{"id":197908,"date":"2008-01-03T00:04:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-03T05:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/01\/03\/tom-lantos-retiring\/"},"modified":"2008-01-03T00:04:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-03T05:04:00","slug":"tom-lantos-retiring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/01\/03\/tom-lantos-retiring\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Lantos Retiring"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lantos.house.gov\/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=view&amp;id=483&amp;Itemid=1\">reason given is esophageal cancer<\/a>, but doubtless the challenge of Jackie Speier in the primary, where she was leading by 30% in the polls, had a lot to do with that too.<\/p>\n<p>It comes down to the fact that he was a very strong hawk on Iraq, and any Iraq Hawk deserves to lose their seat.<\/p>\n<p>FWIW, part of his statement is very disingenuous.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family, and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a Member of Congress. I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Of course, Leon Blum (France), Bruno Kreisky (Austria), both of whom were holocaust survivors and not in America, and, of course, Menachem Begin in Israel were all PMs and Holocaust survivors. (H\/t The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.samefacts.com\/archives\/political_science_\/2008\/01\/american_democracy_not_a_world_leader.php\">Reality Based Community<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>This kind of ahistorical American exceptionalism is <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">de regeur<\/span> in US politics, and dangerous, because it leads to things like invading Iraq.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The reason given is esophageal cancer, but doubtless the challenge of Jackie Speier in the primary, where she was leading by 30% in the polls, had a lot to do with that too. It comes down to the fact that he was a very strong hawk on Iraq, and any Iraq Hawk deserves to lose &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,1000,1063,978,1098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-elections","category-iraq","category-politics","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197908"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197908\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}