Should've gone with ubercon, with all the umlauts and lightening bolts. Would've impressed Bibby.

Or perhaps it was because Meshugah (sp) would be a bit too spot on?

It also, by the way, means "eastward," which is where the West Bank is. Might as well have spelled it ubercon, etc., etc.

The leading Yiddish language daily newspaper in New York was called Forward and it was resolutely leftist. It is now an English language weekly.

Lapid may have been so snarky, because the new party will eat into his base, the middle of the road, middle class, secular Israelis.

Robert, is that supposed to be a debunking of my point? The word in Yiddish--Forvarts--had nothing to do with the eastern-looking manifest destiny implied in the word "Kadima."

Rick sees a fascist whenever he looks at a conservative.

OJ sees a person seeing a fascist whenever he sees a liberal.

OJ, are you denying that the name of the party has that implication? Ask the next Israeli you see. I already have.

Rick:

Do I deny that Ariel Sharon, whose entire political program is about shrinking Zion to demographically defensible borders, chose a party name that was supposed to convey a quest for lebensraum?

Of course, the entire idea is just a figment of your self-loathing, post-Zionist imagination.

Israeli politics is a product of American consultants and the name will have been the product of focus groups, not of fascist dreams.

Who said anything about fascists?

And why aren't Jews who deny the just as self-consciously JEWISH and proud strains of both secular leftism and anti-Zionism--going back centuries in both cases--self-hating Jews?

Because seculars are, by definition, not Jews? Jews should hate secularists.

So Rick P. is arguing that the same man who bucked his party to pull out of Gaza, and is now leaving the party he helped found -- a party which btw would have absolutely no problem supporting Rick's delusionary "eastward" movement, is forming a new party to what absorb the west bank into Israel? Yikes.