OBAMA IN OKINAWA

Here’s a question for any Jew who voted for Obama:  how big a schmuck do you feel you are now?

No doubt as much as any Japanese who feels they’re an ahou for supporting Yukio Hatoyama.

Yukio Hatoyama is a weird guy, so weird his countrymen have nicknamed him "E.T.", the Extraterrestrial.  His wife Miyuki is even weirder. 

In her autobiography, Very Strange Things I’ve Encountered, she describes how she was abducted by space aliens and taken in their spaceship to Venus, which was "very beautiful and green."  She also talks about her friendship with Tom Cruise – in a former lifetime when he was Japanese.

What possessed the people of Japan to, 8½  months ago (Sept. 2009), select Yukio Hatoyama as their Prime Minister is a mystery for historians to unravel.  He screwed things up so badly with such a massive mix of incompetence and corruption that yesterday (6/02) he resigned.

The excuse he gave was Okinawa.  Yes, Okinawa.  The Ryukus form an island chain (of which Okinawa is the main island) stretching 600 miles from Japan to Taiwan enclosing the East China Sea.  Its aboriginal peoples formed the Ryukuan Kingdom which was a tributary of Ming China until made a tributary of Tokugawa Japan in 1609.  The islands were formally annexed by Meiji Japan in 1879.

The Japanese are among the most racist folks on the planet.  Their word gaijin is said to mean "foreigner" or "non-Japanese," but a more accurate translation would be the N-word.  All of us are ni**ers to the Japanese, and that includes Ryukuans and Okinawans who to this day are not considered real Nipponese (i.e., real humans).

After World War II, the Ryukyus were governed by the US military under USCAR (United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyus) for 27 years.  In 1972, the Ryukyus were returned to Japanese rule in exchange for the US to maintain a significant military presence (including the positioning of nuclear weapons) in the islands, primarily on Okinawa.

There are some 40,000 US military and employed civilian personnel in Japan today.  The 3^rd Marine Expeditionary Force of 17,000 is based in Okinawa, 4,000 of whom are at the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station.  Okinawans are continually embroiled in pro- and anti-Futenma debates, some wanting it to stay to help their economy, others want it moved.

The latter somehow got Hatoyama to side with them and promise Futenma would be relocated to a more remote part of the island.  When this proved to be too complicated, expensive, and controversial (remember those who wanted it to stay), Hatoyama gave one of those tearful Japanese exercises of remorseful apology and resigned. 

No one in mainland Japan really cares where some US Marines are stationed in Okinawa.  No one, certainly, in Hatoyama’s party – the DJP (Democratic Party of Japan) – which won a landslide victory that sent the long-ruling LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) into the political wilderness last September.

What DJP politicians care about is preserving their power – which they look sure to lose in the upcoming elections next month, July 11.  Heading towards electoral disaster, they threw Hatoyama under the bus.  Okinawa is just the cover story.

Now – do you know of any other political party that won a landslide victory in their country’s last election, and is now staring Electoral Armageddon in the face because of the gargantuan incompetence, corruption, and unpopularity of its leader?  Any party, any leader, any country come to mind?

Yesterday, shortly after the Prime Minister of Japan resigned in Tokyo, the President of the United States gave a speech in Pittsburgh.  Democrat Senators and Congressmen were invited, and all refused to come, save for politically dead Arlen Specter.  They didn’t want to be associated with the horrific incompetence the leader of their party is demonstrating regarding the Gulf Oil Spill, or decreasing unemployment (now over 10%) for Pennsylvanians.

It’s one thing for Republican House leader John Boehner to (accurately) point out how Zero is diminishing the presidency.  It’s quite another for Democrats to implicitly agree.

At the same time Zero was giving his diminishing-the-presidency speech in Pittsburgh yesterday, pro-Israel Democrats were widening the rift between him and them.  The contrast between Zero and his hated predecessor is acutely painful for them.

As Zero refuses to solidly support Israel and denounce Turkey for a provocation of war, pro-Israel Dems (of which there is a considerable number) are finally facing the reality that he is the most frighteningly anti-Israel, pro-Moslem/Palestinian president in history.

Then they compare that reality to George Bush saying on Tuesday (6/01) that, sure, he had 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded, and he’d "do it again," no apologies.  Bush is a hero, Zero is a zero.  For Dems, that hurts so much they feel like schmucks.

Yet the doom they face in November is going to hurt a lot more, and they know it.  So will they throw Zero under the bus, give him the Hatoyama in Okinawa treatment?

No, not yet.  It’s too soon, too many of them are still living along that river in Egypt.  But it’s not too soon to begin suggesting that if they want to save their political derrières, they need to start publicly calling for Zero to resign the presidency.

Ask them to just imagine the headlines if they – a Democrat, not a Republican – called for the president to resign.  Tell them it’s their path to political survival, the only way to survive the Republican Tsunami of November.

I’d like to call upon the TeaPartyers to make this a priority.  If they got only a handful of Democrats, incumbents or candidates, to do this it would be a headlining-garnering coup.  More importantly, it would set up a real resignation campaign after November.

There will be no widespread call among Dems for Zero’s resignation before November.  The most we could hope for is whispers, maybe a shout or two.  But after November and surveying the wreckage, more and more Dems will be receptive to the message that they’ve got to Nixonize Obama or their party will simply not survive 2012.

One example:  while this year, 18 Rep and 18 Dem seats are up in the Senate, 9 Rep and 27 Dem seats are up in 2012.  The math alone, coupled with the likely 8 or more seats the Reps will win in November, favors a massive shift of power to the GOP in the Senate.

America cannot afford two more years of President Zero.  The world cannot afford it.  Israel certainly can’t.  The odds of a gigantic, possibly nuclear, war in the Middle East are ratcheting up by the day due to Zero’s lethal combination of incompetence and anti-Semitism.

What the Dems need to realize is that their party can’t afford it.  And we must realize that, while Joe Biden may be a liberal buffoon, he neither hates Israel nor his own country.  We should prefer Biden in a heartbeat over Zero. 

Thus, we need to promote demands for Zero’s resignation now, and to promote them among Democrats, as a prelude to a full-court press after November.

Recall that it was Republican, not Democrat, demands (led by Senator Howard Baker) that resulted in Nixon’s resignation.  Obama must be the Democrats’ Nixon.  It’s in the Democrats’ own interests that he be.  Let’s make sure they learn this lesson in November, the lesson of Obama in Okinawa.