ANN ALTHOUSE BUSTS FELLOW LAWPROF LAURENCE TRIBE FOR BOGUS CHARGES OF ANTISEMITISM:

Tribe — who must know about Occam’s Razor — tries to exclude the simple mistake by stating that “Trump had to override autocorrect,” but I opened a compose window in Twitter and typed “Frankenstien” and it did not autocorrect. I tried another “i before e” mistake and wrote “recieve” and it autocorrected, so I know how Twitter autocorrect works, and it doesn’t reject “Frankenstien.”

So Tribe just sounds ridiculously conspiracy-theory-oriented. Why didn’t he test autocorrect before making that assertion? I’m so careful about things like that that I feel the need to say right now that maybe Tribe’s Twitter experience, perhaps in a different browser, works differently from mine. And I’m not spreading scurrilous hate by calling somebody anti-Semitic.

I’m so embarrassed for Tribe, dipping into this kind of crap. I wonder where his hands go when he’s typing out tweets that he chooses not to publish to the world? This is what he thinks is impishly cute or brilliantly smart or importantly alarming??

And the dumbest part of it is, who thinks of “Frankenstien” as “distinctively Jewish” in a way that “Frankenstein” is not? There are many Jewish names that end in “-stein.” If anything, the “-stein” ending might cause me to think Jewish. But of all the names that end in “-stein,” the last one I’d think of as Jewish is “Frankenstein.” Who thinks of the Frankenstein monster as Jewish? Here’s the full text of Mary Shelley’s novel, and there isn’t one reference to Jews or Jewishiness or Judaism.

But if the subject is on your mind, perhaps you’d get the idea that misspelling the familiar name would be a way to make it seem Jewish, but who thinks about “-stien” as being Jewish? . . .

I can’t believe the badness of that Laurence Tribe tweet. Maybe the idea is something like: Trump’s bad tweets work for him. Bad is good. You’ve got to tweet badly. . . . If anything here seems anti-Semitic it’s jumping to call something “distinctively Jewish.”

Yep.