Have you no decency sir?

By now we should all be inured to the incredible callousness of the professional politician, a subspecies of the common twerp whose only qualities are loyalty to the party's leader and a low-level cunning and brutality that no doubt come in handy to that same leader every once a while. Sort of like Luca Brasi but without the charm and the elegant manners.

Please meet: Rabbi Meshulam Nahari. Member of the Knesset for the Shas party and Minister of Nothing in the current Israeli Government, party-hack extraordinaire.

As you may of may not know, here in Israel we have a number of political parties that under the cover of religion have taken racketeering to levels of excellence not seen since Caligula made his horse Senator in Rome.  Which might very well be where we got Meshulam Nahari. In my imagination it went down something like this:

A bunch of the Shas guys where sitting around the table some time ago, shooting the s*^t, as wise guys trend to do. They were probably congratulating one another on how smart they were, how they managed to extort some in ungodly amount of money from a government too weak-willed to stand up to them. They might have had something to drink but not necessarily. 

Anyway, Wiseguy No.2 tells the leader about Caligula's horse stunt.

-"For real?", exclaims The Leader, "he really got his horse a job in the Senate?"

-"Just so," answers No. 2, "although I think that they waived the whole wearing-a-toga bit for him."

-"Now THAT is real power," adds No. 3, "getting an unthinking brute into the Senate."

This was beginning to feel like a challenge to The Leader, a real test of his political prowess. So he gives the matter some thought and comes up with this jewel:

-"Appointing a horse to the Senate is nice, but that's not so much of an accomplishment when you're already Emperor of Rome. I'll bet you anything that you want that I can do him one better. If Caligula could get a horse appointed to the Roman Senate, I'll bet you that I can get not only an unthinking brute but a real horse's ass elected to the Knesset."

-"Yeah, right.  And how exactly are you going to accomplish that?"

-"I have some ideas. Do you know Meshulam Nahari?"

In truth, it might have gone down a little differently, but you get the idea.

And what, you might ask, has gotten me so riled up about someone so demonstrably small, so obviously insignificant, so absurdly dumb as bad ol' Meshulam. Well, here it is:

Gilad Shalit (you remember him, don't you?), went to the beach with his dad on the Saturday following his release. Good for him I say, the beach sounds like the right place to decompress and spend some time with family. So far, so good.

Enter the horse's ass. The YNET news service has quoted him saying that instead of going to the beach, Gilad should have gone to the synagogue and recited the traditional prayer of deliverance.

You. Little. Shit.

Religion in Israel is not only big business, it's big politics too and of course right now there is no bigger potential political asset than Gilad Shalit and his family. I'm sure that any party would be happy to have Gilad's endorsement.  However, there are oodles of distance between wishing for Gilad's endorsement and openly, cravenly, seeking to cash in on his notoriety. How Gilad feels about religion is no one's business but his own, how he wishes to spend his time is a decision left only to him. And to you, Minister Meshulam Nahari I say this:


Have you no shame, sir? 

And lest we think that this was Horsey acting on his own, it turns out that he's been 'tasked' by Shas' Great Leader (that's the Leader's boss, in case you're wondering) with "bringing these people [the Shalits] closer to religion." 

Well, Meshulam. If you were to stand on your Leader's shoulders, and he were to stand on the Great Leader's shoulder in turn, you still wouldn't reach Gilad's ankles, so where exactly do you get off telling him what to do or to whom and what to pray for? Do the world a favor and after you apologize contritely to Gilad and his family take a step back and just STFU. OK?

_______________________________________________________________________

Mmmmh. That was kind of a long and very angry rant, wasn't it? Pity to waste it. If you, dear reader, would be so kind to help along I think that we could keep this train of thought going for a little longer in the comments section just below. 

If you disagree that Nahari is an idiot I would really like to know why. If you agree, could you help illustrate to the world just how dumb he is? 

Personally, I think that Nahari is so dumb that he's a taco short of a combination plate; a melon ball short of a fruit salad; and that if you moved his plate five inches to the left he'd starve to death.

Your turn.

File under: Man Bites Dog. Numskull CEO loses her job.

Remember the 450,000 I wrote about a couple of weeks ago?  I neglected to mention that what started the whole social protest thing was a consumer revolt against the high price of dairy products as symbolized by the small fortunes that families everywhere had to shell out for a small tub of cottage cheese.

In most of the world cottage cheese is nothing special.  Something that gets eaten once in a while, a staple of athletes and those that still harbor the delusion that dieting will make them thinner.  In Israel though cottage cheese is big business.  It is widely consumed and its price over the last few years simply sky rocketed.  And so, at some point early this summer people simply decided to boycott the cheese.  

The rest of that story is easily told: Consumer boycott - cheese companies ignore it - boycott grows bigger - cheese companies act even more arrogantly - boycott reaches crazy big proportions - cheese companies suddenly realize that maybe, just maybe, they should be paying attention - boycott becomes a total blackout on cottage cheese purchases - everyone involved in the production of cottage cheese blames someone else for the high prices.  And then everyone involved in the cottage cheese industry gets hammered to a pulp by the angry public, supermarkets are avoided, the cash cow of cottage cheese suddenly runs dry, PANIC, recriminations, special offers on cottage cheese.  Yada, yada, nada.

And in the middle of all of this is the Tnuva Dairy Company.  Originally a farmers' cooperative it grew and metastasized over the decades into a too-large, too-similar-to-a-monopoly company owned by foreign investors that recognized a good deal some time ago and bought it. To say that Tnuva and its head, Zehavit Cohen, acted arrogantly during the whole deal would be like saying the moon is made of cheese (of course the moon is not made of cheese, if it were Tnuva would have mined it by now).  Really, it would be difficult to convey how aloof, how disconnected, how creepy this numskull acted through this whole thing.  Think "let them eat (cheese) cake" and then multiply it by the number of udders in a rather large herd of cattle and you'll get some idea of how bad it was.  

So anyway, this morning the papers reported that Ms Cohen quit her job at Tnuva.  She's got other jobs at the investment firm that owns Tnuva, so don't feel too bad for her.  Still, she's out and that certainly counts as a victory.


(Note: Numskull blogger got Ms Cohen's name wrong in the original posting and corrected it.  Apologies to Ms Cohen for getting her name wrong in the first place.)