As I’ve already noted, the New York Times has called upon Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to save “us” and himself by somehow leveraging his “sterling reputation” to make the Trump Administration’s ax murder/defenestration of now former FBI Director James Comey not look like the gaping wound in the body politic that it so obviously is. Now Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank is adding his voice to the choir, “Rod Rosenstein has one chance to save himself”. Well, as we Virginia-bred Episcopalians are prone to say, fuhgeddabouditt, because Rod Rosenstein is already and irrevocably a shande fur di goyim, by his own hand.
I hate to go out on a limb, particularly a possibly anti-Semitic one, but I will make bold to say that the editorial pages of both the Times and the Post are heavily Jewish—specifically, neocon Jewish—skewing usually but not invariably Democratic on domestic issues but reliably “firm” on foreign ones–almost always looking for a fight, from Ukraine to Cuba, and deeply suspicious of the effete Mr. Obama.1
Which is also why I’m suspecting/implying that editorial page folks at both papers are hoping that Mr. Rosenstein will somehow save us because, well, because he’s Jewish. Jewish Mr. Rosenstein may well be, but he’s also a shande fur di goyim (loosely translated from the Yiddish: “How the gentiles must be laughing at us!”) Let’s consider Mr. Rosenstein’s record:
- His three-page memo is an intellectual disgrace.
- He wrote it at the request of President Trump, so as to have an excuse for making a decision Trump had already made.
- Mr. Rosenstein didn’t believe in his own memo.
- In the memo, while making the (utterly fraudulent) case for removing Comey from office, Mr. Rosenstein carefully refrained from actually recommending Comey’s removal.
All of these points, and more, are made, to crushing effect, in Benjamin Wittes’ piece, available at Lawfare, “Et Tu Rod? Why The Deputy Attorney General Must Resign”. Sorry, New York Times, and, sorry, Dana Milbank. Mr. Rosenstein can’t save us, because he didn’t save himself.
Afterwords
Since I am, of course, not fluent in Yiddish, I checked a number of sites for the “correct” spelling of the phrase. Well, there are several versions, and the whole subject of Yiddish is, unsurprisingly enough, quite “controversial”.
- I’ve complained about both papers (the Times here and the Post here), voicing the frequent suspicion that their “real” motivation is the fear that if the U.S. decides that the Cold War is, you know, actually over, and that we don’t need to spend $600 billion a year on defense (at a minimum!), then we also might forget about defending Israel. Complicating matters for conspiracy theorists like myself: most Jews are not neocons (most of them are secular humanists like me and are far to the left of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likudist crowd in Tel Aviv), while most “America is the Indispensable Nation” chest-thumpers, ranging in fury from Hillary Clinton to Dick Cheney, are so not Jewish. ↩︎
