I was going to comment that this does sound like the Japanese (didn't want to sound racist.)

They typically go WAY overboard, the most ridiculously extravagent meals I have ever had have been on business trips to Japan.

I agree, this was bad PR. Adam Corolla, who is not particularly critical (I hit the button to his station when Air America is running it's interminable commercials in the morning) of politics did a funny bit on it this AM.

Yes, I do. I just laid it on a little heavier.

Or maybe, just maybe they could spend a week in a community that cannot feed themselves.

I implore those "leaders" to take their fancy food and 24 chefs with them, we wouldn't want them to get woozy, but for god's sakes, let them see poverty outside of a picture.

Maybe here at home, we can also ask for our politicians to start pumping their own gas, no they dont need to pay for it, taxpayers are more than happy.
I would just like them to get an idea of what it feels like to see your paycheck dissapear into your gas tank.

and your heritage or academic background allows you to say this?

Thanks for your commentary.

Don't worry about demwords. He's what you call a shadow, a right winger who follows you around, trying to do what censorship has failed to do regarding the military occupation/colonization of Palestinian lands and the oppression and brutality it takes to achieve it. He could be anything from an Israeli settler with a computer to a bigoted member of Little Green Footballs. But a liberal or progressive he and his ilk are not.

WTF are you talking about?!

I am a life long leftist and supporter of Israeli's roots as a self-determined Zionist/Socialist/Labor state. Likud is an abomination of socialist principles and I reject them.

When did I smear Israel as monolithic? Maybe you need reading glasses. My point is that it is exactly the opposite.

It is shergald who seems to paint all Israelis and Zionists as colonialists and oppressors with an amazing one dimensional perspective...and never, ever a diary concerning anything else.

In every discussion shergald dismisses historic facts as "Zionist propaganda."

Just for your information, a Zionist is someone who believes in a Jewish nation. It has unfortunately become a pejorative on the left and perverted by fundy christians who call themselves "Zionists." These were the same crazies that were accusing Jews of blood libel a generation ago.

So looking at your comment I still don't know the WTF you are commenting about.

...you don't have to depend on writing comedy for your livelihood.

Google his entries across the web in other sites and you will find that shergald has never once offered a diary on any issue other than the I/P conflict, and that his spin is vehemently anti-Israeli...
...and at times full of international jewish conspiracy crap.

I have tried to have dialogs with him, but he rejects historical facts as "propaganda." He doesn't even acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Jews from middle eastern countries were exiled from where they lived for centuries by arab governments in the 1950s. he has called this "propaganda.

He wouldn't even acknowledge historical fact because it doesn't fit his view as Israelis as bloodthirsty oppressors.

Apart from the false claim that Arab countries enthically cleansing Jews from their midst, there comes this one: that Palestinians were akin to Native Americans, and therefore, Americans have nothing to say about Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which still goes on today.

Demwords, you are just a propagandist of the right wing Zionist variety. Everyone has heard this nonsense many times. No, the Palestinians who lived in over 470 villages and towns in original Palestine were like not peripatetic Native Americans, if that makes a difference at all. Only the Bedouins in the Negev lived semi-nomadic lives, and they of course suffered the same fate, and are today still being pushed off their lands like the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.