The SS insisted that they couldn’t run the kamps without them.

Sobibor proved it.

Kapos were an essential component in the running of the German National Socialist concentration camps.

Fascinating, open-minded, human, fair, just, better able to express certain conservative opinions than conservatives themselves, but still … some really odd thing, some bizarre in-congruence.

As far as Dershowitz, I look at Stephen Jay Gould as a better comparison, and not because of Jewishness (assuming Gould was Jewish but I don’t know).

I am going to blather simplifications, but here goes. Gould realized that necessary evidence for the commonly understood version of evolution was not only missing, but also that the evidence which did exist contradicted evolution in a necessary way.

So Gould wrote a big book about it, suggesting an elegant theoretical path to Save The Faith.

Now I am going to make a diversion which seems irrelevant but is not.

In The Master and Magarita, the communist editor of the literary magazine commissions a poet to write a poem about Jesus.

M and M opens with the editor criticizing the poet for submitting a poem which trashes Jesus and putting him in a bad light. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The poem (so goes the criticism) by trashing Jesus, implies that he actually existed.

The correct and absolute take on Jesus is that he did not exist, and was a mythological (at best) or deliberate historical falsehood based on primitive mythology (preferred).

Gould committed the same sort of error. His sole expected function was absolutist. No hinting of shades or degrees of possible belief.

Gould loved his Harvard life too much, as any rational human would, so he put on the dunce cap and consented to receive his ritual adulation.

Dershowitz is not God but he is high among the angelic order. God (Harvard) permits him some freedom as long as fealty is humbly made.

Dershowitz is Jewish, Paglia is Italian, and they are both abject cowards who love their abundant life.

And before anybody condemns them, that person ought to be confident he would also reject the life under similar circumstances.

In the meanwhile, we all can enjoy and benefit from Paglia and Dershowitz.

Carter’s bigotry was an — unexpected — surprise to Alan.

Sheesh.

As an ambassador Oren was discreet, and he is still being discreet in the book, but I concluded that Oren had, by the end of his time as ambassador, given up on Obama.

Why did it take him so long? Because Oren, like Dershowitz, really wanted to believe Obama.

(Haven’t finished Dershowitz’s instabook on the Iran “deal” yet, but I’ll probably write some posts on that, too.)

neo: “Supporting a candidate or a party for tribal reasons does not mean ‘I support Democrats because they share my values,’ for example. It means ‘I support Democrats because I am a Jew and it’s good for the Jews.'”

M J R: To my apprehension, it means “I support Democrats because I am a Jew and it’s what the vast majority of my tribe expects and thinks — employing that latter word, errrmmm, *liberally*.” In particular, and I think we’ve been witnessing this for quite a few years now with both Obama and with Hillary, the part about “and it’s good for the Jews” doesn’t apply, in my concept of “tribal”.

I think the only way out is as follows. “I support Democrats because I am a Jew and it’s what the vast majority of my tribe expects and thinks,” and since that’s what I am expected to think and then act accordingly, it must be good for the Jews” — even if it ain’t. Which it ain’t for both Obama and Hillary.

America, what a great country: guilty as sin, free as a bird.

I am completely puzzled by your use of the word “comical.” Nothing funny about it.

And some of them soured before the 2012 election, by the way:

Romney’s share of the Jewish vote represented a “huge increase” of almost 50 percent over Sen. John McCain’s 22 percent in 2008, Brooks told The Huffington Post, calling it “part of an ongoing and unmistakable trend” in which five out of the last six national elections saw Republicans “steadily and consistently” make inroads in the Jewish community.

The RJC released results from its own surveys of 1,000 Jewish voters nationwide and 600 each in the pivotal states of Florida and Ohio. Nationally, it said Romney received 32 percent of Jewish votes, slightly higher than the 30 percent he received in the exit polls conducted by the television networks and the Associated Press. Either number represents the biggest GOP haul of Jewish votes in a presidential election since 1988, when George H.W. Bush took 35 percent.