Peter Beinart, on a noxious column by Elliott Abrams referring to Obama joining an anti-Israel "lynch mob":
It’s remarkable when you think about it. To Americans with even the slightest degree of racial awareness, “lynch mob” conjures something quite particular: African American men hanging from trees in the post-civil war South. To deploy the metaphor to describe a United Nations resolution that obliquely criticizes Israel is audacious. To deploy it to describe the support for that resolution by America’s first African-American president is downright astonishing. It’s a bit like calling Joe Lieberman’s opposition health-care reform a “pogrom.”Lieberman actually supported health care in the end, but the point is right nonetheless. Posted by Stephen Silver at June 10, 2010 11:46 PM