Were the context surrounding their effort to smear the president not so tragic the effort itself would be amusing for its sheer absurdity.
Numerous attempts were made by commentators in liberal media outlets to accuse Mr. Trump of being an anti-semite whose rhetoric has nurtured a climate of hate so virulent that the more looney among his supporters feel justified in taking up weapons to kill Jews.
One wonders how intelligent people can sincerely make such an allegation given several widely known facts: First, the man who committed this crime was known to despise Donald Trump. He regarded the president as being too sympathetic to Jewish interests.
Second, the president's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner are both followers of the Jewish faith.
Third, the president is a hero among Israeli Jews who have even named streets and plazas after him in Israel.
Fourth, President Trump has repeatedly condemned anti-semitism (see here and here) and all forms of bigotry.
Nevertheless, the progressive left is unfazed by any of this. They see a chance to discredit the president and they're not going to pass it up, even if it means making themselves look foolish and desperate.
If rhetoric has a causal effect on actions then we might ask when the left is going to start holding Louis Farrakhan, Linda Sarsour, et al. accountable for their hateful rhetoric toward Jews.
When are they going to hold people like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton accountable for legitimizing people like this by being seen in their company? And when are liberals going to demand that universities clean up the left-wing anti-semitic garbage dumps that exist on some of our campuses?
Julia Ioffe in the Washington Post cites some ambiguous quotes and ads for which alleges Mr. Trump bears ultimate responsibility as proof that he has stoked ethnic resentments among the morally sick far right groups. She writes:
Trump has had enough to say about the Jews that his supporters may easily make certain pernicious inferences. During the campaign, he joked at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition that it wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money.” A campaign-era tweet about Hillary Clinton superimposed a Star of David over dollar bills. He said the white-supremacist marchers at Charlottesville last year were “fine people.”Aside from the fact that Ioffe's claim that Trump averred that the white-supremacists at Charlottesville were fine people is dubious (A more charitable rendering is that he was referring to the fact that there were many people present at the Charlottesville protest who were not affiliated with the extremists of either left or right) her examples prove exactly what?
After I published a profile of Trump’s third wife, Melania, that displeased her — and his supporters — the alt-right deluged me with anti-Semitic insults and imagery, culminating in clear death threats — such as an image of a Jew being shot execution-style or people ordering coffins in my name. When Trump was asked to condemn these attacks by his supporters, he said, “I don’t have a message” for them.
Surely, the fact that people can read into such things whatever they wish to support their own prejudices is no warrant for the conclusion that Mr. Trump is himself a Jew-hater or sympathetic to those who hate Jews. Mr. Trump is no more responsible for what this man did in Pittsburgh, and indeed arguably much less responsible, than Bernie Sanders is responsible for the actions of one of his campaign workers who shot up a GOP baseball practice and nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise.
But none of this matters to our friends on the left. They seem determined to blame President Trump for anything and everything that goes wrong. If a meteorite strikes the earth causing widespread devastation the progressive media will somehow manage to convince themselves that Mr. Trump bears responsibility for the catastrophe.
Perhaps the electorate will be swayed in November by the left's metronomic imputation of blame and their incessant moral outrage, or perhaps people will just tune it all out as so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. We'll see.
Meanwhile, here's something to consider. November 5th will be the one year anniversary of the deadliest attack on a house of worship in American history. On that date last year Devin Patrick Kelley walked into First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas and killed 26 worshippers, including the pastor's daughter, and wounded dozens more. Kelley was an atheist who held Christianity and Christians in contempt.
Does the media hold prominent atheists who have written of their contempt for Christianity - people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris - responsible for this atrocity? Of course not, nor should they, but doing so would be far more justifiable than holding Donald Trump somehow responsible for the murders of eleven Jews in Pittsburgh on Saturday.
