Stock
Benjamin Wittes shares a bit of hate-mail.
This guy is charming…
A reminder to everyone of my policy of tweeting abusive emails I receive with the email of the sender visible.
You have no expectation of privacy in sending abuse to strangers. pic.twitter.com/UpnFPUeIon
— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) March 24, 2018
It’s the usual fever-dream nonsense, but what caught my attention was “Joe DiGenova is good old Irish-Italian stock.” Good old what? Since when is Irish-Italian considered a “stock”? (Jokes about minestrone with extra potato occur to me, but I push them aside.) Since when is Irish-Italian treated as a US ethnic grouping? Since never, that’s since when. Wittes’s correspondent is apparently just thinking “good old immigrant stock, the kind who immigrated so long ago that nobody thinks of them as immigrants any more, your Kennedys and McCarthys and Scavinos and Scaramuccis.” That’s nice, but he’s an idiot if he thinks those immigrants were welcomed with champagne and excellent housing. Like hell they were. They were greeted with hostility and tenements and crap jobs. It’s just a matter of time passing that makes them seem to Abusive Emailer like old, respectable, patriotic, normal, ok “stock.” Just a shot in the dark here but I wonder if one of his parents is of Irish background while the other is of Italian. Wild guess.
Anyway the point is, guess what, genius, time does wonders for injecting Respectability into once-hated immigrant groups provided they are white.
There’s also his bashful list of the things he likes best about his girlfriend, but that’s another story.
Oh man, conservatives love laying claim to Irish blood in particular. They have it in their heads that the Irish are some kind of paragon of humble blue collar work ethic, and so you have ridiculous spectacles as with Bill O’Reilly pretending that his Irish family history makes him an everyman despite his ~$20,000,000 salary. Everyone just wants to get a piece of that navvy reputation.
They should take a peek at some 19th century editions of Punch.
I like the part about how Trump is tough because he “was a promoter for CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING”. Which isn’t real, isn’t called that, Trump didn’t promote it, and it wouldn’t have proven him tough if he had.
Ha!