NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...of my Top 10 Stupid Rightblogger Tricks. Special double-length column, no extra charge!

Long as it is, I had a couple of outtakes:

Wingnut lawyer calls civil rights hero a “fraud.”

John Lewis, now a Democratic Representative in Congress from Georgia, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 and got his skull cracked for it. Lewis also got attacked by new President Donald Trump around the weekend of MLK Day 2017, after Lewis criticized his repulsive civil rights record, and Power Line’s John Hinderaker backed Trump thus: “Lewis is invariably described as a ‘civil rights icon,’ but the man is an utter fraud.”

How a man cruelly beaten in the cause of civil rights might be considered a fraud - especially by a guy whose greatest sacrifice to his own cause might be working late on Friday — Hinderaker didn’t explain. “There is no reason to treat John Lewis with kid gloves,” he sniffed, “and Donald Trump doesn’t do so.” Or, to paraphrase: You may be a national hero, but I am a shameless and energetic hack in the service of a buffoon, and history shows that I have the advantage.

Liberal Fascism for Dummies.

Normally I’d leave this spot open for Jonah Goldberg, and God knows he has plenty of worthy entries this year — like this one, in which he mused that in the post-Lincoln era, “I’d like to think I’d have been in the Radical Republican camp myself.” Try to imagine the inventor of the “Marion Berry cocktail… equal parts Jaegermeister, Kaluha, Bourbon and Coke; ‘So black not even the man can keep it down!’” hanging out with Thaddeus Stevens.

But Goldberg has been outstripped by Dinesh D’Souza, longtime rightwing operative and convicted felon: While Goldberg got his most recent fame boost in 2008 with Liberal Fascism, a dumb book about how liberals are the Real You-Know-Whats, D’Souza has published The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of American Left, which, on the evidence of D’Souza’s August column, “THE SEX PERVERT AS ANTI-FASCIST,” appears to be similar in theme and even dumber.

I can hardly encapsulate it here, but the basic idea is that Frankfurt School Marxists tricked college kids into having orgies: “Marcuse’s celebration of outright perversion was a mantra that could not be more perfectly timed in the 1960s.” And getting all sexed up like this also made them liberal Nazis, because “while the rutting bohemians of the 1960s had no idea, Marcuse surely knew that the Nazis and the Italian fascists were themselves – almost to a man – bohemians.”

Hitler, for example, “was a painter and artiste before he went into politics,” wrote D’Souza; he listened to Wagner, and “was also a vegetarian.” And you stupid liberals think arts appreciation and tofu make you enlightened — if actually means you’re a Nazi!

Even being gay is part of the liberal Nazi nexus — did you know about Ernst Rohm? Indeed, “the Nazi atmosphere in those days… far more closely resembles that of the Village Voice or the Democratic National Convention than it does the National Review or the Trump White House.”

He’s got us dead to rights there. I just wonder why the guys marching around chanting “Jews will not replace us” don’t get in on the sex and bohemianism; I mean, I hear they can’t even beat off. Can merely hating Jews and pluralism really be enough of a payoff?

A SUREFIRE WAY TO GET CONSERVATIVES TO STICK UP FOR YOU.

A Duke professor wrote comments on a New York Times editorial that got negative attention. Sample:

So where are the editorials that say racism doomed the Asian-Americans. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard. 

I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration. The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existent because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white. 

It was appropriate that a Chinese design won the competition for the Martin Luther King state. King helped them overcome. The blacks followed Malcolm X.

Never mind that you can see that and worse in the comments of any online article that mentions race -- in fact, look at the comments under this story at WorldNetDaily and elsewhere -- the point is that Hough's an academic and from the left, so needless to say conservatives have a new hero. Ole Perfesser Instapundit:

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER... Even being an old commie apologist isn’t enough to keep you from being savaged over this badthink.

"Savaged" means, in this context, some people disagreed publicly with his comments and he wasn't fired. (Hough was on leave working on a book when this thing blew up, though some of the usual suspects have sought to convey the impression that Duke pushed him out after the fact.) Don Surber:

Telling the truth online gets you in trouble in America. Consider Duke University political science professor Jerry Hough made the mistake of pointing out that Asian-Americans are as a race doing better than African-Americans in general. For that people are calling him racist. 

Part of the reason is Asian males are not shooting one another up like inner city black males are.

Surber knows how it is to be vilified for what folks 'round here jes' natchurly knows. Nicholas Stix at more-mainstream-conservative-by-the-minute VDare:

As a result of the school’s racist hate campaign Hough’s life is in danger on and near the North Carolina school’s campus. During the 2006-2007 Duke Rape Hoax, which was also rabidly promoted by the school’s administration and faculty, racist blacks in Durham exploited the hoax as a pretext to commit violent hate crimes against white students, simply for breathing while white.

