Among the sillier postmortems of the election of 2016 is an article that ran this morning at Mother Jones titled “Time to Fight Like Hell.” The author, Clara Jeffrey, opens with a lament over what the election might have been, then turns to a grim catalog of what is to be instead:
Decades from now, when the election of 2016 is distilled to its essence, what will that be? Many hoped the central lesson would be a shattered glass ceiling and a cementing of the Obama legacy. An expansion of rights and tolerance.
Instead, a small electoral majority chose a candidate who openly embraced bigotry, who slurred war heroes and mocked the disabled, who bragged of sexual assault, who said he’d roll back the protections of a free press, who was cheered on by white supremacists, who said he’d upend our alliances and the world’s long-overdue climate deal, and who is ignorant and cavalier about the basics of safeguarding a nuclear arsenal.
There’s plenty in that lede that can be picked apart. The author, for example, invites the reader to fret over a locker room boast made by the president-elect, which was leaked during the campaign (pause: It was leaked; somebody call Congress!) Was she as concerned, if not more so, about the well-documented extramarital sexual encounters of a previous Democratic president, or is that asking too much? She also fumes about the new guy rolling back the “protections of a free press,” either forgetting or ignoring that the outgoing president was attacked by the New York Times (New York Times!) editorial board for his unprecedented lack of transparency.
But the money part of the article comes in the next paragraph, which lists the groups that will be most adversely affected by this change:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
There is no way to sugarcoat it. The election of Donald Trump is a brutal affront to women, people of color, Jews and Muslims, and all who value kindness and tolerance.
Yeah, the title “Time to Fight Like Hell” drips with kindness and tolerance. But did you notice the one item in that list that is unlike the others?
Jews?
Since when do Democrats give a rat’s hiney about Jews? Jews are not a protected class in America. When’s the last time you recall a liberal saying it’s high time America had its first Jewish president?
Certainly, if any Democrat at all said it, it wasn’t Barack Obama. Sure, Obama once declared himself to be “the first Jewish president,” but that was in response to accusations that he was the most anti-Semitic president in the nation’s history. In an insider book by former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, the author provided “an incredibly detailed account of the root hostility of the Obama administration toward the Jewish state.”
In December 2015, Obama went through the motions of lighting Chanukah candles at the White House, but he tarnished the ceremony by inviting a reform rabbi to deliver remarks calling for justice for the Palestinians and invoke the Muslim deity Allah.
