Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Agudath Israel - “We have always explained that our concern was for the viability of yeshivas and shuls and summer camps,” He’s warbling a tune that we’re sick and tired of. Woe are them! Woe is us. “Child sexual abuse is so pervasive in this community that eliminating the SOL would financially bankrupt its religious institutions.


Zwiebel said that the organization still opposes a broad opening of the statute of limitations for civil cases. “We have always explained that our concern was for the viability of yeshivas and shuls and summer camps,” Zwiebel said. “We have said that to open up old claims in situations where it could even be that the administration has turned over five times since the incident has occurred… we’re opposed to that.”Read more: https://forward.com/news/362747/has-ultra-orthodox-group-agudath-israel-changed-its-tune-on-sex-abuse-lawsu/
Zwiebel said that the organization still opposes a broad opening of the statute of limitations for civil cases. “We have always explained that our concern was for the viability of yeshivas and shuls and summer camps,” Zwiebel said. “We have said that to open up old claims in situations where it could even be that the administration has turned over five times since the incident has occurred… we’re opposed to that.”Read more: https://forward.com/news/362747/has-ultra-orthodox-group-agudath-israel-changed-its-tune-on-sex-abuse-lawsu/

Zwiebel said that the organization still opposes a broad opening of the statute of limitations for civil cases. “We have always explained that our concern was for the viability of yeshivas and shuls and summer camps,” Zwiebel said. “We have said that to open up old claims in situations where it could even be that the administration has turned over five times since the incident has occurred… we’re opposed to that.”
According to its 2011 statement, Agudah’s ancillary concern is the financial trauma that schools and synagogues would suffer in the event of successful lawsuits brought against sexual predators and the institutions that tolerate them. As Rabbi Shafran wrote, “What Agudath Israel and Torah Umesorah [an Orthodox Jewish organization promoting Torah-based religious studies] must object to… is legislation that could literally destroy schools and houses of worship… Legislation that would do away with the statute of limitations completely, even if only for a one-year period, could subject schools and other vital institutions to ancient claims and capricious litigation, and place their existence in severe jeopardy.”

(Agudath Israel), Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, the Sultans of Self-Pity - Grifters gonna grift for their own self-preservation - Victims be damned!
 
Former President Bill Clinton during an interview on Sunday
Move over, Alec Baldwin. Bill Clinton does a much better impersonation of Donald Trump.

The hair is wrong but the air is right — self-righteous, self-pitying and suffused with anger that anyone would peddle a version of events less heroic than the one that he prefers. We’re shaming him about ancient groping when we should be showering him with eternal gratitude. And what about his pain?

“I left the White House $16 million in debt,” Clinton said in an interview that NBC’s “Today” aired on Monday, batting back questions about whether he had demonstrated sufficient contrition for converting a 22-year-old’s romantic idolization of him into sexual favors and setting off a sequence of events that savaged her. I don’t know what legal bills have to do with a moral ledger. But I can see that his fixations on money and martyrdom are intact.

Before cries of “false equivalence” shatter windows and startle forest creatures, I should make clear that I’d take Clinton over Trump in any role on any day. Trump is the Everest of delusion and depravity; Clinton ascended only a bit beyond base camp.

But at an honor-starved moment when most of our politicians are quicker to shirk responsibility than to shoulder it, I cringe at his evasions, elisions and rationalizations. Is he taking a cue from Trump or showing us where Trump got some of his moves and inspiration?



Granted, Clinton is venturing in front of cameras this week to discuss a book he wrote, not the book on him. So he’s frustrated and flustered.

And at 71, he’s not the talker or the actor that he used to be. Those eyes don’t mist as wetly. That lower lip isn’t as ripe for penitential chewing.

But hasn’t he or anyone around him, in response to the #MeToo movement, thought to prepare a script in which he says something brave and healing about his own mistakes, the lessons he learned and how all of us can apply and benefit from them?

He’s correct that he has gone through the motions of saying that he’s sorry for the Monica Lewinsky scandal before. But that preceded the fall of Harvey Weinstein, the recognition of sexual misconduct’s pervasiveness and the damning circus of Trump, whose allergy to apology gives Clinton a chance to model a more generous, better way. He sure as hell isn’t seizing it.

He grows visibly annoyed when journalists are so petty as to bring up the past and the pesky fact that he’s one of only two American presidents ever impeached. He raged when Craig Melvin of NBC News breached this territory. And he promptly turned into Trump.

He pointed fingers elsewhere, excusing his own erotic exploits by insinuating that his Oval Office forebears were no less randy. “Do you think President Kennedy should have resigned?” he challenged Melvin. “Do you believe President Johnson should have resigned?” Give Clinton a break. He was merely playing follow the libido.

He cited polls, outsourcing discernment and judgment to the crowds. “Two-thirds of the American people sided with me,” he told Melvin. They thought that Republicans’ impeachment of him went too far. But that doesn’t mean that he’s innocent — or virtuous.

He accused Melvin of sloppy journalism, though there wasn’t a scintilla of sloppiness in the portion of the interview that “Today” shared. “You, typically, have ignored gaping facts,” he said. I myself gaped — at the Trumpian magnitude of Clinton’s ire.

Those ignored facts were the most ignoble part of his rant. He mentioned how many women he had put in top jobs, presenting the roll call as a counterweight to — or absolution for? — the infidelities, the accusations of sexual harassment and Juanita Broaddrick’s claim of rape. Does Madeleine Albright’s ascent redeem Monica Lewinsky’s evisceration? Was Janet Reno a get-out-of-jail-free card?

What a queasy-making calculus. And what foreshadowing. Decades before many of Trump’s enablers edited out huge chunks of his behavior to rally around his policies, many of Clinton’s fans made a similar if less egregious bargain.

The Venn diagram of the 42nd and 45th presidents overlaps not only where hormones rage but also where entitlement roars. And that entitlement is antithetical to a world in which women get the respect and equality that they deserve and Americans get the leadership that we sorely need.

Clinton’s new book, a thriller written with James Patterson, is called “The President Is Missing.” That could also be a title for his book tour — and for a real-time chronicle of the Trump administration. If the president is supposed to be someone more focused on his obligations than on his reputation, on his duty than on his due, then we lack one now, and Clinton isn’t filling the void.

He’s warbling a tune that we’re sick and tired of. Woe is him. Woe is Trump.

I’d tweak the lyrics. Woe is us.