The President's New Direction

George Allen deserves some of the credit for transforming this election into a Borscht Belt routine. But let's face it, for journalists, Hanukkah has just come early.

Shelley Lewis writes:

"Does anybody really care whether Senator George Allen's mother came from a prominent Jewish family? Well, yeah. I do.

"Haven't we Jews suffered enough this year? Everywhere we turn there's another shonda (embarrassment), from Jack Abramoff to Joe Lieberman. We learn that Rep. Eric Cantor had a sandwich named after himself at a fundraiser at Abramoff's deli. We've got Kristol, Wolfowitz, Perle. Do we really need a Jewish George Allen?...

"He said 'as far as he knew,' his mother was raised as a Christian.

"As far as he knows? If you have a Jewish mother, you know it. A Jewish mother doesn't let you wear a Confederate flag lapel pin in your high school yearbook picture, or pimp your pickup truck with rebel flag bumper stickers. She might mention her religious heritage when you have your picture taken with white supremacist members of the Council of Concerned Citizens. And I don't think a Jewish mother visiting her son's law office would remain silent about the noose he kept hanging there, or that she'd fail to ask her daughter in law if hanging a Confederate flag in her son George's home was really the best interior decorating idea she could come up with."

The New Republic's Jason Zengerle :

"I now half-expect I'll be seeing Allen at Rosh Hashanah services on Saturday."

Extreme Mortman : "I would love to know where the Virginia Senate candidates stand on the Social Security lox box."

David Frum suggests a tilt in the coverage:

"It really is outrageous that people would suggest that George Allen has been the victim of media bias. Of course they would behave in an exactly similar way to a similarly situated Democrat. Remember how the press fiercely grilled Sen. John Forbes Kerry about his ancestry and background - how they demanded to know why he had presented himself as Irish all these years when in fact his paternal grandparents were Jews from Vienna who had changed their name from the original Kohn - and how the reporters insinuated that Kerry was either ashamed of himself or else secretly antisemitic when he implausibly denied that he had ever had any idea of his background until jourrnalists discovered it for him. Remember? Anybody?"

I detect a note of sarcasm.