"Israelis Don�t Ask. They Tell" and David Sirota

By John Ballard

From this morning's surfing in the stinking aftermath of the elections.
Two unrelated links, both pointing to a downhill slide, lubricated in part by a pusillanimous administration.

?Now the largest independent Jewish magazine in North America, Elie Wiesel and Leonard Fein founded Moment in 1975, calling it "The New Magazine for America's Jew." (H/T Wonk Room)

Israelis Don't Ask. They Tell.

America�s controversial Don�t Ask Don�t Tell (DADT) policy has led to the dismissal of 13,500 uniformed men and women since 1993. Although the policy seems destined to change, myriad political obstacles remain.

The United States could learn from Israel�s experience as one of the first countries to integrate gays into the military. If you tried to enact a law like DADT in Israel today, you�d be laughed out of the Knesset. Whether or not they�re asked, Israelis tell. But it hasn�t always been that way. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had to go through its own �coming out� process.

While gays and lesbians have doubtless served in the IDF since its founding, they generally flew under the radar. Homosexuality was frowned upon in Israeli society and seldom discussed in the state�s earlier days. Although there was no specific prohibition against serving, soldiers discovered to be gay were usually discharged. Starting in 1983, they were allowed to serve but were required to undergo psychiatric evaluations and denied security clearances. These rules were implemented arbitrarily and inconsistently.

When the media released a photograph of a soldier�wearing his uniform�literally coming out of a closet constructed for Israel�s first gay pride event in 1993, the soldier was tried in a military court and forced to leave his unit. In February of that year, things began to change. The Knesset held its first hearing on gays in the military, where Uzi Even, the chairman of Tel Aviv University�s chemistry department, testified that he had been fired from his top secret position in Israel�s nuclear facilities because he was openly living with a man. The fact that he was dismissed after 15 years of service created a national outcry and inspired Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin to rethink the policy. Within three months, then-IDF chief of staff Ehud Barak signed the command banning military discrimination based on sexual orientation into law.
[...]
The speed at which the policy has changed indicates that constantly embattled Israelis feel as if they have bigger fish to fry than squabbling over gays in the military....
[...]
Yet emotionally-driven issues such as the common shower (that universal test of unit cohesion) preoccupy Americans. Federal Judge Virginia Phillips�s September 9th court ruling that DADT is unconstitutional cites, among other things, the fact that communal showers are increasingly rare in the American army. Israelis have a different perspective. Avner Even-Zohar, a retired IDF captain who lectures extensively on LGBT issues, says that �in officers' training in the Israeli army they told us that real soldiers hardly shower at all.�

?Susie read and posted what David Sirota said.

The facts are painfully apparent. Though hundreds - if not thousands - of people in D.C. are professionally paid to pretend these facts require debate and analysis and parsing and speculation and press releases and pithy Tweets and Sunday Show roundtables and C-SPAN symposia and to-camera cable-TV rants and lengthy thousand-page books, they don't require any of that. They are simple. They are obvious. They are undeniable:

1. The Democratic Party shit on its base with its policies, as noted above.

2. This demoralized the Democratic base, which responded by not turning out to vote. As CBS News notes, "Hispanics, African Americans, union members and young people were among the many core Democratic groups that turned out in large numbers in the 2008 elections (but) turnout among these groups dropped off substantially, even below their previous midterm levels."

3. In cause-and-effect style, the result of all this was, as the Washington Post reports, a freshman congressional class that is primarily made up of angry, white, lunatic-conservative assholes.

So yes, all of you who are wasting all of our time pretending this isn't the basic point-A-to-point-B story of the election - and there are a lot of you out there - please, if not for me, then for everyone else: Go fuck yourself.

More at the links but you get the point.