He's like MLK in Selma except, you know. Maybe Stix can get up a posse from the Bundy Ranch to protect him. The libertarian position is expressed by Robby Soave at Reason:

These are gross, nonsensical statements (Asian names are better geared for integration than black names? What?). But to say that they have “no place in civil discourse” is going too far. Is hearing, contemplating, and rejecting his claims not a worthy exercise for university students?

The problem with higher education is that Harvard students are not exposed to the opinions of Professor David Duke, that they may wrestle with them to their intellectual profit.  How will they defend their mollycoddle anti-racism when confronted with an argument on the order of "nigras has funny names"? Liberalism has much to answer for.

You know, I'm beginning to think that these guys weren't really into Charlie Hebdo for the free speech part.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger reaction to Anders Breivik's Norwegian rampage. As is customary with these guys, they imagine themselves the aggrieved party, put upon by liberals who connect their politics with Breivik's just because -- well, their politics are Breivik's. If my local ward-heeler went on a mass-murder rampage, I wouldn't feel obliged to explain to the world that not all Democrats are mass murderers, especially on such thin evidence of slander as rightbloggers present. For a bunch of internet tough guys they sure are pissy and defensive.

Oh, and it strikes me that in all their complaining, they don't have a lot to say about the dozens of people who were murdered in cold blood. It's as if victims only become worthy of their interest when they're killed by Muslims.

UPDATE. Comments brilliant as usual; I especially appreciate BigHank53 linking to Charles P. Pierce's story on the Spokane would-be MLK Parade bomber, and other right-wing nutcases.

Meanwhile rightbloggers, including big ones like the Ole Perfesser Instapundit, continue to insist that they're the real victims here. The various defenses of Jennifer Rubin genuinely surprise me; Rubin was clearly, spectacularly wrong, yet her comrades echo her belligerent response that even non-Muslim violence is a reminder of Muslim violence as if it were a home truth rather than a non-sequitur. And Mark Steyn actually disappoints me; the incident seems to have spooked him off his usual stylish insouciance, and thrown him back upon gooberisms more appropriate to dimwits like Jonah Goldberg.

So, if a blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavian kills dozens of other blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavians, that’s now an “Islamophobic” mass murder? As far as we know, not a single Muslim was among the victims. Islamophobia seems an eccentric perspective to apply to this atrocity, and comes close to making the actual dead mere bit players in their own murder.

The killer explained at length that he considered leftists responsible for the Islamification of his country, and then he went out and killed a bunch of them. He clearly despises liberals and Muslims, and mass murder is his preferred mode of self-expression. It's easy to see why Norwegians worry that some other nut -- possibly also quoting Mark Steyn -- might decide to cut out the middleman.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Only recently heard this one. Billy Stewart's always cool,but dig the two-chord structure! Heavy.

•  Marc Thiessen, Washington Post:

By now, most Americans have heard of critical race theory. But many do not know just how radical or pernicious CRT is — because, as a new study from the American Enterprise Institute shows, the media does not explain its key tenets in its coverage. So I asked one of our nation’s preeminent historians, Princeton University professor Allen C. Guelzo, to explain CRT and why it is so dangerous.

Critical race theory, Guelzo says, is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s.

The fuck? 

It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded. Kant believed that “reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives” and so he set about “developing a theory of being critical of reason,” Guelzo says.

I don’t know which of these worthies dropped the ball here but describing The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason as “Being critical of reason” is like describing Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations as “questioning the wealth of nations.” 

But the critique of reason ended up justifying “ways of appealing to some very unreasonable things as explanations — things like race, nationality, class,” he says. Critical theory thus helped spawn totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century such as Marxism and Nazism…

I’m not an expert but have you ever known anyone who was not putting it on as a pedantic display who said they got into Marx via Kant? (As for Nazism, maybe he’s thinking of Fichte.) The Critiques are about time and space and categories and thing-in-itself and whatnot. It ain’t Points of Rebellion. 

The rest of the column by the Post’s second-worst columnist is the usual CRT Panic bullshit (yes, Thiessen invokes MLK). My guess is that he threaded in the highbrow stuff to appeal to rightwing cranks who learned about the Frankfurt School from Glenn Beck and will yell about it like the guy in the diner in The Birds going "It's the end of the world!" Why not? In the coalition of crackpots -- the anti-vaxx members of which are now bathing in Borax in an attempt to neutralize the effects of their mandated COVID shots -- there’s plenty of space for pseuds who think blaming liberalism on foreign philosophers makes it sound extra sinister.

•  Roy Edroso Breaks It Down Freebies today! There’s the course descriptions for Bari Weissamatta U., and a partial transcript of a Rittenhousean trial of another of another freedom fighter. 

OFF THE ROPES AND ON THE MEND.

Hey guys, just letting you know I’m out of the hospital. My gratitude to the folks at the NIH Clinical Center for once again taking such good care of me. It just makes me more fond than ever of big government, and more contemptuous of jail-Fauci science-is-witchcraft Republicans like Rod Dreher and Ross Douthat.

