Giuliani Imitates Mafiosos On The Campaign Trail

The Incredible Shrinking Candidates

By PEGGY NOONAN
April 14, 2007; Page P14

On Wednesday John McCain distinguished himself with a closely argued and eloquent address in which he spoke seriously and at length of his position on Iraq. He said America faces "an historic choice" with "ramifications for Americans not yet even born."

"Many Democrats," he said, view the war as "a political opportunity," while Republicans view it as "a political burden." But it is neither, he said. It is not a political question to be poll-tested but a challenge that bears on our continuance as a great nation. We must stay and fight and win.

"It may be standard-setting," the Hotline said of the remarks the next day, "perhaps the most powerful plea a war supporter has . . . sent to the American people since the troop surge began. Has any other presidential candidate written a speech to persuade -- importune -- an audience to change their minds?"

You can agree or disagree with Mr. McCain, but where he stands is clear -- and clarity these days, from our candidates, feels like a gift. As does certitude. He isn't running from the war but owning it. A political rival might say, "He has no choice." But there's always a choice.

My larger point, however, is that he sounded like a serious man addressing a serious issue in a serious way. This makes him at the moment stand out.

There is a sort of stature gap in the presidential campaign so far, isn't there? A lack of personal height among the candidates, a lack of the bearing that befits the office they seek.

Here was Rudy Giuliani this week in a speech in California. No one much noted it -- he was lucky it was subsumed by the Imus wave. But this is how Mr. Giuliani opened a speech to citizens considering his candidacy for the American presidency. "Thank youse all very much for invitin' me here tuh-day, to this meeting of the families from different parts'a California."

He was imitating Marlon Brando in "The Godfather." (The rendering comes from a Newsday report.) Actually the character of Don Corleone, as drawn by Mario Puzo, was possessed of a certain verbal elegance, but never mind. Mr. Giuliani's imitation was clear enough to inspire in the audience a smattering of applause and, apparently, laughter.

Earlier in the week, in reaction to a spate of critical stories about his wife, Judith, he asked reporters to leave her alone: "I am a candidate. She's a civilian, to use the old Mafia distinction."

Ah. Can't have enough candidates for president who whimsically employ the language of mobsters.

Rudy is No. 1 in the GOP polls, but he has been displaying the worst stature gap on the trail. He can't see why his wife sets people's teeth on edge; he can't see why it would disturb us to have her at cabinet meetings; he assures us she actually won't be at cabinet meetings. This was followed by his statement that of course he continues to be pro-choice on abortion, and yeah, actually, he's probably also for taxpayer funding of abortion, but maybe not.

There is an embarrassing ad-hoc-ness, a bush-leagueness to this. It's as if he hasn't thought it through, as if he's just deciding everything each day. But by the time you're running for president you should have decided.

At the very least a major candidate should by now have absorbed and internalized that he is running for what is actually the presidency of the United States, and not, say, the Las Vegas City Council.

From Mike Huckabee this week, a similar contribution to the august nature of the endeavor. He said if Republicans don't start judging the private lives of the Republican candidates for president they should just "apologize to Bill Clinton." That'll class things up. Mitt Romney at the same time was talking about shooting varmints with all the rifles he does or does not own.

None of these are as bad as what may be the worst moment in the entire campaign so far, that being Hillary Clinton's adopting of a deep Southern drawl when she spoke at a church last month in Selma, Ala.

"Ah don't feel no ways tarred, ah come too far. . . . And the chair of all the mares in the country, Mare Palmer from Trenton, New Jersey . . ."

Oh my goodness. It was so embarrassing, so lead-footed and cynical, so patronizing. You know she was shocked that it didn't go over because she'd seen her husband hop up his own accent and go with the sing-song cadences a hundred times in his career, a thousand times, and no one ever knocked him for it. But he was good at it. And he was, actually, a Southerner. He wasn't adopting an entire new regional accent and calling it his own.

So what's going on here? "Can't nobody here play this game?" The presidency is an august office. Why are these candidates acting so small when the job they think they deserve is so big?

Maybe it's just that people have less dignity these days, and so candidates do too. A few decades ago personal dignity became equated with stiffness and pretension. There was nothing in it for politicians anymore. (It all might have started in 1968, when Richard Nixon went on "Laugh-In" and said, "Sock it to me." But that worked because he had actual personal dignity to spoof.) Maybe we've reached the point where anyone who'd run for president is almost definitionally strange. Maybe it's that the candidates so far are just the kind of people who'd make it to the top of the greasy pole, scramblers by nature whose main talent is energy, not judgment.

