Israel's Kadima Party In Trouble?

Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, has suffered a major stroke so soon after an earlier one that may leave him too paralyzed to remain in office. . . and that's a best-case scenario. Sharon had actaully been moving Israel toward consensus and peacemaking with the Palestinians after having been a belligerent warrior-leader over the issue of a Palestinian state; just as only Nixon could have opened a dialogue with the People's Republic of China, only Sharon could have created an opening toward the Palestinians, for there was nothing in his background to suggest that he was doing it out of starry-eyed idealism but rather out of the necessity of realpolitik. He formed a new party, Kadima (meaning "forward"), to take a centrist approach to Israel's issues and had taken top talent from both Likud and Labor to form the party. Once favored to win in the March elections by a landslide, Kadima's future is in doubt as Sharon himself lies in a medically induced coma. The only bright side to all of this is that even if Kadima comes up short at the polls without its leader, the peace process is indeed expected to move forward because it's really the only way to go.

Not for Pat Robertson, though. Citing Biblical verse that says the Promised Land is not for the Jews to divide and give away, Robertson said that God caused Sharon to have a stroke as punishment. Could God have cursed Robertson to say stupid things in public to embarrass himself? Robertson is making statements like these with the same frequency of Paul McCartney's drug arrests in the seventies. But then, at least we all knew Paul was smoking something. What's Robertson's excuse?