If you need a good chuckle this morning, and I suspect you might, take a look at Jennifer Rubin’s WaPo blog, which is devoted, as it often is, to breathtaking pronouncements that American Jews are on the brink of abandoning Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, which will in turn trigger that president’s and that party’s final, much-deserved, plow-and-salt-the-earch destruction, forever and ever, amen. Rubin is often, perhaps even mostly, wrong, but almost never in doubt.
What makes today’s installment hilarious is that Rubin triumphantly cites as the unmistakable sign of impending disaster for Obama among Jews the defection of Marty Peretz, “maybe Obama’s most vocal Zionist backer in 2008.”
I don’t remember exactly when Marty turned on Obama, but it couldn’t have been much more than fifteen minutes after the Inauguration. By 2010, he was saying things like this:
Just about every principle of President Obama’s foreign policy has been exposed as, at best, stupid and, at worst, treacherous.
Yeah, someone with a jeweler’s eye might be able to discern the first stirrings of Peretz’ reluctant, more-in-sorrow-than-anger misgivings about the 44th president.
Fact is, before he mercifully sold his share of The New Republic to Chris Hughes, regular TNR readers (and indeed, TNR writers) knew each time we clicked onto the magazine’s site we might be treated to a fresh Peretz screed about the perfidy of the Obama administration. Yet Rubin hails as big, political momentous news an interview with Marty by the Wall Street Journal that pretty much sounds to me like every other recent Peretz pronouncement on Obama’s Middle East policies.
I wonder what’s next for Rubin? The revelation that former Clinton advisor Dick Morris doesn’t like Obama? Wait, stop the presses: Zell Miller has left the Democratic Party! And I hear a rumor that staunch southern Democratic senator Strom Thurmond might be on the edge of flipping to the GOP. The rout is on. Romney will sweep all 50 states, and D.C., in revolt against African-American Democrat Vincent Gray, could be a real nail-biter on November 6.
