BAR KOKHBA RIDING AGAIN!
Bar Kokhba Rode to Victory on Promises,
But Fell off His Horse after He was Victorious,
And had a Name change by His People to Bar Kozeba!
You can Count on a repeat Performance by Barack Obama!
A Strong Self-Esteem Generation leaves little Room for the Lord!
March 4, 2008
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Simon bar Kokhba (transliterated as Bar Kokhva or Bar Kochba) was the Jewish leader who led what is known as Bar Kokhba’s revolt against the Roman Empire in 132 CE, establishing an independent Jewish state of Israel which he ruled for three years as Nasi (“prince,” or “president”). His state was conquered by the Romans in 135 CE following a two-year war. He became the last king of Israel in history.
Originally named Simon ben Kosba (or ben Koziba), he was given the surname Bar Kokhba (Aramaic for “Son of a Star”, referring to the Star Prophecy of Numbers 24:17, “A star has shot off Jacob”) by his contemporary, the Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva.
After the failure of the revolt, many, including rabbinical writers, referred to Simon bar Kokhba as “Simon bar Kozeba” (“Son of the lie”).
End Wikipedia Reference
Numbers 24:17 – I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth. (For Full Exposition of This Scripture See Archive Prophecy Update Numbers 149A, 149B, and 150A)
Bar Kokhba was “A Star shot off Jacob (Israel) who, after his failure to keep his promises, became known as the “Son of the lie.” I believe the same will be true of Obama if he is victorious in the November election aga
inst the Republican President.
I have read after and watched Charles Krauthammer on Television for years. I respect his opinion on world events more than any other writer in America. I hope you will seriously consider his article extracted from the Chicago Tribune.
As a part of the American Education Community for many years as a certified teacher in it, I have always been opposed to the great emphasis placed on constantly attempting to pound into our youth what is known as a “strong self-esteem” image. It is really a measure of the degree of self-confidence a person possesses internally.
I do agree with the second article from the Jerusalem Post by Abraham Katsman. The Obana movement is a cult of “self-esteem” followers created by the American Education System. It is very difficult for those who strongly develop it to see any need for repentance toward God. And, oddly enough, those in Obama’s movement who possess it are pressing hard for change in others, not in themselves.
Even if you disagree with what you just read, please take the time to read both articles. This country is being led down a garden path to chaos and few realize it.
Begin chicagotribune.com Article
Commentary
Obama spell mesmerizing but empty
Candidate’s appeal takes on cult quality
Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post Writers Group
February 18, 2008
WASHINGTON
There’s no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionary nouns — boat, shoe, clock — by charging advert isers zillions to be l
isted whenever the word is searched.
And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.
This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity — salvation — for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a “salvational fervor” and “idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria.”
“We are the hope of the future,” sayeth Obama. We can “remake this world as it should be.” Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country — nay, we can become “a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest.”
And believe they do. After eight straight victories, Obama is near to rendering moot all the post-Super Tuesday fretting about a deadlocked convention with unelected superdelegates deciding the nominee. Unless Hillary Clinton can somehow do in Ohio and Texas on March 4 what Rudy Giuliani proved is almost impossible to do — maintain a big-state firewall after an unrelenting string of smaller defeats — the superdelegates will flock to Obama.
Hope will have carried the day.
Interestingly, Obama has been able to win these electoral victories and dazzle crowds in one new jurisdiction after another, even as his mesmeric power has begun to arouse skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media.
ABC’s Jake Tapper notes the “Helter-Skelter cultish qualities” of “Obama worshipers,” what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls “the Cult of Obama.” Obama’s Super Tuesday victory speech was a classic of the genre. Its effect was electric, eliciting a rhythmic fervor in the audience — to such rhetorical nonsense as “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek.”
That was too much for Time’s Joe Klein.
“There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism,” he wrote. “The message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.”
You might dismiss The New York Times’ Paul Krugman’s complaint that “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality” as hyperbole. Until you hear Chris Matthews, who no longer has the excuse of youth, react to Obama’s Potomac primary victory speech with “My, I felt this thrill going up my leg.” When his MSNBC co-hosts tried to bail him out, he refused to recant. Not surprising for an acolyte who said that Obama “comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament.”
I’ve seen only one similar national swoon. As a teenager growing up in Canada, I witnessed a charismatic law professor go from obscurity to justice minister to prime minister, carried on a wave of what was called Trudeaumania.
But even there, the object of his countrymen’s unrestrained affections was no blank slate. Pierre Trudeau was already a serious intellectual who had written and thought and lectured long about the nature and future of his country.
Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He’s going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can’t possibly redeem.
Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs.
Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war — with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.
Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening.
It will be rude.
Begin Jerusalem Post Article
Obama-mania and cult of self-esteem
Abraham Katsman, THE JERUSALEM POST
March 3, 2008
The public response to our previous articles on this Site has been overwhelming. Among the more striking contributions we have received is the following insightful analysis of the Obama phenomenon by our friend and fellow Board member, Abraham Katsman. We welcome serious contributions from RAI members and may, on occasion, publish them here.
Marc Zell and Kory Bardash.
The phenomenon of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign is astounding. He has packaged policies largely indistinguishable from those of John Edwards or Hillary Clinton in airy platitudes about “change” and “hope,” and suddenly he’s a rock star – complete with swooning and fainting fans at his huge campaign rallies. He can do no wrong, applauded wildly for everything from interrupting his speeches to give out water bottles to fans overcome by his presence to-no joke-blowing his nose onstage.
