Vote for the Left-Wing Nut Job
I’m so furious at AIPAC — the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee — that I’m inches away from becoming an antisemite.
And I speak as the proud mother of a former lone soldier who served behind enemy lines.
I also speak as a resident of New Jersey’s 11th congressional district, which has just seen an 11-candidate special primary race to elect a Democratic candidate for the open Congressional seat that Mikie Sherrill vacated when she won the gubernatorial election in November. I voted for Tom Malinowski, an honorable, experienced, pro-Israel moderate. In recent weeks, though, AIPAC has put $2.3 million dollars into a lie-based smear campaign against him. Apparently the problem, as AIPAC saw it, is that though Malinowski is a firm supporter of Israel, he isn’t necessarily a firm supporter of Bibi. Nor am I. Nor is a single member of my extended family in Jerusalem. Nor are most of my fellow congregants at my traditional, Conservative synagogue. Nor is my million-old father, who happens to have been a leader of the American Jewish Committee, including as its president, for a good chunk of the 20th century. As for his father: no doubt he’s turning in his grave.
And now, because AIPAC decided to spend money not on building bridges or even throwing itself a few rubber chicken dinners, but in throwing filth at an experienced, moderate and honorable candidate, it seems that I, a Zionist from head to toe, am going to be forced to vote in our upcoming Congressional elections for the winner of the primary, whose views I find abhorrent. Her name is Analilia Mejia, and she has staked out a firmly anti-Zionist position, including accusing Israel of genocide.
Of course, I could sit this election out and simply not vote. But I’m not going to do that, for the following reason: Donald Trump is so evil on so many fronts — from his plastering his name on the Kennedy Center to his pay-to-play fundraising schemes to the way he lines his pockets with taxpayer monies to his disdain for the rule of law to his outright racism to his sending his goon squads to drag (brown skinned only) immigrants to transit camps — that for me not to vote for a Democrat, no matter how putrid her views on Israel, would be tantamount to my own little appeasement of a lunatic.
The Republican in the race is a local mayor named Joe Hathaway. I’ve read his platform which, by me, seems generally reasonable, but other than that I know nothing about him. If times were different, I, a lifelong liberal, might consider voting for him. But with the balance of power in Congress being what it is, and the current Congress, even with its minuscule Republican majority, serving as a rubber stamp for each and every one of our mad king’s whims, sorry, no can do.
I lived with my family in Louisiana for 13 years. Just before we moved there, Louisiana had had a bruising election for Governor that pitted famously corrupt Edwin Edwards against David Duke, an avowed racist and anti-Semite. All over Louisiana cars sported bumper stickers that said: VOTE FOR THE CROOK.
Perhaps I’ll design a bumper sticker that says: VOTE FOR THE LEFT WING NUT JOB. But I probably won’t.