Harris, Shapiro, and Walz

 

Mr. Taggart: I got it! I know how we can run everyone out of Rock Ridge.

Hedley Lamarr: How?

Mr. Taggart: We’ll kill the firstborn male child in every household.

Hedley Lamarr: Too Jewish.

-Blazing Saddles

So apparently was Josh Shapiro. On the evidence Kamala Harris and the Democrats were set before the weekend to select Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania as their candidate for vice president. They announced that there would be a big kickoff event for their ticket Tuesday in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania is a state that a Democrat pretty much has to win to become president. Shapiro is very popular there, and people thought that having him on the ticket might swing the state away from Trump. He is also what passes for a moderate among Democrats these days and might have helped with some voters who would be wary of a hard leftist such as Harris. The selection seemed obvious to lots of people, an easy slam dunk of a decision.

It probably would have been except for one thing. Shapiro is a Jew, and not only a Jew but a Jew who supports Israel in its war against Hamas. The best guess is that that outraged the party’s pro-Hamas leftists enough that Harris found it necessary to drop him and choose instead a leftist governor who seems to add nothing to her chances of winning.

If so, the antisemitism it shows is not even the worst thing about it. The war in Gaza is not only a conflict between Israel and Hamas’s savages. It also is part of a world wide struggle between liberal civilization and its illiberal and barbarous enemies in China, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere. If Harris and her party are too afraid of, or worse sympathetic to, those who side with the savage and the barbarous to do not only the right but even the apparently politically expedient thing, it says a lot about her and the entire party.