The vote came in at 51/49 in Florida? Without Tom, Nidra and I it would have been much worse. heh
An article in the Washington Times says it all. Muslims are pleased with the election of Barack Obama, they expect that the US will take an attitude of conciliation instead of confrontation. It was illustrated with a picture of two Palestinian gunmen in Tripoli Lebanon watching the election returns. It looked like they were literally holding the elections hostage.
Here is the second in the series of Nidra Poller's coverage of The Great Schlep. (If you missed Part I, go here)
(Lebanese missionary, Atlas Nidra)
The Great Reverse Schlep Part 2
Somewhere outside of Washington D.C.
November 5, 2008
Today’s Washington Times headline reads like a theater marquee: President Obama / America picks first black chief executive. The weather is announced on the dateline: Gloomy – High 63, Low 52. And the truths start tumbling into our gloomy laps. They said it wasn’t about race, and now we have the first black chief executive. Dewy-eyed FoxNews journalists granted him a historic victory for blackness and suddenly discovered his undeniable pragmatism; now that he is elected, he will certainly move to the center right. Reaching apotheosis, the mindless crowd in Grant Park chanted Yes We Can in unison. Yes We Can said the president-elect, wielding power over his hapless disciples who responded in one voice like one man Yes We Can. Yes We Can he repeated, like a lion tamer snapping the whip, Yes We Can they responded, religiously. Russian Imperial Bonds. The image sloshed around in my head last week as I looked at the long line of unread messages in my inbox. We were on the move, picking up steam, gathering confidence, building instant networks and I couldn’t add another log of information to the already blazing fire of damning information about Barack Hussein Obama. Our task was to transform that energy into light = McCain Palin votes. And we were dauntless. Hah!
I was wrong. I thought the pollsters were playing footsie with Obama and his media. Nope. They were predicting the outcome. I didn’t want to believe it, I kept saying it’s not going to happen that way (I lost my bet with the gentleman at the West Palm Beach Country Club) and the only hint that I wasn’t fooling myself was that metaphor: Russian Imperial Bonds. All the precisely documented information on Obama accumulated in my archives would be, I thought, as worthless as Russian Imperial Bonds if he wins this election. There will be no further investigation. Case closed.
Writer, trust your metaphors. Okay, so now how do I tell our story? You saw the crowd at Grant Park last night? Someone at our election night party kept asking “Where are the Blacks?” You saw the crowd, young, white, and yuppie, with a token Oprah, a token Jesse J., tears rolling down their cheeks. Not to worry. We’ll soon find out where they are, the African Americans who gave Obama a dictator’s score. (Could someone check on this for me? Has any demographic sector ever given any candidate such a near-unanimous vote? I don’t think so!) Call me names but I’m still going to say it: welcome to tribal politics. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.
So there was this big rally at Grant Park on election night, and Pamela and I drew a crowd of about 50 in Sanborn Square in Boca Raton last Friday, on the first day of our mission to Florida. They came with signs, badges, t-shirts, flags, and bumper stickers. Tom Trento prepped us: this is a rally, you have to put your lips right onto the mike, speak up, make it strong and snappy. I sat down on a bench in the windy square and wrote up my notes. Over there in Paris where I live there’s not much opportunity for joining rallies. We had a march in 2002 to protest antisemitic attacks in France and “suicide bombings” in Israel but aside from that the demonstrations are all for “peace” and the Palestinians, for perks and against capitalism, for the status quo and against reform.
In no time the three of us—Tom, Pamela, and me—were operating as a hilarious sharpshooting team. We met highly motivated volunteers, and they appreciated us. We heard directly from the person who had exposed massive fraud by the Obama people in the Democratic primaries. As it turns out, this crucial information would be transformed into more Russian Imperial Bonds, but I didn’t know it then. We had hope…in fact, that was my punch line: “Keep the Change, we have the hope, it’s called hatikvah.” People said where were you all this time, why didn’t someone send you around, you’re terrific. It felt good but we didn’t get any messiah complex.
A rapid pit stop at Publix for clean restrooms and some snacks. No time for lunch. We had to zip down to Fort Lauderdale for a press conference organized by Revered O’Neal Dauzier, former football player, military man (20 years of service) and now a lawyer and pastor in a fine cut dark suit and some flashy jewelry. Dauzier was a darling of the Bush administration…until he took issue with a project to build a mosque next to his church. His straight talk about Islam pushed the upstanding jetblack man out of favor. Buffeted by the wind, we waited in front of the courthouse for an eternity. No press in sight. A policewoman came over every ten minutes to herd us back onto the grassy strip… Our barely tolerated mini-conference without the press was not allowed to congregate on the sidewalk.
A Lebanese Christian missionary, learning I live in Paris, engaged me in a long meandering conversation in French. She’ll be off to Syria and Lebanon this spring to proselytize. Now that’s dauntless! Though she looked a bit down at the heels, she said her father had been a chief justice before they were forced into exile, and I believe her. She has revelations. She told authorities forty years ago that the Islamists would ruin America as they had ruined Lebanon. No one believed her. She’s no crackpot. We too might look down at the heels a few years from now.
My cell phone rings. One of those dynamic women who had come to our rally invites us to do a salon meeting tomorrow evening. The whole thing is put together before shabat. I’m dazzled by this American pace. It makes me realize how slow we are in France.
(To be continued. You understand the pain of it all. It’s like telling the story of a fantastic whirlwind romance-- the man you’d always dreamed of meeting, and there he was, in a tropical setting, and it clicked, and it soared, and the sails of your heart were billowing… and you parted at the airport with so many tender kisses and promises to resume the following weekend…and the next day the whole thing fell apart with one phone call… OK, this is just politics, so what if our country broke loose of its moorings right before our eyes. We’ll figure out what to do about it, n’est-ce pas? But I’d just like to go on record here and now: this was not an election, it was a coup d’état.)
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