Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) on Sunday said he supports Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D) after he apologized for comments he made following an attack on a Detroit-area synagogue earlier this year, with the South Carolina House…
Page A2From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
El-Sayed apologizes for lamenting a terrorist's family's death; Clyburn grants him a second chance immediately.
As it ran on the front
Here's how it works, and it works fast if you're the right kind of somebody. Abdul El-Sayed said something ugly about a dead family in the aftermath of the Michigan synagogue attack, took his time getting to sorry, and finally landed on an apology. Same week — not a review board, not a primary challenge, not a task force — Jim Clyburn, one of the senior men in the House Democratic Caucus, stood up and said all of us deserve second chances.
All of us. That's the phrase. Not 'in this case,' not 'given the circumstances' — all of us. Which would be a nice thing to believe about the country if the country's institutions behaved that way for anybody who wasn't already three deep in the party's contact list. Try losing your job over something you said in a group chat and see how many ranking members show up to grant you a mulligan on cable the same week.…
…(cont) This isn't really about the apology itself, which — fine, people say ugly things, people can walk them back, that's allowed. It's about the machinery that turns on the second a member of the club needs it turned on. Clyburn didn't wait for a hearing, didn't wait for a primary opponent to force the question. He went straight to the press with the absolution, same week as the apology, like the two statements were scheduled together.
The stakes here aren't abstract. Every one of us has watched somebody get permanently filed under one bad sentence — fired, blacklisted, dragged for a decade — while somebody with the right seat at the right hearing gets absolved between one news cycle and the next. That gap is the whole story. It's not that El-Sayed doesn't deserve forgiveness; people generally do, eventually, if they mean it. It's that forgiveness, like everything else in this town, turns out to be a resource, and resources get allocated by who's already standing close enough to the tap when it opens.
Nobody's asking for a permanent record on a man who apologized. We're asking why the turnaround time is measured in days for him and measured in years, or never, for everybody else standing outside that particular door.
“Say sorry, get absolved by lunch — that's the whole transaction, and it only works if you're already inside the tent. Regular people don't get a same-week pardon from the ranking member of anything; they get a permanent file. Watch who gets the fast forgiveness and you'll see who the club actually protects.”
“Republicans have said for years the left holds its own to a different standard, and here's the exhibit — a same-week apology and a same-week absolution, no review, no waiting period. That's not persecution, that's just — well, that is sort of what we've been saying, isn't it.”
The receipts
Michigan Senate hopeful Dr. Abdul El-Sayed formally apologized to Jewish Democrats for weaving a jab at Israel in his response to an attack on a Michigan synagogue in March.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.