Josh Mandel

I’m morbidly fascinated by Josh Mandel, the Ohio Republican U.S. Senate candidate who is currently giving LGM favorite son J.D. Vance a fearsome beatdown in the primary polling. The sight of a Jewish politician descended directly from Holocaust survivors throwing his lot in with white supremacist Christian fundamentalist ethno-nationalism is one of the more uncanny spectacles of this uncanny time:

Mandel’s maternal grandfather, Joe, is originally from Poland and is a Holocaust survivor, while his maternal grandmother, Fernanda, is originally from Italy and was hidden from the Nazis by Christian families during World War II.

Mandel, who will be 44 next month, appears from his photos to be 15 to 20 years younger than that, which adds to the air of uncanniness, as do his tweets:

“Judeo-Christian values” is a phrase that’s always good for a laugh, or would be, except that joke isn’t funny any more.

Then we have this from this morning:

The hermeneutics of this text are truly riveting. For one thing, is “Breaks” an intentional mis-spelling? I remember the days when people would claim that many of the items in Trump’s Twitter feed contained intentional mis-spellings, put there not by Trump but by whatever Svengali was putting up that particular tweet in his name, with the mis-spelling intended to add an air of anti-elitist authenticity.

This always seemed to me too clever by half, given that Trump is clearly capable of unintentionally mis-spelling pretty much any word of more than one syllable.

For another, what is any of this supposed to mean? Safety is bad? Conservation is bad? That Josh Mandel’s going to drive liberals to drinking if he don’t stop driving that hot rod Lincoln? (Lincoln was a Republican. Not a lot of people know that).