But I have a different theory. I think it's that all our candidates for president have met, or know well, too many former and sitting presidents. They've seen them up close, they know them, they have seen their flaws and mess and inadequacy. Knowing a lot of former presidents, and a lot of incumbents, will give you a too mortal sense of what the presidency is.

The problem with former presidents is that knowing them keeps you from being awed by the presidency. When you haven't met them, you have a more austere and august sense of who they are, and what a president is.

Candidates on the trail today would be better off keeping as their template for the office Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln -- the unattainable greats. It's no good to just be thinking, At least I'm better than Clinton, at least I'm better than Bush.

Something to reach for even if you know it will exceed your grasp. But it's good to be reaching upward, not stooping.

Israel acts like mafia when it comes to settlements

A settlements mafia

By Dror Etkes


The figures published yesterday by Peace Now's Settlement Watch team on the ownership of land on which the settlements sit presents a scary picture of the State of Israel's behavior in the territories. Approximately 40 percent of the area of settlements is privately-owned Palestinian land, according to the Civil Administration. Put simply, for dozens of years, Israel continued to expand and entrench the settlement enterprise by dispossessing Palestinian residents of their lands, whose private ownership even the State of Israel does not dispute. All of this is in contrast to the frequently voiced argument of official government spokesmen and settlers that "the settlements sit on state lands."

What is the method used to bring about this phenomenon? From 1967 to 1979, the Israeli military administration in the West Bank made widespread use of the process of "acquiring land for security purposes" to grab thousands of dunams of land under private Palestinian ownership. These lands were in practice used for the purpose of expanding the settlements.

Although "acquiring land for security purposes" in an occupied area is permitted according to international law, it is also limited to a certain time. The High Court of Justice rejected the petitions the landowners submitted against the acquisitions, basing itself on the argument that the settlements do indeed have an added security value, as they are located in the heart of an area where a hostile population lives. That is, permanent settlements were established on lands whose acquisition was meant to have been temporary to begin with. To this day, dozens of settlements owe their legal existence to the absurd ritual in which the OC Central Command signs an extension of the acquisition orders for the lands on which they sit, while declaring that he is convinced the land in question is "necessary for military purposes."

Ironically, this method of operation eventually ran into trouble specifically because of the settlers' refusal to continue cooperating with the open lie at the heart of all those declarations the IDF provided to the High Court of Justice. In a response submitted by the settlers in 1979, when the High Court of Justice was discussing land acquisitions for Elon Moreh, it was actually the settlers who refused to recognize the temporary nature of the settlement they were about to set up, arguing that it was not being set up for the purpose of temporary security needs, but as a "supreme moral and divine order." With no alternative available, the High Court of Justice was compelled to overturn its previous decisions and to order the state to refrain from acquiring lands intended for building settlements. Even though Elon Moreh had to relocate to an alternate site, all the settlements that had been established in this manner until that point remained where they were.

As a result of the Elon Moreh case, the construction of settlements in the territories, which only accelerated during those years, switched to two parallel tracks: the first, the pseudo-legal one, in which the government of Israel, assisted by the legal advice from the industrious Plia Albeck, declared huge tracts of the West Bank to be state lands. And in that way, without Israeli governments ever having to provide any sort of accounting, not for the questionable way in which these lands were declared state lands, nor for the very fact that these land were allocated only for Jews (even though they were and remain a small minority of the West Bank population), the settlement enterprise became entrenched.

The second track on which Israel worked represents a more advanced stage in the government's scorn for the concept of its subordination to the laws of the state, whose enforcement, or so it is commonly thought, it is actually supposed to oversee: the governments of Israel continued to initiate or "only" to enable the construction of settlements, neighborhoods and outposts on private lands without even bothering to issue acquisition orders, because after all, the High Court of Justice would probably have disqualified them.

As mentioned, all of this happened with the knowledge of the Civil Administration, which did not get lazy and took the trouble to document the phenomenon and its dimensions, while insolently insisting on its right to conceal it from the public. And this is what the Jerusalem District Prosecutor's Office wrote to the court when explaining its refusal to hand over the data: "The subject of the petition is an extremely sensitive issue that involves, among other things, the State of Israel's security considerations and foreign relations."

Even though it is hard to understand what "security considerations" could have been involved in this matter, it is easy to guess how Israel's foreign relations would indeed have been affected by the information contained here. The unfortunate conclusion is that when it comes to land management policy, the State of Israel acts like a mafia state inside the area of the West Bank.

The author is the director of Peace Now's Settlement Watch project.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/790934.html