Poor Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Not only does he have a middle name that makes anyone who utters it sound like he’s trying to talk under water with a mouth full of marbles, now Democrats are seizing on that name as proof that the Alabama senator is a racist.
Sessions, whom President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to be attorney general, was purportedly named after Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard. But those names are common in the South, and were even more so in 1946, when Sessions was born.
Contrary to what seems like the common wisdom all of a sudden, he didn’t choose his name.
Nobody thought it was a big deal that Good ol’ boy Bill Clinton’s middle name was Jefferson. Also born in 1946 and in the nearby state of Arkansas, Clinton was actually named after Thomas Jefferson. We know this, however, because he once told a young boy in a receiving line that he wished he’d been named after Jefferson Davis instead.
Sessions’ antagonists don’t have much of a case that he’s a racist, as The Weekly Standard‘s Mark Hemingway makes clear. He oversaw school integration and successfully got the death penalty for his state’s top KKK boss.
But that hasn’t stopped them from trying.
“If you have nostalgia for the days when blacks kept quiet, gays were in the closet, immigrants were invisible and women stayed in the kitchen, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is your man,” Rep. Luis Vicente Gutiérrez of Illinois said in a statement.
“Jefferson Beauregard Sessions” holds views that are “incompatible with constitutional guarantees,” Sen.-elect Kamala Devi Harris said. Incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles Ellis Schumer told ABC News that there were “troubling things” in Sessions’ past.
What’s truly troubling is how desperate the Democrats have become to stain every political opponent with the taint of racism.
There is an irony here. When Republicans began using Barack Obama’s middle name — Hussein — liberals leaped to call them racist Islamophobes (or was it Islamophobic racists?). Most conservatives stopped using it, or never did. On the 2008 campaign trail, John McCain felt compelled to repudiate a surrogate who uttered that taboo portion of Obama’s name.
But you know what happened? The Obama administration and its media allies began using it more and more, and pretty soon it was okay again to use it — well, for some people. When Trump uttered “Hussein” earlier this year, the media heaped criticism on him once again for using “coded language.”
You see the consistency here? When Republicans use Obama’s middle name, it’s proof of Republican racism. When Democrats use Republicans’ middle names it’s also proof of Republican racism. Either way, you just can’t win, unless you’re a Democrat. Which is how it’s intended to be.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