Healing is happening, though more slowly than it did when I was a pup. But dammit, I can still type! So far I’ve answered muster on all this week's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues – here’s a freebie, about the exciting new trend of Republican officials acting like mob bosses, insofar as their social disabilities allow. As I’ve said in the past, Ron DeSantis suffers especially in this regard:

The problem with DeSantis is, he may be too much of an obvious goon to translate as leader material beyond the borders of his corrupt bastion of Florida Men. He reminds me of minor gangsters in old movies as played by Sheldon Leonard and Mike Mazurki, except Leonard and Mazurki had presence and even charm — DeSantis is more like Rondo Hatton. It’s telling that he so consciously copies Trump’s body language; on the one hand it shows the requisite shamelessness, but on the other it also suggests a lack of inner resources. Once Trump’s out of the way — and he will need to be, for anyone else to advance — the new champion will have to have some style and swagger of his own, and if DeSantis can’t achieve that he’ll go down the way the minor Warner Brothers hoods did.

Meanwhile I see at the Wall Street Journal that Barton Swaim has chivalrously rushed to the defense of Clarence Thomas’ Sugar Nazi, Harlan Crow. Swaim starts (under a gentle drawing of Crow clearly meant to make him look like a more charming Noah Cross) by tut-tutting the “political left” for what Swaim portrays as its penchant for “delegitimation”:

The habits of delegitimation have become so familiar that it’s easy to forget how antidemocratic they are: political correctness and, more recently, cancel culture; the invention of “phobias”—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia—to characterize dissent as mental illness…

If you’re wondering how liberals got away with suggesting conservatives were stirring up fear and loathing of gays, Muslims, and trans people, you may have just awakened from a 20-year coma. 

…the wanton attribution of racism, misogyny, fascism and white supremacy; and of course the easy insinuation that any political figure of whom one disapproves is guilty of crimes.

Lately, of course, most accusations of Republican criminality are focused on Donald Trump, an obvious and widely-acknowledged crook. (By the way, somewhere Hillary “Lock Her Up” Clinton is laughing her ass off.) Swaim does mention Trump, but as a victim: He “rose to power by treating his adversaries exactly as they treated him, and indeed as they had treated George W. Bush: as de facto illegitimate.”  More sinned against than sinning! 

Swaim then travels to Crow’s estate for a tour and whattaya know, Crow’s got MLK and Lincoln memorabilia too, and he’s pals with Cornel West – see, it’s not just Nazis! Over sandwiches Crow tells Swaim how moderate he is – “I’m kind of a traditional George Bush type Republican… I’m moderately pro-choice—a first-trimester guy… So when people say I want to influence people on the court, I would say that if I were trying to do that, which I’m not, I’m not doing a very good job.” So Thomas and Crow can agree to disagree that people who aren’t them can have their rights taken away. It’s not like there’s anything important at stake. Just keep it civil, without delegitimation! 

Finally, I see Texas has gotten so gun crazy they’re mowing down cheerleaders, which in the Lone Star you would have thought were a protected species. What’s next, oil tycoons?

LIBERTARIAN OUTREACH ON GAY RIGHTS.

Hey, an NBA player says he's gay, great. This is something liberals and libertarians can agree on, right? Not if libertarians can help it! Matt Welch at Reason:

The Importance of Allowing People to Say That You Can’t Be a Gay Basketball Player and a Christian

He's talking about ESPN's Chris Broussard, who for the crime of criticizing the gay basketball player was beaten to death. Okay, not murdered, just beaten. Okay, not beaten, just criticized by people on Twitter, which is still censorship (because anything short of responding to Broussard's mouth-fart with "Intelligent people can disagree" and a pat on the back would be).

Broussard is predictably getting beaten to a rhetoric pulp on Twitter. And while I think today is a wonderful, watershed day for people (especially the artist formerly known as Ron Artest) to live as open and free as they wanna be, I agree with the New York Post editorial Robert George here: "Chris Broussard spoke what more than a few players feel. If such comments aren't expressed, a real conversation can't be had."

Actually America had this conversation for years. Thesis: "DIE FAGGOT!" Antithesis: (cries of pain). Fascist that I am, I don't see any point in reviving it.

And sometimes engaging with the I'm not ready to go that far just yet crowd brings out the best in activists. See, for example, Martin Luther King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."

MLK was glad people were opposing him -- in fact, he'd have been disappointed if people suddenly gave up and let him have what he wanted. Where'd be the fun in that? And getting assassinated was just an inevitable part of the process.

There is only one possible explanation for Welch's bizarre post: As I've been saying for years, libertarianism is just a hipper line extension of conservatism, the rightwing version of Budweiser Black Crown. So if liberals like something you'd imagine libertarians would approve, Reasonoids still have to maintain the anti-liberal brand positioning by bitching about it in a way the mouth-breathers can approve. The cleverer ones will do it by explaining how gay rights is statist, but with the kind of funding they have, there's really no need for a libertarian to be clever. Q.E.D.

