The Democrat delegates to their convention had earlier this week quietly removed language from their party platform that recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and also voted to expunge the phrase "God-given potential" from their document, presumably because a lot of delegates don't want to give the impression that they might think God is in some way relevant to our public life.
Their seeming willingness to stick their thumb in the eye of both Jewish and Christian voters won them considerable opprobrium so on Wednesday the leadership, apparently at the urging of President Obama who foresaw a needless disaster in the making, moved to have the language restored. The voice vote on restoring the language was inconclusive (it required a 2/3 vote) so on the third attempt the motion was declared passed despite the fact that the nays seemed to actually outnumber the yays, and the delegates erupted in a chorus of boos at the undemocratic manner in which the change was rammed through despite the wishes of the delegates.
This presented the nation with the charming spectacle of a substantial number of liberal Democrats voting "no" on both our Israeli allies' right to decide where they will have their own capital and on a tacit recognition in their platform of the existence of God. I'm sure it's not the picture that the Democrats wanted, but it shows the extent to which the party has become the party of secularism and the party of indifference to Jewish concerns.
Here's a video of the debacle:
Incidentally, President Obama has in the past declared that the question of the Israeli capital should be a matter of negotiations with the Palestinians. It's not his position, at least not his public position, that Jerusalem is, or should be, recognized as the Israeli capital.
Yahoo has the story here.
Having spent much of the first two days demanding that women have the right to a tax-payer funded abortion at any stage of a pregnancy and demanding, too, that the Republicans help them raise taxes, it seems that the Democrats are happy now to present themselves to the nation as the party of death, taxes, and secularism.
Sounds like an electoral trifecta.
