Not since H.B. Reese put his chocolate in a jar of peanut butter have two men, Bret Stephens and Andrew Sullivan, been so full of it.
But for a rubber glove and a surgical mask, with Stephens counting down from 10 and Sullivan thumbing his rosary beads while the attending doctor goes cheek to cheek, while Stephens and Sullivan face each other and fall asleep; but for smelling salts and a half-used matchbook, that doctor would not know how impacted these two are. Stephens forgoes the details by tweeting the diagnosis instead, thanking Sullivan for his honesty and smarts, all because Sullivan had a “brain fart” regarding his citation of Stephens’s facts.
Thus does Stephens segue from the scatalogical to the scurrilous, praising a man whose commentary he would otherwise condemn were it not written by a critic of President Trump: said commentary being Sullivan’s martyrdom in defense of free speech—in defense of the right to say the Israel Lobby is wrong, in part or whole—thereby turning Andrew into Matthew (27:25), or rather one of the cursed upon whom His blood is on Sullivan. Thus does Sullivan bleed and suffer like a Jew, with no platform to voice his opposition, save those outlets run by fanatics, such as HBO, New York, and The Atlantic.
Where is Stephens’s outrage toward Sullivan’s comparison of Larry Summers to a hook-nosed Jew in “Christ Carrying the Cross” by Hieronymus Bosch? Where is Stephens’s disgust toward Sullivan’s online attempt at Yiddishkeit, starting with the first word of Mr. Honesty’s empty apology, “Oy”? Where is Stephens’s revulsion toward Sullivan’s disgust for a country that makes him “sick”?
Perhaps Stephens lacks the “rat-like instinct” for recognizing trash. Perhaps Stephens is the better Jew because he is a Christian, willing to do for Sullivan what that beleaguered doctor willed himself to do for science: turn the other cheek.
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