NEXT WEEK: MLK VS. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.

I see some of the brethren are pimping a Jeff Jacoby column asserting not only that welfare recipients are all frauds and bums, but also that if FDR were around today, boy, he'd be against welfare too:

Is this any way to help the poor? FDR didn’t think so. In his annual message to Congress in 1935, President Roosevelt warned that “continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.” The father of the New Deal knew that “to dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of a sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.” 

It is a mark of how far we have declined that a political figure who dared to say such a thing today would be denounced as heartless, a hater of the poor, even a racist — as Newt Gingrich found out when he tried to make an issue of soaring food stamp rates during the presidential campaign.

Newt Gingrich, the FDR of his time!

By the way, nine years later FDR proposed a Second Bill of Rights, the theme of which was not to throw all the bums off welfare, but to guarantee every American, among other things, "the right to a useful and remunerative job.. the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation... the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health..." Maybe Jacoby heard about this, but couldn't believe it was true -- not his Newt Roosevelt!

I don't usually pay attention to Jacoby but I have to admit, anyone who can combine a Nooningtonian personalization/distortion of history and the viciousness toward the poor of a Rob Port belongs in the asshole hall of fame. (BTW, the title refers to this.)

SERENDIPITY. My old colleague Steven Thrasher has a story in the Voice about wingnuts gone wild, called "White America Has Lost Its Mind." Today the world has been very graciously corroborating his thesis -- first, with news of ACORN pimp James O'Keefe's planned sexual harassment of a CNN reporter, and then with rightblogger reactions to Thrasher's article.

The best of the lot take the traditional we'll-tell-you-who-the-real-racists-are position. "The author of this RACIST column works at NPR," yells Reliapundit. "If you substitute 'BLACK' for 'white,' you'd be fired for racism." Cripes, these black people are always getting away with shit.

Reliapundit also claims he and his imaginary friends aren't racist because "We'd've voted for Powell in 2000 - and elected him." I don't know why he's bragging on that, because in 2008 this is what he thought about Colin Powell:

ONCE AGAIN, COLIN POWELL PROVES HE'S A BIG FAT JERK

That big fat jerk Powell refused to go after Saddam in 1991. This was the primary mistake which led us to have to complete the job in 2003.

That big fat jerk Powell made an ass of himself with an awful WMD presentation at the UNSC.

That big fat jerk Powell got "played" by de Villepin at the UNSC and failed to get a second UNSCR in 2002...

Maybe Reliapundit means he would have supported Powell because he knew Powell's horrible record of failure would have made it impossible for any other black guy to get elected for years afterward.

At Big Hollywood Dana Loesch includes among her tales of Democratic racism "Obama: Blacks are a ‘Mongrel’ People," which I suppose means that liberal bigotry is so pervasive that even Obama hates black people -- either that, or Loesch has a spreadsheet called DEMS = RACIST and never checks her data before she dumps it. She also says Thrasher "has no clue what he’s talking about" regarding Shirley Sherrod, then goes on to explain that the civil rights worker was not misrepresented by the strangely-edited tape of her speech -- though even Andrew Breitbart admitted it was out of context -- but revealed to be racist against white people. Well, I suppose there are people who still think Dreyfus was guilty, too.

The moral of the story is, you can be fortunate in your enemies as well as in your friends. Congrats Steve!

UPDATE. Reason gives the libertarian response: We're not nuts, you're nuts!

UPDATE 2. Special guest appearance in comments by Reliapundit, who explains that he's a "registered democrat since 1974" who marched with MLK and the Black Panthers. What a long, strange trip it's been! He also claims "70% of the usa hates obama," and rebuffs several requests that he produce a citation for this finding.

STOP THE PRESSES.


This country sucks.

Honorable mention: The headline on Brian Hughes' article at the Washington Examiner, "Obama still faces daunting challenges as Libya changes," is even better in the paper edition I received outside the Metro station* this morning: "Obama challenged by chaos in Libya." It's time to pull out of that quagmire, which will never be the success our led-from-the-front victories such as Iraq have been.

* Oh, yeah, the quake: Kia and I were downtown. As a former Californian, she was unfazed (she says such a dinky temblor would rate a two-inch squib in the Cali papers). It was my first, and I'm glad the Earth was gentle. All office drones got the rest of the day off, so we had a few drinks at the St. Regis and went down to look at the MLK Memorial:



Not sure I like the hewn-from-the-rock effect -- it's very literal, and puts me in mind of a Ray Harryhausen special effect in which King bursts out of the rock and inches forward, roaring, as the earth shakes. But the quotes along the wall are effective, and King's face is very good; when we first saw it, it looked stern and schoolmasterish, but it softens as the light and angle change.

The other visitors seemed to like it fine. Don't know what they thought about the aesthetics, but they were certainly happy to see it there.

LIBERTARIANS IN THEIR OWN WORDS. This Rand Paul thing just gets better and better. Now Reason's Matt Welch has informed the troops that the expected liberal attack on the Son of the REVOLution has come to pass, "using as prime evidence his recent statements in opposition to the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act."

