Jewdar vs. President Obama

As of last week, Jewdar has officially joined the anti-Obama crowd. For a long time, we were satisfied that, even though not much seemed to be getting done, what could you expect, given the ginormous mess Obama had inherited.

Then, beginning a couple of months ago, we decided that ginormous mess or not, Obama was a dud. What’s so amusing about his dudness is that it’s the exact opposite of how his critics present him. According to the Fox News crowd, Obama’s a Fuhrer (Caudillo, for his Latino supporters) in the making. In fact, we can think of no president since perhaps the 1920’s, if not the 19th century, who has less represented the ideals of the Fuhrerprinzip than Obama. After a year in office, Jewdar can think of no policy that he’s really pursued strongly, or invested himself in fully, if there was any real opposition to it, and it seems that his most memorable moment was having a beer with Henry Louis Gates and the cop, and it was a crappy beer at that. Still, we were willing to accept that, if he wasn’t doing much good, at least, as per the first rule of the Hippocratic Oath, he was doing no harm. Now, he doesn’t even have that going for him anymore.

Last week, Mrs. Jewdar was returning from a week visiting family in the Holy Land, and was at the duty free, picking up a bottle ofPhenix Arakfor yours truly (okay, it’s not strictly speaking arak, but it’s made from anis, and we can’t tell the difference between it and arakother than it’s more awesome). Not only one bottle, but in a sign of the kind of miraculousness that takes place in Israel, it was two for the price of one. Before she buys, though, she double checks if it can be brought on the plane, and is told it can’t. "We don’t care. It’s the Americans. You can thank Obama." You can thank Obama.

So here’s where things stand. During the last election, we donated money to Obama’s campaign–first time we’d ever made a political donation. We wrote the boilerplate for the Heeb fundraiser for him. We spoke out in his defense umpteen times in our inimitable Jewdar fashion. But no more. As far as we’re concerned, the president owes us two bottles of Phenix. Now, we’re not unreasonable. We don’t expect him to pay for it, and we’ll gladly reimburse him (at the two-for-one price the missus would have paid, we should note). But until he brings us our bottles, like Fredo to Michael,you’re nothing to me now. Come on, Mr. President, you’ve got enough diplomats traveling to Israel that one of them can bring us back our liquor. Pass the word, Rahm Emanuel, we know you read Heeb.

What do you think?