Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Roger Cohen, "Israel’s Vote Without Victory"*: Do You Remember "Dewey Defeats Truman"?

[* The title of the op-ed has now been changed to "An Uneasy Coalition for Israel."]


Do you remember the famous pictures of Harry Truman holding up a copy of The Chicago Tribune declaring "Dewey Defeats Truman"? Well, none other than Roger ("Iran is not totalitarian") Cohen has managed to provide us with his own special revival of this journalistic debacle. In a New York Times op-ed entitled "Israel’s Vote Without Victory," Cohen writes:

"If the Israeli election was above all a referendum on the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he did not lose it. After accumulating nine years in office over three terms, that is a measure of his political guts, however limited his political achievements.

Nor, however, did he win it, according to early exit polls, and a long season of Israeli uncertainty now looks inevitable, despite the cries of victory from Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party.

. . . .

But many Israelis are tired of Netanyahu’s games; they embrace a different idea of Israel.

. . . .

As with Churchill’s words on democracy, a national unity coalition now looks like the worst form of government for Israel except for all the others. It could curtail Netanyahu’s hubris while giving Herzog heft, a desirable double whammy."

However, with 95 percent of the vote tallied, Netanyahu's Likud currently leads Herzog's Zionist Union by five parliamentary seats, and Netanyahu is almost certainly assured of forming the next government in Israel.

As always, nice work, Roger!

4 comments:

  1. Millions $USD of tax payer's money spent on 'regime change' in Israel... poof - gone in an instant. NIF, Molad, OneVoice and it's affiliate, the V15 group all must be scrambling, trying to put together a contingency plan in wake of Likud's victory. Kudos to Israel's electorate for their wisdom and realizing that appeasing one's enemy never brings peace.
    Now, for Netanyahu's biggest challenge ever: surviving two more years of Obama's 'befriend-your-enemies-abandon-your-allies' foreign policy.

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  2. BTW, to avoid that 'journalistic debacle', the link above completely disappeared and the whole article was re-written under the title "An Uneasy Coalition for Israel".
    All the embarrassing portions of the original article are now neatly hidden away in the cache directory of Google's servers.

    "The New York Times issues a correction on..." ?
    Aw, just fuhgeddaboudit!


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  3. At 5:00pm EDT, only Al Jazeera America covered the closing of Israeli polls on USA cable news. Yes, it was most surreal: watching AJAM on the Israeli elections!

    Even with those first exit polls, AJAM knew Likud had won by one seat. I admit AJAM has the best international news coverage, except when it comes to Israel, but they did a good job trying to figure out the coalition possibilities, after 40 minutes, they knew Herzog would not be able to form a coalition.

    Most surreal 40 minutes of news watching :)

    Guess Roger Cohen went to sleep very early in his home somewhere in the State of Denial?

    k


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