Ready for Rudy?

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 3/11/10

Vice President Joe Biden went to Jerusalem to scold. He “condemned” the Israelis, saying the East Jerusalem housing plans "undermined the trust required for productive negotiations.” "Sometimes, only a friend can deliver the hardest truth,” he said.

Is Joe a friend of Israel?

Biden’s visit to Israel is part of the Obama Theater of diplomacy. Netanyahu is probably more concerned right now with the upcoming Likud Central Committee elections to take place on April 28th.

Biden may be a dork, as Karl Rove said, but his real problem is that he works for a pre- 9/11 President. I think we needed a rest, as we did after Vietnam with Jimmy Carter and as England did after World War II with Clement Atlee. But rest time is over. The time for smoozing is over.

War changes people’s temperament. We are a different people today than we were in the Clinton ‘90s, which John Kenneth Galbraith called a “culture of contentment,” and in the Carter ‘70s, which Christopher Lasch called a “culture of narcissism.” The election of a soldier in pacifist Massachusetts, Scott Brown, to fill “Ted Kennedy’s seat” should be testament to that.

The war in Iraq is over. We won. We won with ominous threats from Toby Keith and Rudy Giuliani backed up by American boots on the ground. We won with some unconstitutional acts – as Lincoln and Roosevelt did - and some egregious practices by the George W. Bush administration. It happens, as anyone who served in the Vietnam War or any other war will tell you. The time for recriminations is past. It is water under the bridge. Those who dwell on the dark side of it become poisoned by it.

And because of these things the United States has a brand new place in the world. But post-9/11, post Iraq war, relations cannot be established by a President who reaches back to the 1980s and 1990s for his agents and advisors. It is the politics of denial.

Only Sarah Palin has brought focus on Israel under the new circumstances, met of course with fear and trembling in the MSM. Rick Perry will in time as the Christian Zionists in Texas have been better friends to Israel and more dependable ones these war years than Biden, Clinton and Obama. Netanyahu said their vision preceded his own. There is an opening for Rudy Giuliani here as well and he should speak up now to the issues of national security, especially related to Iran and Israel. Because if a demure and reticent Massachusetts is ready for Brown, America might be ready for Giuliani.

Political temperament changes like the four seasons. Mitt Romney is right to call on an America without apology. But that is Rudy’s America to a t and always has been. The election of Brown and the awarding of a movie about an honest, competent and unapologetic warrior by Hollywood this month suggest the winds of change are at hand. It is dawning on America that this is not Vietnam and that this is a war that we have won. A Giuliani run with Keith’s unapologetic Courtesy of the red, white and blue, playing somewhere in the hinterland – as rousing an anthem as Rule Britannia – gave tremors to the timid in 2008, but could well be the coat that fits in 2012. And in contrast, it would make the messianic ardor of Obama, which shook the world in 2008, appear merely bookish in 2012.