The comments are fucking delightful. It's like Free Republic for the high school debate team.

First, there's a lengthy discussion over whether or not to buy gold.

When the Wealth Producers get back on track, some -- perhaps hoping like Rand to convince onlookers that they too would march with MLK in defense of his so-called "rights" -- explain that in our modern, racism-free Valhalla, the Free Market would fail to reward segregated businesses: "Even if an owner wanted to run one, nearly all white people would refuse to eat at it, and it would go out of business." One says that if he were black, instead of "not knowing" a racist storeowner is "saying 'damn n-----' under his breath while he serves you, patronize his business and give him money," he'd rather the guy identify himself as racist; then, the thought-experimental black would be discriminated against, but he would live to see his white neighbors drive the racist out of business, perhaps with the aid of Superman. It would make a lovely After-School Special.

They also bitterly lament that, despite their solicitude toward African-Americans, the stupid liberals will call them racists anyway. This I suppose makes them moderate libertarians.

More hardcore commenters just get right to the nut -- if businessmen want a black-free establishment, Congress shall make no law! Some take the logical next step, and argue that the Civil Rights Act should be repealed ("If it is possible that the Civil Rights Act was the right thing to do in 1964, isn't it also possible that things have improved enough in nearly fifty years that we can now go back to respecting personal autonomy and property rights like we did before?").

Favorite isolated incidents:

[Joe] Scarborough sounds more like a liberal the longer he hangs out at MSNBC.

So Rand Paul thinks that it is okay to ask minorities to help support businesses with their taxes (to pay for police/court protection, roads, infrastructure, etc.) yet be prohibited from being able to patronize them?
They PAY taxes? News to me . . .

This is one of those things that is better left alone. Just lie about an answer and be done with it.

That last cowboy seems to have caught on. It remains to be seen if Rand has. (UPDATE: Apparently!)

I doubt this will scuttle Rand's campaign -- it is, after all, Kentucky. But if the incident informs more people of what libertarianism's really about, it will have been worth it.

UPDATE. James Joyner pitches in. Sure, maybe things were bad for black people back then....

The problem, circa 1964, was that there really was not right to freely associate in this manner in much of the country... More importantly, it meant that, say, a black traveling salesman couldn’t easily conduct his business without an in-depth knowledge of which hotels, restaurants, and other establishments catered to blacks.

...but now we have the internet, so we can get rid of the Civil Rights Act and make something like Yelp for black traveling salesmen seeking Jim Crow accommodations. Maybe we can call it HALP!

UPDATE 2: The Poor Man has the transcript of "Rand Paul’s speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Birmingham, Alabama in April, 1963 (hypothetical)."

MARXIST LUTHER KING, EXPOSED! American conservatism has entered a very weird phase. We've talked here about their recent revival of racist tropes (or as I like to call it, the old Ooga Booga). Obnoxious as it is, it has another extraordinary feature; it represents a sharp departure from normal rightwing practice. Though they have always had obvious racists like Pat Buchanan amongst them, conservatives have also (at least since racism became somewhat uncool) maintained certain "I'm no racist, look at this non-racist thing I do" gambits. You may remember, for example, how they've bragged on the few black people at Tea Party rallies as proof that theirs is an Afro-friendly movement.

A longer-lived staple of conservative anti-racist cred has been their effusions over Martin Luther King, Jr. Yes, back in the old days they hated King ("For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country" -- National Review. More here!). But when things got a little hot for them, bigotry-wise, they shifted to declaring King a good conservative; on every MLK Day, in and among their many confused tributes, you'll see many that insist King's vision of a color-blind society is exactly what conservatives have been trying to do all along. Then they grab parasols and handkerchiefs, burst into "When The Saints Go Marchin' In," and dance around. It's a grisly sight.

But that may be changing. Get a load of this editorial by Jeffrey T. Kuhner in the Washington Times, the Moonie wingnut paper:

Undoubtedly, King deserves much praise...

Yet, there was a dark side to King and it should not be ignored. Its effects continue to plague our society. Contrary to popular myth, the Baptist minister was a hypocrite who consistently failed to uphold his professed Christian standards. His rampant adultery...

Boy, nobody tell Kuhner about Jack Kennedy, that doorty Irishman! These ancient accusations are the sort of thing white supremacists like to play with, but which leave most of us who are under 80 cold, so Kuhner moves on to the sort of thing everyone in 2011 is worried about:

Moreover, King was a radical leftist. He promoted socialism, pacifism and the appeasement of totalitarian communism. He opposed the Vietnam War...

At home, he called for heavy public spending, urban renewal and a cradle-to-grave nanny state... racial quotas... affirmative action and billions in welfare assistance... identity politics...

