About those mean lefty types

I'm seeing it again. The idea that somehow those who are on "left" are unfair, mean and overly aggressive.

This is probably too ambitious and will wander, I beg your indulgence in advance.

The present examples are the Gannon/Guckert mess, the criticism of Thomas Woods.

We've also seen some blatant hypocrisies on the part of those attacking Eusan Jordan and Ward Churchill. I'll deal more with with those after the first bits.


The worst thing about the Gannon/Guckert mess isn't that he was forced to leave the White Housel; after he pulled a Gary Hart and dared people to out him. No the real problem is that he was allowed to walk in and out of the White House for two years under either an assumed name, or with the conniviance of the White House, who chose to let him, and him alone, use a false name.

He didn't get paid for the things he wrote, and no one knows how he paid his bills while he was living in Washington.

So there was a lot of stuff to get upset about. It's amusing that the website he was writing for has made him an unperson (so if you want to read what he wrote, to better judge whether his qualifications [and he had a pass to the Republican Convention] were enough to justify his being allowed to fake a hard pass, which the White House admits he was never going to get.

Thomas Woods, well he's got a lot of explaining to do. The summa of it his book "The Politically Correct Guide to American History" Regnery Publishing, Inc. (December, 2004) is that history, as taught is wrong. Why? Because, "most textbooks and popular history books are written by left-wing academic historians who treat their biases as fact."

But as Eric Muller points out Woods says, "In fact, my book leaves out a lot. I freely admit that. The book had to be 80,000 words; how could it not leave out a lot? . . . The point of my book is to focus on areas that are either neglected or hopelessly mangled by the typical text."


Muller has several posts which address it, but as he says the book is so sweeping, so broad in it's allegations that to address them all is more work than any ten people could do.

So one looks to what Woods is arguing for, and where his philosophical past indicates he came to his distortions.

Woods, and his apologists, claim this is unfair. They say his associations with racist and Neo-Conderate, and white supremecist groups is irrelevant to understanding his work.

Which leads to the Churchill and Jordan flaps.

Churchill made some over the top statements about 9/11. There is a kernal of valid ideas in there (that we ought to realise the people who attacked us did it as a result of things we've done. Not that it makes it right, but it wasn't some random thing, and it wasn't because they hate, "our freedom.")

It was wrong, and even offensive. But unless the comments of a host of right-wing academics are to be condemned, and they threatened with the loss of tenure, then the bloviating nonsense about Churchill is just a self-serving political hack job, meant to make professors think twice before saying anything which isn't supportive of the, present, administration.

For a discussion of this see Orcinus goes into detail, but I'll borrow his abstract. For details, go there and follow the links.

-- James Everett Kibler, a University of Georgia English professor. A founder of the secessionist and white-supremacist League of the South, Kibler is mostly noted for his outspoken admiration for defenders of slavery and white upper-class rule.

-- Thomas DiLorenzo, an economics professor at Loyola College in Baltimore, who promotes a historical view of Abraham Lincoln as a wicked man "secretly intent on destroying states' rights and building a massive federal government."

-- Clyde Wilson, a University of South Carolina history professor. Wilson is another League of the South founder, and remains an unapologetic neo-Confederate. He says the only thing wrong with The Birth of a Nation is that it was too sympathetic to Lincoln.

-- Donald Livingston, a philosophy professor at Emory University. He has recently been focusing his work on "the philosophical meaning of secession." According to the SPLC, at a 2003 "Lincoln Reconsidered" conference, "he said that 'evil is habit-forming' and no habit is as evil as believing that Lincoln acted out of good motives."

And that's just the currently active neo-Confederates working in Southern universities. Some of those no longer active in academia include Grady McWhiney, now retired as a University of Alabama professor;

Outside the South, there are a number of problematic professors of various kinds, notably eugenics sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.

These include Kevin MacDonald, a Cal State-Long Beach evolutionary psychologist who testified on behalf of David Irving at his libel trial in London. MacDonald has argued "that anti-Semitism can be understood as a natural byproduct of a Darwinian strategy for Jewish survival," and insists that "Jewish behavior must be part of any adequate explanation of the recurrent persecution of Jews."

Then there was Glayde Whitney, a Florida State University psychology professor who liked to teach his students the basic precepts of white supremacy, i.e., that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Whitney also was a subscriber to Holocaust-denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Most notably, he was closely aligned with David Duke, the notorious white supremacist, and wrote the foreword to one of his racist screeds. Whitney died in 2002, much to chagrin of right-wing extremists everywhere.

Eason Jordan was just hounded out of his job because he said American troops were targeting journalists. It appears what he said wasn't as clear as it ought to have been. He says he meant to say it seemed they were talking about, or even targeting Arab journalists. If that's what he said, I can well believe it, because I heard people saying reporters from AL Jazeera and Al Arabiya were, if not actually on the side of terrorists, they were aiding and abetting, by telling another version of events, and we ought to shoot them.

On the flip side, Ann Coulter still has work. Hell, she's still praised, after she said that the Army really ought to be killing reporters. This is, mind you, nothing new for Coulter, she said McVeigh ought to have blown up the New York Times, then he would have been doing us a favor. She has also said some liberals need to be killed, "so they know they can die."

And that is part of a greater meme, that those who are against anything the Right is for, are not just in opposition, but are traitors, actively working against the country, even to accusations that they are in league with terrorists.

And this isn't just the fringe elements posting in itty-bitty blogs like mine, no this is "respectable and balanced" (I've seen that sentiment) Glenn Reynolds Instapundit however (though he denies it, here I'd like to, because I am fundamentally a decent guy, give him the benefit of the doubt, but other things he's said in the not so recent past make it hard to accept his protestation, as the Bard said, "methinks the lady doth protest too much"),but even if I take Mr. Reynolds claims that he was only talking about Europeans on the left, at face value, he isn't decrying (as the Left is supposed to do with Jordan, and Churchill, and everyone else who says things less than flattering of the Gov't) things like Fourth Estate or Fifth Column or Jonah Goldberg saying Juan Cole would give money to the Al Asqa Martyrs.

If there's anything I hate more than hypocrisy, it's double standards.