Each day our politics gets more toxic. And those who trade it in find that this poison could help return them to office. Witness GOP Senator David Perdue who “joked” about praying for President Barack Obama’s death at a meeting of Christian conservatives.

At a major event for conservative Christians this morning, a Republican senator joked about praying for President Obama’s “days to be short.”
Sen. David Perdue, a freshman senator from Georgia, opened his remarks at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference by encouraging attendees to pray for President Obama. But, he added in a joking tone, they need to pray for him in a very specific way: “We should pray for him like Psalms 109:8 says: May his days be few, and let another have his office,” the senator said, smiling wryly.
The crowd chuckled and he moved on with his address.

Yep. That’s really a crowd-pleasing joke. But there was a bit more to that passage which he didn’t use:

The rest of that passage, which Perdue did not recite, reads, “May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.”
The psalm is a pointed, lengthy death wish for one of David’s enemies.
“Let the creditor seize all that he has, and let strangers plunder his labor. Let there be none to extend mercy to him, nor let there be any to favor his fatherless children. Let his posterity be cut off, and in the generation following let their name be blotted out,” it continues.
Perdue’s joke drew immediate criticism. Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, tweeted, “Republican Senator David Perdue is praying for President Obama to die. This is why Trump is the GOP nominee.”
As the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel pointed out, conservatives have long invoked this verse in the yearning for an end to Obama’s days in office. A Christian Science Monitor report from November 16, 2009, detailed the popularity of bumper stickers that read simply, “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8.”
“It’s protected speech, but it’s clearly offensive,” the Anti-Defamation League’s Deborah Lauter said at the time.
The Road to Majority conference brings together top leaders in the social-conservative world, as well as prominent elected Republicans.”

These are Christian conservatives?

My rabbi has a more Christian attitude than they do.

So, to some it’s really a scream to wish that Barack Obama is lying in state, his wife a widow, his daughters fatherless, his family grieving and crying. What could be funnier than that?

Then, after the media (correctly) did its job and reported his joke and the reaction, the inevitable CYA statement came out from Perdue’s office:

UPDATE: After publication, Perdue spokeswoman Caroline Vanvick gave this statement to Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur:
“Senator Perdue said we are called to pray for our country, for our leaders, and for our president. He in no way wishes harm towards our president and everyone in the room understood that. However, we should add the media to our prayer list because they are pushing a narrative to create controversy and that is exactly what the American people are tired of.”

That’s right: blame it on the media — not on the words that came out of Mr. Perdue’s lips. Going after the media for reporting a)that a Senator thought it was great to pray for Obama’s death (a joke of course) b)that GOPers sitting there thought it was a line that killed (perhaps not as literally as a few of them may have wished) may play well with the Republican Party’s base, but to others who hear about it, they’ll sigh and say it’s so typical of the attitude of political adversaries these days — and conclude its typical of the hatred fanned and enabled by the Republican Party that has led to it becoming the Trumpublican Party.

Should we believe the Perdue statement that it never crossed his mind and the words for the joke just came out?

Did the devil make him do it?

A few words: In. Your. Dreams.

It’s another symptom of our hyperpartisanship.

But I’ll leave the last, fitting words to a cinema icon:

grahic via shutterstock.com

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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