From the Weekly Standard‘s “Scrapbook,” May 31, presented without commentary:

Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings recently published a guest column in the Charleston Post and Courier in which he complained that the true purpose of President Bush’s Iraq policy was to “secure Israel” and “take the Jewish vote from the Democrats.” Various people are rather upset with Hollings as a consequence; Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham H. Foxman says the senator’s op-ed argument is “reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate the government.” But Sen. Hollings angrily rejects any suggestion that he is anti-Semitic — and, in fact, he himself is now demanding an apology from those who’ve made that suggestion most forcefully.

You know all this already, of course; it has been widely reported in the media. But THE SCRAPBOOK will say it straight out: The media have not treated Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings of South Carolina fairly, here.

Genuinely fair coverage of the controversy would have gone into much greater detail about exactly how anti-Semitic Sen. Hollings’s arguments truly are.

For instance: Consider the extended–and extraordinary — defense of himself Hollings made on the Senate floor last Thursday. In the course of which he (a) groused that “you cannot have an Israel policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here”; (b) insisted on the “legitimacy” of his notorious reference to the late Howard Metzenbaum as the “senator from B’nai B’rith”; and (c) revealed that just “the other day” he’d asked his staffers how they supposed they’d react were the Israeli army to bulldoze their families’ homes. “Wouldn’t you want to cut their throat?” Hollings said he asked his aides. And “They said: ‘In a New York minute.'”

When Sen. Hollings retires home to South Carolina at the end of this year, we hope he takes his staff along.