Bernie Madoff

If there were any justice in the world, he'd have this page all to himself.  Really, can you think of anyone since Roy Cohn who has done more to shame his fellow Jews?  After robbing them blind? And it was all so easy; apparently Jews are also suckers for the old canard about how clever they are with money. It was a pitch so easy a former tie salesman could score with it. Now it turns out that Bernie, unlike some once-honest Ponzi artists who got in over their heads, never, from Day One, invested his clients' money. It was a scam from the get-go. What we don't know is what the angle was: Bernie never charged management fees, and he made plenty of money legally (we think) with his broker-dealer business. So where's the gelt? Not the $50 billion which was no more real than August Melmotte's railroad, but the much smaller amount actually invested. It's still billions, and we don't see it in his houses or yachts or around his wife's neck. Either it's buried in a Liechtenstein bank vault or Bernie spent it all paying back the early investors.  That would be the final irony: the greatest thief in history forgot to save some for himself.
 

Avigdor Lieberman

Israel is having yet another election and the United States is careful not to be seen as involving itself in Israeli politics. The question is why the Israelis have to be involved in Israeli politics. Haven't they suffered enough? Especially with candidates like Russian emigré Avigdor Lieberman. He's apparently doing quite well with his platform of paving the West Bank with settlements and, in "exchange," driving Israeli citizens of Arab ancestry out of the country. Perhaps he's modeling his platform after his former fellow countrymen Joe Stalin, who drove Germans out of their Volga homes, not to mention once Teutonic cities like Danzig, Koenigsberg, and Breslau. Hell, nobody stopped him.  You'd like to think that any leading Israeli politician would represent a higher stage of moral development than the second-greatest butcher in the history of the world. You'd like to think that, but you'd be wrong.

Rep. Eric Cantor

What is it about Jewish Republicans from Virginia? First George "Macaca" Allen, now this guy. Eric's rapidly becoming the public face of the Republican Party, following the self-destruction of former stalwarts like George Bush, Tom "the Exterminator" DeLay and Ted "Put the sofa over there" Stevens. Yet Eric faithfully channels all their bankrupt ideas, like tax cuts for the rich as the universal nostrum for all economic woes and the unraveling of what's left of the social safety net. We toiled as strangers in the land of Egypt; as for those who toil today (if they're lucky) in poverty, unable to afford health care or decent housing, Eric's got some good advice: get back to building Pithom and Ramses, you're lucky to have a job. As for helping the unfortunate mitigate the effects of the Bush Depression with stimulus spending on social welfare programs, Eric knows the best stimulus of all: starvation.