The Democrats and their media adjunct played the race card over and over in the campaign that concluded with the election of Donald Trump on November 8. They aren’t about to give it a rest now. They have done a superb job of devaluing the charge. One might reasonably infer that the equal treatment of men without regard to race means nothing to them. Rather, they treat the issue of racism as a charge to be invoked purely for instrumental purposes.
It worked in 1986 when Senator Sessions was nominated to the bench by President Reagan. Anticipating the possible nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions to President-elect Trump’s cabinet, Roll Call columnist Jonathan Allen reopened fire again a few days ago in “Jeff Sessions unfit for the cabinet.” For some reason Allen introduced him as “Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.” I suppose we should be grateful that Allen avoided a pun on the senator’s name using “secession.”
Now that Senator Sessions is to be nominated to serve as Attorney General in Trump’s cabinet, Tucker Carlson invited Allen to appear on his new FOX News show to discuss the column. (For “discuss,” read “cross-examine him on.”) Put to the test by Carlson, Allen proved to be firing blanks. At the Weekly Standard, Mark Hemingway introduced evidence somehow overlooked by Allen in his column.
Allen, incidentally, is coauthor with Amie Parnes of a biography of Hillary Clinton that even the New York Times’s Jodi Kantor found to be panegyrical (my word, not hers). “Their Clinton is the stock version, Democratic edition: gracious in defeat and fearless in negotiation…” Kantor observes toward the end of her review: “You can almost hear Philippe Reines, Clinton’s crafty public relations aide, parceling out anecdotes: Let’s give this one to the ‘HRC’ authors, and save the grade-A stuff — the private conversations with the president, an inside-her-head account of the bin Laden raid — for her own book.”
Paul Mirengoff went over the same ground in “Freakout by Elizabeth Warren.” I thought it worth revisiting with a focus on Allen’s column this morning.
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