No longer a joke

Bob, in a post about the long-held belief that no black man will ever be US president, quotes this old joke:

I firmly believe that, one day, a man in a kippa and prayer shawl will sit in the Oval Office...Unless, of course, he's Jewish.

Which reminded me of this line, repeated by Eliot Weinberger in the LRB piece I mentioned here:

If there's a black or woman president in the Oval Office, it means an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty.