J's Cafe Nette

Archive for September 16th, 2007

With all that has been written over the years about the Holocaust and its victims, the amount of history to be yet uncovered is no doubt staggering. As I read this piece, I found myself travelling back in time using examples cited trying once again to grasp the magnitude of this horrific time in history.

Impossible is the only word I can find. Unless you lived through this, or had family who did, all the stories and pictures in the world could never leave the same mark. Perhaps that is why reminders of the Holocaust continue to be unearthed to this day. To that end, those of us who have no personal attachment will never forget.

BAD AROLSEN, Germany – Deep in Shari Klages’ memory is an image of herself as a girl in New Jersey, going into her parents’ bedroom, pulling a thick leather-bound album from the top shelf of a closet and sitting down on the bed to leaf through it.

What she saw was page after page of ink-and-watercolor drawings that convey, with simple lines yet telling detail, the brutality of Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp where her father spent the last weeks of World War II.

Arrival, enslavement, torture, death — the 30 pictures expose the worsening nightmare through the artist’s eye for the essential, and add graphic texture to the body of testimony by Holocaust survivors.

“I have a sense of being quite horrified, of feeling my stomach in my throat,” Klages says. Just by looking at the book, she felt she was doing something wrong and was afraid of being caught.

Now, she finally wants to make the album public. Scholars who have seen it call it historically unique and an artistic treasure.

But who drew the pictures? Only Klages’ father could know. It was he who brought the album back from Dachau when he immigrated to America on a ship with more than 60 Holocaust orphans — and he had committed suicide in 1972 in his garage in Parsippany, N.J.

The sole clue was a signature at the bottom of several drawings: Porulski.

This is a fascinating piece in its entirety and once again, even though some of the blanks are filled in as it proceeds, you realize the numerous unanswered questions about those who suffered this unimaginable crime. Questions which undoubtly will never be answered.

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This MSNBC post by Newsweek writer Michael Hirsch goes over the former Clinton Administration officials who are working for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

I’ve skipped the part about Barack Obama because I found something quite interesting in a quote about Mrs. Clinton’s favorite oldies:

The more experienced Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has relied largely on her husband and a triumvirate of senior officials from his presidency—former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke and former national-security adviser Sandy Berger (who tries to keep a low profile after pleading guilty in 2005 to misdemeanor charges of taking classified material without authorization). Hillary also consults with an informal group of 30 less prominent advisers. But she has shown increasing anxiety over Obama’s active recruiting effort—so much so that she recently hired Lee Feinstein, a prominent and well-connected scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, to launch an “outreach” program similar to Obama’s. Perhaps the hardest loss for the Clintonites is Greg Craig, the former lawyer for President Clinton who, along with former Albright protégée Susan Rice, a Clinton-era assistant secretary of state for Africa, and former national-security adviser Tony Lake, is considered one of Obama’s closest confidants.

Sandy Berger: the man who went to the National Archives and stuffed papers down his pants, in his socks and anyplace else he could imagine and proceeded to destroy them all by “accident”, except they shouldn’t have left the building. Who knows what Clinton secrets he destroyed so the public will never know what Clinton did or didn’t do to prevent terrorism in this country?

Do we really want to go down that dark road again?

Do we want to hear our president is a crook every day again, and is as slick as an icy road?

Do we really want parsing of words such as “It all depends on what the meaning of is, is” as a daily thing?

Are we ready for a convict to be a member of our National Security staff again, even though his security clearance will have been given back by then?

Regardless of your party, you’d better think long and hard before pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton. If you thought things were bad during her husband’s tenure, imagine how much worse they can be under her. She doesn’t have his charm.

Stop the ACLU has more on this story.

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Polls seem to be confirming what most of us already know: we don’t feel warm and fuzzy over the prospect of having Hillary Clinton as our president.

You know how we feel about polls on this blog, so take it for what it’s worth.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has the highest negative ratings of any presidential candidate in the 2008 race, can add another voter designation to her image: the coldest.

The Gallup Poll recently asked voters to rank the candidates on a “feeling thermometer,” in which zero was the coldest and 100 was the warmest. The New York senator and Democratic front-runner was the “most polarized” of all the candidates in either party, according to the poll.

“Nearly as many Americans say she leaves them cold as say they feel warmly about her,” Gallup said.

The article notes the core of Mrs. Clinton’s support is in her party, which is good enough to get the nomination, but what about the general election?

I was asked today who I thought was a good enough candidate to be our president, and I had to answer I didn’t know because I really haven’t paid attention to the issues favored by the various candidates. I also said I was sure I would crawl naked over frozen ice on crushed glass in a blizzard to make sure I got to the polls to vote against Hillary Clinton.

I’m tired of voting against someone and hope I can find someone to vote for instead.

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Bill Kristol of Weekly Standard and Fox News is saying former federal judge Michael Mukasey will get the nomination to be the next Attorney General.

“I would say he’s a sort of hard — a tough-minded conservative judge who will be a strong attorney general, not a movement conservative. I don’t think he’ll get into social issues, that sort of thing. Those Bush policies are already in place,” Kristol said.

“I think the best thing about him, from a conservative point of view, is he will be an extremely effective witness before Congress when FISA, the eavesdropping program, comes up for reauthorization, as it will in a few months. On all War on Terror issues, he will be to War on Terror issues what (Gen. David) Petraeus is, I think, to military issues, an independent, well-respected person who’s pretty much in agreement with the president’s policies,” he continued.

Asked about the nomination, Sen. Joe Biden, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he doesn’t know anything about the judge, but he will have to pass a Democratic test before being confirmed.

“As long as he can prove — not prove, assert, and I believe that he understands he’s not just the president’s lawyer but the country’s lawyer, I could support him. But I don’t know enough about him, so he has to pass that test for me, go through that filter. Is he going to be the president’s guy? Is he going to — or is he going to stand up and defend the Constitution and be the people’s lawyer as well? And I just don’t know the answer to that,” Biden said on “FOX News Sunday.”

Mukasey already has earned support from liberal Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, a point that Kristol noted has turned off some conservatives. But he said Republican senators will come out in force for him.

“I think every Republican will vote to confirm him. It’s unfortunate that Chuck Schumer respects him, but you can’t do that much about some people saying nice things about you. He is widely respected on both sides of the aisle,” said Kristol, whose article noted that Schumer and the liberal “Alliance for Justice” supported Mukasey only after it became clear that Mukasey was not going to be on the short list of possible Supreme Court nominees.

Kristol and others have noted that many conservatives support former Solicitor General Ted Olson, a tried and true GOP ally, as the next attorney general, but it may be better to avoid a fight in the last 15 months of the administration when an equally good candidate can be picked without an argument.

Mukasey is the judge who appointed a lawyer to Jose Padilla, the man arrested for trying to detonate a dirty bomb.

Supposedly the announcement will come as early as Monday. We’ll see if Kristol is right.

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