Democratic National Committee logo

Call me a running dog for Hillary, but the DNC email story strikes me as pretty much a nothing-burger. So Bernie Sanders mounts an insurgent primary campaign against the Democratic establishment and now we know that the Democratic establishment was rooting for…the Democratic establishment.

OK, it’s a cool story, especially considering the historical parallelism. Back in 1972, White House plumbers bugged DNC headquarters to get Richard Nixon reelected president. Now, it seems, Kremlin plumbers hacked into the DNC’s servers to get Donald Trump elected president. From Watergate to Wassergate.

Now I confess I haven’t personally waded through the thousands of January-to-June emails released by WikiLeaks, but if you look at the Washington Post‘s “most damaging things” list, virtually all the anti-Bernie smoking guns date from May, by which time Hillary Clinton had the contest wrapped up. A little privately expressed DNC antagonism towards the never-say-die Sanders campaign was, well, pretty understandable.

But what about the proposal — number one on the Post’s list — to get Bernie to fess up in re: his belief in the Almighty? At 1:31 AM on May 5, Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall, who maybe should called it a day, sent out an email with the following message:

It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.

At 1:33 AM, Marshall explicated his proposal with: “It’s these Jesus thing.” Twelve hours later, he received a one-word response from Chief Executive Officer Amy K. Dacey: “AMEN.” That’s  the thread in its entirety.

If anyone popped the question to Sanders, it made no difference in the May 10 West Virginia primary, which he won handily. But a week later he lost Kentucky to Clinton by a whisker, so who knows?

As far as I’m concerned, and I say this as a person of the Jewish persuasion, the good news is that Southern Baptists draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist — by which I assume they think a Jew is OK, an atheist not so much.

Of course, we Jews know that we get to be Jews whether we believe in God or not. That news doesn’t seem to have reached Brad Marshall and his peeps, however.