Huff Post: Delusional or Just Cynical?

Alexis Rice — February 9, 2009 – 4:14 pm | Barack Obama | Economy | Republicans Comments (0) Add a comment

Ira N. Forman, Executive Director of NJDC, published this piece today in the Huffington Post concerning support for the economic stimulus package and questions the logic of Jonathan Tobin, Executive Editor of Commentary.

The piece notes:

One of the more fascinating spectator sports in recent weeks has been watching the behavior of the Republican apparatchik class as it sounds off on President Barack Obama’s economic recovery package. A good example of this “frothing at the mouth” reaction is a February 5, 2009 blog penned by Jonathan Tobin, Executive Editor of Commentary.

Tobin, the former editor of a Jewish weekly newspaper, approaches the issue from a Jewish communal perspective. Like many Jewish movement conservatives, he is baffled and frustrated at the fact that most Jewish communal organizations are not slavishly committed to his own extreme conservative view of the world.

Tobin dismisses most of the Jewish communal organizations’ support for the Obama stimulus plan as merely reflective of their commitment to “a statist, liberal welfare-state agenda—even if it has very little to do with what is or is not good for the Jews.” The support for the stimulus package by other Jewish organizations (most notably United Jewish Communities [UJC]) which can’t be so easily dismissed, is, in Tobin’s telling, merely a function of their self-serving devotion and addiction to government grants. Tobin ends his piece by dismissing the notion that the recovery package is about getting the country out of recession as “laughable.”

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