This is the point in the peroration where a less self-possessed demagogue might start yelling about welfare queens and Cadillacs. But we're not there yet, brothers and sisters (and Jeffrey T. Kuhner may not get there with you, though not for lack of trying); instead he goes here:

King’s leftism ultimately betrayed his original civil rights creed.

Because affirmative action, set-asides, etc. Also, "King’s socialism also convinced many blacks to adopt welfare liberalism."

Gotta give Kuhner credit: This bit about civil rights hurting black people is wingnut SOP of long standing, but it takes some stones to suggest that Martin Luther King is the real racist.

But conservatism has gotten crazy enough that you can try something like that, it seems. Any day now we'll see them burning effigies of Alexander Hamilton because he sold us out to the mercantilists (substitute "Jews" in some jurisdictions). Or maybe Lincoln -- I mean, what was that Civil War about? Statism and giving black people a new bunch of so-called "rights"! The boys at Free Republic have been all over that shit for years; they used to be considered fringe, but compared to what's coming, they're Rockefeller Republicans.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about how conservatives celebrated MLK Day by beating up King's old comrade John Lewis.

The column came too soon, alas, to cover as alicublog has done in the past the more general rightwing Martin Luther King Day tributes. But some of the brethren stepped up early. At Laura Ingraham's LifeZette, Lee Habeeb, whose gibberish has been examined here before, claims "the media" doesn't want us to know that King was a man of God.

"Leaving God out of Martin Luther King's life," a friend once told me, "is like leaving naked young women out of Hugh Hefner's. It's like leaving the story of segregation out of Jackie Robinson's."

Yet the filthy media takes the segregation from Jackie Robinson's story and puts it in King's too, which is double-dipping!

But that won't stop the media from redacting any and all references to the source of King's inspiration. You'll hear endless references to Dr. Martin Luther King this week — but never to Reverend King.

The lesson is that King has been hijacked by race hustlers who think he was about equality or social justice or some shit. Similarly, at National Review Ian Smith says King was a fan of Cesar Chavez, so he would have been against illegal immigrants, just like You Know Who, and that's his Real Message, never mind this race nonsense. He looked forward to the day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by The Conscience of a Conservative!

Somehow these guys never bring up that King advocated a guaranteed national income.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: MLKING IT EDITION.

You believe this shit was 20 years ago?

We got a lot of snow here in the Northeast and today I went back and forth from my workdesk at intervals to shovel the stuff off our sidewalk, lest by storm’s end it got two feet deep and encrusted in ice. It was a nice change of pace from my accursed day job, though I imagine if public works were my day job I’d get as sick of it (or, more likely, seriously injured in the commission of it) pretty quickly. So kudos to our local DPW! (I am also grateful that, being on the side of truth and light, I am not even figuratively required to shovel shit at you good people.) 

One cool thing: We get on well with our neighbors, so I took a few minutes to do their walk as well. A while back I went out and found they’d shoveled a layer of our walk. Sometimes it’s nice living in Baltimore! 

But you must be impatient for the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies! Well, Martin Luther King Day – the one day when everyone trots out the One Quote Everyone Knows, Something About Contents – was Monday so is definitionally old news, I guess, but I have an essay that’s still fresh on why conservatives who usually try to suck up to (dead) MLK are starting to denounce him instead. I guess you could file this under Masks Coming Off. As mentioned in the post, the years of tedious “King was a conservative” posts have always been wearisome to folks like you and me, but now that the right is thoroughly MAGAfied, it seems they’ve gotten sick of it too, and are going back to their overtly racist roots. It’s a relief in a way! 

As for the second freebie, here, enjoy this accurate transcript of Vivek Ramaswamy lobbying Tubby for the VP gig. It’s a killer! 

A FAR GONE CONCLUSION. Well, I asked for a new meme to replace the "Obama plots to lose in 2012 and come back in future gay America" one, and Jeffrey T. Kuhner at the Washington Times has delivered: By endorsing gay marriage, Obama is committing "political suicide" on purpose because he hates this country and, with this "latest onslaught on traditional America," means to kill it once and for all, even if he has to sacrifice himself to do it.  He's our first suicide bomber President!

The ultimate aim of the radical left has been to destroy religion - especially Western Christendom. Once a religion dies, so does the culture and civilization it spawned. America is at a crossroads, enmeshed in a cultural war with homosexual advocates like Mr. Obama who are determined to strike at the very nexus of our civilization.

Give him this much -- Kuhner, "a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute" (and author of a 2011 WashTimes article that celebrated the dedication of the MLK Memorial by informing us on what a commie bastard King was) is little inclined to play the compassionate-conservative games his comrades go for. At one point he tells us:

The liberal media, such as the New York Times, consistently portray anti-gay-marriage advocates as bigots. This is nonsense. Most Americans are neither intolerant nor bigoted.

Just when you're expecting to hear him defend that claim of toleration with Dick Cheney and the boys at the Log Cabin Club, Kuhner goes with this:

Every major religious faith - Christianity, Islam, Orthodox Judaism - teaches that homosexuality is an abomination. Homosexual behavior, especially sodomy, is unnatural and immoral.

