Harvey Korman and Barack Obama

Two events merged this week.

The last-chance (though not seriously employed) folly of shooting down the Democratic nomination of Barack Obama, and the death of actor, Harvey Korman (1927-2008).

Harvey Korman, among his numerous amusements, portrayed the Hedley Lamarr character in Blazing Saddles (1974, Mel Brooks).

Brooks and Lamarr mocked bigotry, hatred and ignorance so mercilessly that 30-plus years later one almost feels sorry for the bastards manipulating and manifesting these imbecilites today—diseased pursuits of the American mind that have played a great role in American history and that soon will dismay loudly John McCain and his ilk as this truism of American bigotry is discovered to have been uttered by anybody at anytime in anyway associated with Barack Obama’s campaign.

Nothing makes a non-bigot laugh so much as watching Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Slim Pickens, Harvey Korman, Madeline Kahn, Mel Brooks, and company ridicule bigotry into nothingness in Blazing Saddles.

One scene in Saddles (and you can pick among many) is set among the villains, including Korman’s Hedley Lamarr, scheming to drive out the residents of the town of Rock Ridge.

As the villains brainstorm specific methods of shock and awe to scare the residents out of their homes so that the villains can build a railroad through the town and profit to their huge financial advantage, one not-so-bright villain, Taggart, stumbles upon an apparent solution.

Taggart: I got it.

Hedley Lamarr: What?

Taggart: Let's kill every first born male child in Rock Ridge.

Hedley Lamarr: Nah, too Jewish.

The villains decide upon murder, rape, and pillage as the non-controversial solution.

Pure comedic, political, and cinematic brilliance.

So, hearing of Korman’s death, one hopes for a voice from Obama that holds up bigotry, hatred, and ignorance with the same grace and clarity as Brooks and Korman, and that bunch, displaying the disease with such good humor and illuminatingly cool ridicule that McCain and his forces of stupidity will be left by the wayside of segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism—old hatreds and idiocies good for a great political laugh today, if only a presidential candidate can perform as a Mel Brooks or a Harvey Korman.

Alexandrovna Blasts Dershowitz' Pro-torture WSJ Column

As defenders of torture go, militarist Alan Dershowitz has rightfully become the scorn of the anti-torture, anti-militarist American progressives, you know: Anti-Semitic Israel haters.

Larisa Alexandrovna takes down Dershowitz, and writes that Alan Dershowitz was against Nazis before he was for them.

Welcome to the dessert of the real in which a Jewish man can cite Nazis in defense of torture tactics. I was raised on the Holocaust. I went to a highly religious school where many of my teachers and guest lecturers were Holocaust survivors.

My family talked about the Holocaust at every opportunity, remembering those who were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered, including members of my family. I lived under the Soviet regime, which also tortured and murdered. I have never met or spoken with any Jew who has ever defended torture, no matter who the "scapegoat" is.

Apparently, there are some Jews who are more than willing to become the very monsters they abhor.

This mentality I do not understand and never will.

Take for example the latest Alan Dershowitz column in the Wall
Street Journal. Aside from getting the new meme on Mukasey about how the Democrats are beholden to MoveOn.org - echoed by meister Rove, President Bush, Dick Cheney, and the right wing propaganda machine as if one ring ruled them all - Dershowitz actually writes this:

"There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives."

This statement defies logic. Even if in some instances Nazi tactics worked, why would anyone endorse them for any reason, especially a Jewish man? Dershowitz, and others like him - Joe Lieberman, et al - do not speak for Jews, nor do they speak for Israel. In fact, the far right regime that has co-opted Israel and the US both is not representative of Judaism or Christianity for that matter. Whatever or whomever it is they represent, it is not the Israeli people or the American people. It is as though a multi-national organized crime syndicate has taken over both countries and is using the cover of religion as a shield against criticism.

No Jew, no real Jew, would ever support torture. When torture becomes policy for politically influential American and Israeli Jews, then the whole of our history becomes polluted with monsters whose crimes we lose the right to condemn. It is the responsibility of other prominent Jews in both countries to
take our religion back from these political parasites, because if we don't, their handy work will create the kind of antisemitism not seen since WWII. Ever since this morally repugnant right wing extremism has in a "paper coup" taken over both Israel and the United States, antisemitism has skyrocketed.

To look at the global situation, racism and xenophobia had become more acute, particularly anti-semitism. Worldwide, there had been 590 cases of deliberate violence and vandalism against Jews, an increase of 31 per cent from the previous year, with the most incidents in Europe and the Middle East.

If Israeli citizens will not demand a more moderate government, then Jews around the world will have to ask the hard question: what is more important, the country of Israel or the Jewish people as a a whole?

And if American Jews do not demand that right wing political prostitutes, Jews in name only, stop the US march toward world domination, then American Jews might have to ask themselves a hard question as well: Is the United States more important than our traditions, morals, values, and history as a Jewish people?

In both cases, Jews of the world have to stand up against torture that other, more visible Jews in the US and Israel publicly endorse. We have to do this because we are a good people, a victimized people, and because we know what it means to be on the other side of the torture argument.
- Larisa Alexandrovna
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