Are We Disgusted Enough Yet?

The Creature is going to go to Pittsburgh tomorrow and pretend that he cares. I won’t be watching. Be sure to read the letter to Trump from Pittsburgh Jewish leaders.  Newsweek reports that Ivanka and Mr. Ivanka had to persuade Trump to explicitly denounce anti-Semitism.

Does anyone want to bet that he can get through a speech about the massacre at the synagogue without saying something nasty about somebody? Or bragging about himself? Or claiming that people are mean to him, too?

Paul Waldman:

 In the age of Trump, the politics of conservative victimhood has reached new heights. And as usual, it comes right from the top.

After bombs were sent to a dozen people President Trump had attacked, he quickly identified the person really being threatened. “Come to think of it, who gets attacked more than me?” he asked at a White House political event just after reading some words about unity that were obviously written by others and about which he couldn’t have cared less.

Dana Milbank:

Eleven Jews are dead in Pittsburgh, gunned down during Shabbat services allegedly by a man who shared President Trump’s paranoia about a migrant caravan. Pipe bombs were sent to more than a dozen of Trump’s favorite political targets, including the homes of two former presidents, Democratic leaders and CNN.

But let us not lose sight of the real victim here: Donald Trump.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders hadn’t given a briefing in nearly a month, so she had a lot of time to build up grievances before Monday afternoon’s session. She emerged half an hour late with a scowl, and read a written statement containing the requisite denunciations of the attack in Pittsburgh and affirmations of Trump’s affection for Jews.

But when the questioning got going, it became clear that she was rather less animated by the pipe bombs and the synagogue massacre than by perceived attacks on Trump by the media.

“The very first thing the media did was blame the president and make him responsible for these ridiculous acts,” she began. “That is outrageous.”

Whenever I write about Sarah Sanders I am tempted to include the image of the Mouth of Sauron from The Return of the King. 

Haaretz is reporting that Netanyahu’s deplomats are carrying water for Trump:

Unfortunately, their message of sympathy is being undermined by the shameful effort of Israel’s top diplomats in the U.S. to absolve Donald Trump of any responsibility for fomenting an atmosphere of right-wing hate and, even more outrageously, to implicate anti-Semitism on the left instead.

For many American Jews, Trump’s cardinal sin is the false equivalence he created between neo-Nazis and leftist demonstrators in the wake of the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, in which Heather Heyer was killed.

There are “fine people” on both sides, Trump said, infuriating Americans in general and American Jews in particular. This did not deter Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer and New York Consul General Dani Dayan, however, from using the same odious analogy.

Rather than focus on the neo-Nazi credentials of Pittsburgh perpetrator Robert Bowers or on Florida’s serial pipe-bomber Cesar Sayoc’s endless admiration for Trump, Dermer and Dayan opted to muddy the waters. The two senior diplomats emulated the U.S. president by obfuscating the clear-cut white supremacist backdrop of the Pittsburgh atrocity and, in Dermer’s case, by commending Trump’s statement after the attack.

So Israeli officials are siding with Nazis?

In other news: Politico reports that Trump doesn’t do any work.  And former President Jimmy Carter sent a letter to Republican nominee for governor, Brian Kemp, asking him to resign as Georgia secretary of state.