That's a choice not an echo right there.

While I never had much respect for the Washington Times (they used to let John Podhoretz review movies, for God's sake), lately they seem to have entered a particularly degenerate era. I assume they're just keeping up with their readership.

INDIA DINKS. I hate to bore you good people with repetition, but the Obama India trip has drawn more interesting commentary. The excursion seems, by the usual measures, to have gone well, what with the crowd-pleasing offer of a permanent UN Security Council seat, the juicy trade deals and all. It has even been praised by a writer at the American Enterprise Institute blog ("eased export restrictions on several Indian companies, and facilitated closer talks between private-sector leaders in both countries... There’s much more work to be done, but this was a good all-around effort. GRADE: A-"). If this, along with the major arms deal Obama pumped on the trip, seems ominous to regular readers, I would remind them that the President is a traditional Democrat, alas, rather than a socialist wrecker as advertised daily in rightwing blogs.

Speaking of rightbloggers, they continue to see the thing through their own special prism. Fausta's Blog sees Obama's call for Indians to "get involved in public service" as a call for "more bureaucrats," and denounces Obama's "distaste for private enterprise," which might surprise the business leaders he took with him on the trip.

Actually those leaders are part of the problem, says Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek, as their presence suggests that Obama's approach is to "bestow favors and privileges on politically connected firms." This seems a good point about partisan oligarchy, until Boudreaux explains that "these favors and privileges, such as tariffs and export subsidies, invariably oblige consumers to pay more – either directly in the form of higher prices, or indirectly in the form of higher taxes – for goods and services." The elimination of tariffs from American international trade policy would be interesting, as we haven't had such a policy since the founding of the Republic, due to the statism of the Founders. India might like it, though, since they haven't eaten enough American jobs. While we're at it we might as well stop making them irradiate their mangoes; bugs should be as free from government regulation as capital.

Next on the list of outrages is Obama's visit to the Gandhi Museum. It was hypocritical, for one thing, says theblogprof: "Was Ghandi pro-infanticide like Obama is?" he roars. (I'd be very interested to know what other Gandhi prescriptions theblogprof endorses -- it's a cinch he wouldn't approve the Mahatma's physical culture regimen.) "I knew there was something I never liked about that Gandhi guy," snarls Angry White Dude. neo-neocon agrees, though in daintier language: "History is history, and Gandhi’s is hardly all sweetness and light." She quotes: "All sense of proportion had vanished when [Gandhi] advocated non-violence not as a technique of moral pressure by a weaker on a stronger party, but as a form of masochistic surrender…" Clearly by his endorsement Obama wishes the same for all of us, and the arms sale he also endorsed was some kind of Alinskyite diversion tactic.

Obama also gave the Gandhi memorial "a piece of white stone from [Martin Luther] King Jr's memorial at Washington DC. It was set on a small black base that had the presidential seal and Obama's signature embossed on it," which Weasel Zippers reports as "Obama Gifts Gandhi Museum With Pet Rock From MLK Museum."

And of course there's the tried and true OBAMA BOWS! "Skreee," says Freedom Eden. "Skreeeeeeeee."

And so to Indonesia, about which visit National Review's Daniel Foster affects concern: "You know what seems a bad idea to me?" he says. "Publishing POTUS’s itinerary, right down to motorcade routes, during his visit to a country with a long history of Jihadist attacks on Western targets." His concern is touching.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about Beckapalooza. The distinguishing features of the rightblogger coverage, I found, were 1.) a conviction that this allegedly apolitical demo proved America was on their side (and no one was really buying the apolitical angle, as press coverage showed; it was universally acknowledged as a ploy, which made the rigor with which the fake neutrality was observed especially fascinating); and, 2.) an unshakeable awareness that, despite their best efforts, no one is buying Beck as the new MLK and teabaggery as the new civil rights movement, which irritates them no end, and reanimates their rage over the many unfair advantages enjoyed by black people in this country, even dead ones.

I did watch Beck's speech and I have to say, America's taste in demagogues has deteriorated. He comports himself like an overgrown child, all appetite, talking about dark days and civil wars and other bleak subjects but bouncing around like he just shotgunned a packet of Kool-Aid and now hopes to talk the crowd into giving him cake. That anyone would follow him to Washington in August says more about the parlous state of the nation than anything in his incoherent speech.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about what I like to call the Nixonization of Occupy Wall Street. Catchy, no?

UPDATE. Reagarding a photo of protesters with a "Class War" sign -- which might shock the Little Old Lady from Dubuque, if no one else -- Ole Perfesser Instapundit lays on the bullshit:

And Reuters ran this pic, but I doubt many newspapers front-paged it as they would have a similar photo of masked Tea Party protesters proclaiming some sort of war...

