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| | Email this article • Print this article | We've got winners; we've got losers
by Douglas M. Bloomfield
Few can be sorry this year is ending and the aughts are history. Here are some of the winners and losers.
Let's start with the winners.
• Joe Lieberman - Lots of Jews and progressives are furious with him for trying to block health care reform, but the senator from Aetna had a very successful year. Barack Obama blocked Senate Dems from punishing Joe for playing on the Republican team in the 2008 elections and helped him keep his seniority and committee chairmanship, but that didn't inhibit the sanctimonious senator from sticking it to Obama and the Dems at every opportunity. He got everything he wanted and no one could touch him because Dems are willing to pay any price for his 60th vote.
• Bibi Netanyahu - He didn't win the most votes in the last election, but he got the top job anyway. He deflected American pressure for a total settlement freeze with a partial moratorium. Mahmoud Abbas' insisted on terms he knew Netanyahu couldn't meet and rejected Bibi's invitation to meet him half-way, making the Israeli leader look like the only one who really wants peace.
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - He stole the Iranian election, brutalized the opposition and continued his nuclear program without interference. His stall strategy is a big success: Obama keeps declaring and missing his deadlines, the Chinese run interference and the Iranian centrifuges keep spinning. Congress is poised to pass feel-good sanctions, but they're meaningless unless everyone joins in, and that appears highly unlikely.
• J Street - the new pro-peace/pro-Israel lobby had a hugely successful first convention with unexpectedly large turnout, media attention and contributions, thanks in very large part to the hysterical attacks by its right-wing Jewish enemies who were apparently terrified that it might catch on and be effective.
• Sarah Palin - She far outdistances the rest of the GOP pack with glamour and personality, if not brainpower and experience, and she's running for a presidential term extending from 2012 to 2014.
• Ada Yonath - The first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize and only the fourth woman ever to win one in chemistry.
• Al Franken - The freshman senator's first measure to become a law was an amendment barring defense contractors from preventing employees taking workplace sex assault and discrimination cases to court. Dubbed the "anti-rape" amendment, all 30 opposing votes were cast by Republican men. When they realized what they had done, they accused Franken of tricking them, proving once again the worst wounds are self-inflicted.
And, here are the losers.
• Barack Obama - For contracting out health care reform to the Congress, creating confusing policy on Iran, getting outfoxed and outmaneuvered by Bibi Netanyahu and for a focus on bipartisanship that never had a chance. After running an effective campaign to become president, he now needs some first-class legislative strategists to help enact his agenda. Quickly.
• Hannah Rosenthal - A bright and talented woman whose first action as the special State Department envoy for fighting anti-Semitism was to attack the Israeli ambassador. The merits of her comments aside, she forgot she now works for the U.S. government, not J Street, and private thoughts are to be kept private.
• Israel's Labor Party - The once venerable party came in fourth, and has become a party in search of meaning.
• Middle East Peace - 2009 started full of hope generated by the new American administration, but no one seemed deeply enough committed to relaunch peace negotiations that had been on ice for the past eight years.
• Nobel Committee - One editorial cartoonist put it best, giving the gold medal to the athlete at the start of the race and hoping he does well.
• Jimmy Carter - Al chet or mea culpa, he's now apologizing. Remember all those nasty things Jimmy said about "apartheid" Israel? He's sorry for "stigmatizing" the Jewish state. And he insists his repentance has nothing to do with his grandson running for the Georgia state senate in a district with an influential Jewish population and a retiring Jewish incumbent.
• Birthers - The lunatic fringe still can't believe a black man could be elected president in the 21st century; 11 House Republicans even introduced legislation requiring presidential candidates to produce their "original birth certificate."
• Rep. Peter Hoekstra - The Michigan Republican said "it really is" fair to hold the Obama administration responsible for the suspected terror incident on a Christmas Day Detroit-bound flight because it is "not going to use the word terrorism anymore."
Douglas M. Bloomfield is a nationally syndicated columnist.
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