’t? Oooooookay. I guess the long list of hideous, incurable, behavior-related diseases is just an incredible set of coincidences. Cervical cancer, lung cancer, cirrhosis, morbid obesity, diabetes, hepatitis C, herpes…coincidence after coincidence.

I have been told AIDS isn’t a plague. If AIDS doesn’t qualify, someone tell me what does. If AIDS isn’t a plague, then the word “plague” should be removed from the dictionary, because it is impossible for any disease to make the cut.

Not only is AIDS a plague; it’s a laser-guided plague with very limited collateral damage. You have to be pretty unlucky to get it without doing something immoral. It’s not like smallpox or the bubonic plague, which don’t discriminate on the basis of morality.

Some people say the “fear” part of “God-fearing” actually refers to a warm, fuzzy feeling. Maybe so, but I am trying to cultivate a healthy fear of judgment. I think this is one of my big deficiencies. There was nothing warm or fuzzy about what happened to Jezebel or the prophets Elisha fried alive or the people of Sodom. I am not anxious to cause myself problems by thinking of God as a giant teddy bear.

I used to think the US was blessed because we helped deliver the Jews out of the hands of the Nazis. Lately, I’ve started to think we’ve actually been punished, for turning them away before the war. Not just the people on the St. Louis, whom we sent to die in the gas chambers. But Jews, generally. We kept them out. I believe that may be why we ended up losing so many men in bloody wars, and why the children of the GI generation turned out to be so immoral and so damaging to America. Why we suffered the cancer called the Sixties.

Did you know American universities used to have Jew quotas? Robert Oppenheimer, who was to other geniuses as Muhammad Ali was to Chuck Wepner, had to get by a quota to do undergrad work at Harvard. I wish I had all the facts in front of me, to help you understand how nutty that is. This is a person who graduated with a degree in chemistry (while auditing several courses in addition to his normal courseload) and then got a Ph.D. in physics in a single year. You just don’t do that. And Richard Feynman was kept out of Columbia by a quota.

It occurred to me the other day that no one ever mentions what should be the most obvious cost of keeping Jews out of the country. We could have taken in millions. Think what that would have meant. Think of what we lost. Scientific advances. Great music. Distinguished judges. Inventions. Jews get something like 20% of the Nobel prizes. Wouldn’t that figure be higher if Hitler hadn’t killed a third of them? And if they had had American money, backing their advances? And wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in the country where the additional discoveries were made?

God told Abraham the world would be blessed through his seed, and He wasn’t kidding, and He wasn’t just referring to the Messiah.

I wonder how different life would be, if not for the achievements we prevented by closing our doors. What diseases might be curable. What technology we might have. How many Oppenheimers and Einsteins and Bohrs and von Neumanns and Rubinsteins and Cardozos and Salks and Tellers did we send into the crematoria?

The US is the friend of the Jews. But it hasn’t been a very good friend. And we have paid a price.

Anyway, I’m very sorry to hear that Senator Clinton is now hoping her enemies get shot by white supremacist militia nuts. A critical person might say this reflects a certain degree of desperation and conceivably, a tiny deficit in the empathy department.