With the fillibuster on its last legs, the Dem tactic for blocking Trump judicial nominees is to Kavanaugh each of them with smear campaigns. Steven Menashi faced a particularly slimy smear campaign orchestrated by MSNBC conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow accusing him of being a white supremacist.
Even though Menashi is Jewish.
Steven Menashi, a former Alito clerk, is the son of Jewish Iranian refugee father. And, as he notes, “My grandparents were Iraqi Jews who had lived in Baghdad before moving to Tehran and then finding a home in Israel. My grandmother survived the Farhud, a violent pogrom against the Jewish community of Baghdad in 1941, by fleeing the city for the countryside.”
So, Maddow and her people decided to attack him as a racist.
In Maddow’s rant, she falsely accused Menashi of making “a highbrow argument for racial purity” and of a “blood-curdling article”.
With first blood drawn, other media outlets joined in. The substance of their accusations was that Menashi had done some conservative blogging.
Did it work? It worked on Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham, but his nomination still made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
That’s important. Beyond getting Menashi through, it sends a message that lefty smear campaigns won’t stop qualified judges.
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