Yeah, the MSM commissioned it and ran it -- but they didn't run it big enough to suit the Perfesser, the Perfesser bets! Well, I don't remember seeing this one on the cover of the New York Post, proving the rightwing media is preje-ma-diced, infinity:



I'm not sure why Reynolds didn't just pretend the picture was from Zombietime, and that Reuters tried to Photoshop it to look like Rick Perry was stupid or something -- it's not as if his minions would notice.

UPDATE 2. Give the commenters some! Hunger Tallest Palin reminds me that the whole thing about sleeping-bag sex, which Tina Korbe claims would incense MLK if he were alive and Thomas Sowell, was more or less claimed against King and his peeps, too -- in fact, some of the brethren still run that game ("Those four days on the road had turned into an habitual sex orgy by the time [the Freedom Riders] reached the capitol").

And D. Sidhe, yes, I know who Kalle Lasn is, but so what? The protesters are not the cat's-paws of Kalle Lasn, nor of George Soros, nor any of the other ooh-scary figures these operatives are trying to stick to it.

Fave one-liner from DocAmazing: "I don't expect originality from these loons, but a shot-by-shot remake of Joe?"

SOTU WHAT? There's not much to say about tonight's State of the Union address. As President Bush sees it, there are no Constitutional concerns with the NSA, Gulf hurricane victims need school vouchers, and homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to get married. This we knew. As for the "addiction to foreign oil" bit, I am old enough to remember the promise of hydrogen cars in the 2003 SOTU, so I know it means nothing.

I might ask why the list of countries to which we will inevitably deliver democracy did not include Cuba, but what's the point? Apart from the grisly image of aged and infirm Coretta Scott King embracing MLK with his throat shot open, this speech had no literary substance whatever. Leave it for the dogs to pick over.

MAD MAILBAG: EPISODE ONE. Busy again, so I invented a new category that allows me to recycle other people's work and make it look like I did something. Hehndeed!

As a break from the tedious forensic work of isolating the central fallacies in wingnut columns, we go straight for the cheap laffs with Mad Mailbag -- celebrating comment-box crackpots and their prose-poetic descriptions of the alternative universes in which they dwell.


Today's winner comes from Winds of Change, in a response to Armed Liberal's MLK day complaint that liberals don't get King right.

As a quick scan of sites like Roger L. Simon's and (pre-hejira) Michael Totten's shows, the usual fan base for pro-war sorta-usedtobe-whatever-liberal guys like AL consists of conservatives delighted to hear smack spoken by an insider against the hated liberals.

But some in the crowd are not convinced that the former fellow-traveller has truly repented; and when the audience has thinned out, they step to the podium and, as the speaker is packing up his papers, lean over and whisper in his ear:

Armed Liberal said in post #6: "While I think that the Left has foolishly abandoned both the moral center and style of discourse used by Dr. King, I'd bet that it would resonate still in the right voice. I'm looking for that voice..."

Armed Liberal, I hope that you never find it. Because three are some people who are responsive to that voice. They are Christian, conservative and the backbone of the pro-life cause.

The Left, which the voice that you are looking for would serve, is committed to "choice". When all the oily rhetoric about "choice", "quality of life" and so on comes to a practical point, it is the point of a hypodermic needle piercing the heart of a viable human foetus, to inject it with potassium chloride, to kill it. A voice for the Left is a voice that facilitates the slaughter of helpless human beings.

I think that what you want is a Saruman the White, using the finest words to get people to agree to the worst actions.

I hope you never find him.

With friends like these, who needs glassy-eyed stalkers?

P.S. I also propose a codicil to Godwin's Law: any political argument availing wizards, wookies, elves, necromancers, or persons named Something The Something is prima facie bullshit.

OBJECTIVELY PRO-AHMADINEJAD. Oxblog complains that the Washington Post is too soft on the Iranian Prime Minister. No, really:

The [Post] article is basically a summary of Ahmadinejad's press conference in New York. Even when he says things that are fairly absurd or insulting, you don't get a counterpoint from any of his critics, domestic or foreign.

The headline is "Bush Would Kill for That Kind of Press Coverage."

Demurrers follow; "...when you are a charter member of the Axis of Evil, journalists assume that no one will believe anything you say..." etc. Well, yes. Still, the author says that "any article about the Iranian government should also let us know about the ongoing efforts of the Iranian opposition to stop rampant human rights violations in Iran and bring down the clerical dictatorship." Because, one supposes, people who take the trouble to read a Washington Post back-pager about a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad press conference might not have heard about that.

Still, better safe than sorry, I guess; with all those college kids wearing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad t-shirts and taking summer trips to Iran to help the mullahs stone adulterers, it's imperative that we nip these false impressions right in the bud.

(The author also attempts to make a parallel case of the Post's coverage of Rep. John Lewis. "[Lewis'] status as a 'civil rights icon' ensures that his argument will carry the presumption of truth," he complains. Lewis was Chairman of the SNCC from 1963 to 1966, and a keynote speaker at MLK's March on Washington, which might lead some people to take his thoughts on race seriously, further demonstrating the insidiousness of the liberal media.)