Jimmy, do you need a lift from the airport?

I just read that Jimmy Carter is coming to Israel for a "private" visit and I am trying to figure out what that means.

Is he here for vacation? Understandable. We have some of the best sightseeing and ancient ruins in the world. The beaches are great in Israel and so are the restaurants. And in June, the weather is still tolerable to those uninitiated in Middle Eastern summers.

Or is he here to visit friends? Now if that is the case, I find it baffling. Who, in the State of Israel, could possibly be a friend of the anti-Israel, ex-president of the United States? I am sure there are a few groupies who simply enjoy the company of anyone now or previously famous, but JIMMY CARTER??? Ewwwwwwwwwwww.

And here is another question: If Jimmy Carter is coming on a private visit, who is picking him up at the airport? I am thinking about driving out to Ben Gurion Airport on the off chance that he exits the plane and no one is there to meet him. Sometimes you just have to create your own opportunities.

If that happens, then I am going to walk over to him and tell him in my clean Canadian English, that I would be happy to drive him wherever he wants to go. And, I will tell him, don't worry, I'm Canadian. There is nothing more innocuous to an American than the word "Canadian." And then I am going to help him get his bags to my car.

That's when the fun will begin. Once we are happily settled in the car, with the doors locked, speeding down the highway, I am going to start to tell him what I think of him and his anti-Israel views -- which isn't much. I am going to give him a brief history lesson starting prior to the original Testament. I am then going to explain to him that I understand his anti-semitism. It's part of his culture and heritage, and that he would have had to have been a very strong-willed individual to have departed from that misguided thinking and use his own head and eyes to see the facts on the ground.

I am going to mention how nothing of peace-related value has happened since his Camp David Accords. Granted, we are not at war with Egypt, but it is a very cooooool peace. And I would particularly like to thank him for that book he wrote in 2006 to explain the facts-on-the-ground in the Middle East to Americans. Here's a particularly nice little snippet from the book:

"Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land."

Well, thanks for setting the record straight for 325 million Americans. Apparently you forgot to write the chapter about the Arab's war of attrition; terrorist bombings as one approach to peacemaking; and the Arabs hateful indoctrination of innocent Arab children against Israel. I could go on but I don't want to get bogged down on any one point, when I only have a limited amount of time.

Finally, I will thank him for calling Israel an apartheid state. I am so sorry that he missed all the important modern history that led to the need for a Jewish state. Jimmy, I am pretty sure you would have loved Treblinka. I hear it was a great vacation spot as well. Particularly for serious dieters.

And by the way, Jews do dominate Israel. It's true. On a piece of land that takes up less than .0001 % of the available earth's surface. And on top of that, Arabs in Israel have more freedom than Arabs living in other Middle Eastern countries. Just ask the Bruqa-clad Arab woman who almost reversed her car into me at the mall last week. At least in Israel she can drive, she can vote and she has many other rights that you so conveniently ignored in your educational, tell-all book. Show me an example of that anywhere else in the Middle East and I will show you a pig that flies!

Unfortunately, then, my time will be up and I will have to drop him off at the home of his old and good friend, Israel's president Shimon Peres. I would have dropped him off at Judas Iscariot's house, but I don't know where he lives. However, Peres, Iscariot. Pretty much the same thing.

I hope Shimon doesn't invite me in because I will have to decline -- I have to get going if I want to get to the big Obama-Mubarak love-in party in Egypt on time.

And now it's time for the real Israeli elections to begin

I hate to say I told you, but I did. Way back in February. The day after the sort-of-democratic Israeli national elections.

Finally, after thousands of miles of ink and electronic coverage, the real Israeli elections are taking place. And they have absolutely nothing to do with the voting public.

Let's review for a minute. The Phase 1 elections took place on a rainy day in February. The results were neck-in-neck between Tzipi Livni and Bibi Netanyahu. Tzipi had the slightest bit of a majority, but she did not have enough votes to get her a majority government. Not even close.

That's when Phase 2 of the election began. Livni and Netanyahu both tried to convince the leaders of the other parties to join them in a variety of coalition arrangements. Livni, having not planned well for that eventuality, was left out in the cold and essentially politically out-manouevered by the more experienced Netanyahu. He already had commitments form several of the small right-wing parties that they would join a Likud (Netanyahu's party) coalition in the event that there was a need for such a coalition.

Now Netanyahu could have been satisfied with that. He had enough mandates to achieve the necessary 65 required to form a majority-sort of government. But.... Netanyahu being Netanyahu, this apparently wasn't to be. That's when he set out to woo pretty much anyone of any political stripe -- he wants to create a really representative government. Isn't that what elections are supposed to do? Government for the people, by the people?

I am not going to comment on his actual choices because I am not in the mood to sit here for a week typing all the possible machinations. Let's just say that at this point pretty much everyone is angry at him.

The most remarkable part of the process for me is that he didn't receive enough mandates to even win the first round of the elections, yet he appears to be the new prime minister elect. Don't get me wrong, I am not particularly unhappy with that, but I don't get it. Don't the numbers actually mean something? (hahaha... soon as I wrote that I realized how funny it was.)

So here we are more than a month after what could have been a real election and Netanyhu has gone to the figure-head president, Shimon Peres, to ask for more time to form a coalition government. Of course he is going to get that time because the alternative is to go back to the polls and that is not going to make tax-payers very happy and it is going to even further destroy Israel's credibility in the democratic western world. This makes the US's dangling chad issue look like child's play.

I can't help but wonder what will happen if heaven-forbid there is some sort of catastrophe (it can happen here; this isn't Canada) in Israel and no one is truly in charge. We really need someone to mind the store now. Even I am ready to give up on democracy if it means we can have closure.