His spokesmen on national TV are flummoxed when asked to identify a single accomplishment in Obama’s political career, yet it doesn’t make the slightest dent in his support. Conventional wisdom says this adulation and intensity level cannot last. But conventional wisdom may be missing something fundamental.
His evident charisma aside, a clue to the source of Obama-mania may be found in the demographics of his support: he is far and away the favorite of younger voters and college students, routinely winning over 75% of the votes of Democrats under 30. Obama has tapped into is the first generation educated in schools focused on “self-esteem.” Now, the products of self-esteem education have come of political age in substantial numbers, perhaps with profound implications for this and future elections.
For the past two decades, America’s educational establishment has stressed the inculcation of self-esteem as the supreme educational goal. Self-respect – the product of struggle and achievement – is out; self-esteem – the entitlement tofeel great self-worth regardless of actual accomplishment – is in.
Strict correction of misspelling or of wrong answers to math problems is discouraged. Competition is a big no-no: many youth sports leagues forbid keeping score, lest any child’s self-esteem suffer from the indignity of losing. Posting honor rolls is discouraged, as it might injure the self-esteem of those who did not make the grade.
Grade inflation is rampant in schools: according to one recent study, about half of today’s college freshman had an “A” average in high school compared to under 20% in the late 1960s, even though SAT scores have tanked over the same period. The focus on self-esteem has, in a sense, been a huge success.
For example, American students have very high scores when asked to assess how good they are at math. Unfortunately, they have low/mediocre scores in actual math performance, routinely being outscored by students in most other developed countries.
Inevitably, however, such over-indulgence of students leads to increased narcissism, self-absorption, and sense of entitlement.
Those with self-esteem disproportionate to their achievement tend to be less willing to take responsibility for their own failures, shortcomings, or bad behavior.
Coddled children raised to believe that any dream is not only attainable, but an entitlement granted regardless of actual effort and accomplishment are increasingly growing into depressed and stressed young adults as they rudely discover that the post-school world is not so cooperative and doesn’t really care about their dreams or their feelings.
In the real world, they keep score.
But not in Obama-world. That is a world of Hope; of Action; of Change You Can Believe In; of Yes We Can; of Coming Together; of Moving Forward Into the Future, and of other banalities that can mean absolutely anything to anyone. “I am asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations.” It’s all about us and our good feelings of youth and unity. Nothing so difficult as spelling out tough policy choices or arguing about a particular program’s merits or ramifications is involved.
Why, that might instigate analysis, or arguments about right or wrong answers, which would divide us; that would interfere with our focus on how good we feel about ourselves and the restoration of the soft, fuzzy future which once belonged to us. “I intend to lead the party of tomorrow, not the party of yesterday.” Unification for “change,” “hope,” and “the future” is perfect for Obama’s young, esteem-fueled supporters: just as their academic self-esteem was divorced from actual achievement, and their competitive self-esteem was insulated from scorekeeping, Obama-supplied political self-esteem is disconnected from any actual opinions, policies or analyses.
Notably, Obama’s rhetorical flourishes never involve policy choices or the big, bad, complex world outside the campaign rally. “In the face of change lies hope, and in the face of hope lies change.” Brilliant! Dreams are restored!
We’re all 14 again! Just close our eyes and hope a perfect future into existence. Problems with the genocidal Iranian neighborhood bully? Simple, we’ll use our seventh-grade conflict resolution methods on Ahmedinijad.
Those pesky student loans and subprime mortgages we took out? No worries, Obama will make someone else pay for them. Israeli-Arab conflicts and daily missile barrages on civilian populations
? No problem, everyone just come together -Obama’s very presence will melt hardened hearts and pacify Hamas and Hizbullah. There. Problems solved. No need to think about all that anymore.
Now, let’s focus again on us, brimming anew with all the virtue and youthful innocence and self-love in which we were immersed in our school years, as newly bestowed by Obama’s incantations. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!” What about actually defining a political course to follow, or weighing the specific national security implications of competing approaches to the Middle East and Islamic terror? How irrelevant to our feelings. How yesterday. How… Republican. We’d much rather just “believe in ourselves to do the things we believe we can do!” We are the future. We can do anything. This feels great. Self-esteem rocks.
One gets the distinct impression that these Obama supporters really couldn’t care less what policies he advocates. How many of them can explain how his prescription for Iraq differs from Hillary Clinton’s? Or how his fiscal policy differs from John McCain’s? Would it matter to these supporters if each of those policies were the opposite? Would they even notice?
Which brings us to the question of sustainability – will the movement last? It certainly could. By bolstering voters’ sense of self-satisfaction, Obama has unleashed a wave of heady feelings of unity, purpose, and enthusiasm – but all for the man who makes them feel this way, not for any particular policies. No one, after all, is fainting at the thought of Obama’s position on health insurance. Thus, nothing any opponent can say or do will likely get between Obama and his worshipers to undermine those feelings. And if that’s not enough to carry him to the White House this year, keep in mind 2012, when America’s self-esteem obsessed schools will have churned out four more graduating classes of swooning Obama voters.
Abe Katsman, an attorney, has worked on several political campaigns, including Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s first successful run for mayor and President Bush’s 2004 re-election. He will be assuming a major role in Republicans Abroad Israel.
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