David Yassky is pissing me off

The primary race in NY-11 has been fairly nasty on some levels, and a lot of that nastiness--especially race-based nastiness--has been aimed David Yassky's way. See, for example, today's New York Times article on the subject:

Black Leaders Fear Loss of Brooklyn House Seat
By JONATHAN P. HICKS

A group of black and Hispanic elected officials from Brooklyn are scheduled to meet this morning to devise strategies to keep a white candidate from winning a Congressional seat of historical significance in black politics.

It is not the first such meeting of these officials, nor is it likely to be the last. That there are talks so steeped in ethnicity indicates that race is not just one of the issues in determining who will succeed Representative Major R. Owens. It seems to be the dominant one.

Mr. Owens, a veteran of more than two decades in Congress who turns 70 this month, is not running for re-election. The black and Hispanic officials gathering today are discussing how to prevent David Yassky, a white city councilman from Brooklyn Heights, from winning a seat that once belonged to Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress.

While I don't support the guy or agree with him on many issues, I thought this was a little unfair. That was before this morning, when I went to look for some things on Yassky's website in order to comment on this post of Steve Gilliard's on that NYT article. That's when I started to believe there might be something to Bouldin's claim that

...[t]he Yassky strategy is cynical, reaching out as it does to Jewish voters on Jewish issues, and otherwise appealing to other voters on the basis of color-blind competence. That is not merely starkly hypocritical, it is intentionally and knowingly divisive.

Yassky used to have a page in the issues section of his website that pandered pretty outrageously to religious Jewish voters, talking about his efforts to divert funding to religious schools and to get a state-paid nurse in every yeshiva. When I went to look for it this morning, though, it wasn't there.

I mentioned that in my comments at Gilliard's, and reproduced a snippet of my brilliant Left Behinds analysis on that NY-11 poll, which included a link to the "Defending Israel" issues section of the Yassky website. Lo and behold, the Yassky team redesigned its website today, and perhaps coincidentally (as an anonymous user alerted us in the comment thread later) the "Defending Israel" section is gone and my link is dead.

Excuse me, but fuck that. Yassky doesn't get to pander and run a second time. This time I went to the Google cache and got screenshots of that issue page, which I will now post so they don't disappear forever. Again.





Full sizes here and here.

Tags: David Yassky, Defending Israel