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or have I just stumbled across yet another full-of-shit conservative?
That about sums up Dennis Prager. He's the male counterpart to neo-pseudo-quasi-orthodox Laura Schlessinger.
He has a radio talk show too, neocon before it was entirely fashionable, and he gets off on pretending to be a rabbi. (It has far higher currency with nonreligious Americans than pretending to be a Christian clergyperson, for explanations see under Radiovangelism and Televangelism and Father Coughlin.) What always bugs me about Prager is that for him it's really about settling scores with other American Jews who happen to be smarter/wiser/funnier and certainly more liberal and influential than himself. (He was a paragon for a while in the Nineties and then imploded with accumulated hypocrisies and stupidities.) It's sort of a modern continuation of the old battle between the 'Ashkenazi' Jews of Poland and the Jewish Pale and the 'German'/Rheinland Jews that used to rage in their 'overlap zone' cities like Berlin, Prague, and Vienna. (Liberal/intellectual-academic/Modern/minimally observant vs Conservative/learned-dogmatic/semi-Enlightened/traditionalistic, with each side considering the other a corruption of the heritage.) (Today it mostly takes the form of the 'Reformaservative' vs 'Conservadox' argument, with their progressive and neocon politics in U.S, political arena.)
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