About those mean lefty types
Feb. 12th, 2005 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumI'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.
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.
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.
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Suggested reading
Date: 2005-02-13 06:25 am (UTC)It's an investigation of pro-Axis (mostly German-linked) groups in the US, including their ties to respectable conservatives.
Re: Suggested reading
Date: 2005-02-13 06:41 am (UTC)TK
Re: Suggested reading
Date: 2005-02-14 01:47 am (UTC)Re: Suggested reading
Date: 2005-02-14 03:45 pm (UTC)What makes Dana so noteworthy is that he was breaking the law by engaging in extralegal diplomacy, trying to get the Taliban more recognition than the US Gov't was giving them.
TK
Did you see that about the Wa Times' ties to supremacism?
Date: 2005-02-13 12:27 pm (UTC)(I wonder if it was the insult qua insult - how dare you peons mock us? - or the fact that the implication of cracker/honkey is one of absurdity, vulgarity, and low social standing, just like PWT.)
They might have a little bit of a point about Michael Moore, except that to say the words "Michael Moore" in a forum like dKos is to throw a golden apple into the feast. Even the people who really like him, there are a lot who will criticize his flaws regardless. Which you don't see with the decades-long fawning over the Limbutt by the millionaires and their paid pundits like Buckley and Spawn of Buckley.
One of the other funny things about the Ward Churchill affaire is that as commenters at Berube's noted, the response of most of us is "Ward who?" Tu Quoque! sort of loses its impact if you have to explain who the guy we're supposed to disavow is...
This may also actually reflect more projection, I've realized. As you can tell from my posts, the Right-wing intelligensia really is that small and cliquish, where everybody knows everybody, or at least a sibling or spouse or child, and all spend the time discussing the same things in the same circles and writing for each others magazines and guest-lecturing at each others colleges. The overlap between the author and staff lists on the mastheads is considerable.
So they may just not realize that in the larger world outside, it doesn't work that way...
Re: Did you see that about the Wa Times' ties to supremacism?
Date: 2005-02-13 03:57 pm (UTC)TK
separate, yes
Date: 2005-02-13 04:31 pm (UTC)The stock routine, "so what if we burned heretics at the stake, the Saudis won't let us even build churches there, this proves that Christianity is (and was) superior to all other religions, even though we're trying to prevent the building of mosques in England and Italy," that they've been whipping out for decades (also "there are Protestant pedophiles too!" and "but Stalin killed more people than we did") is another form of this argument.
In this vein of appeasement and reactivity to the unreasonable aggressor, I was also pleased to see Dean stop playing the "have you stopped beating your wife game" and rap the SCLM in the teeth yesterday, by refusing to dignify the "Some People Say" (you're a frothing madman/out to destroy the sun/eat babies) style of questioning with answers, categorically.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-13 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-13 03:58 pm (UTC)A double standard is an external failing treating one group of people differently from another.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-02-13 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-13 06:27 pm (UTC)It's hard to distill that remarks' meaning from its context.
Are you attributing these sentiments to Ward Churchill, and saying there's a kernel of truth in them?
Or are you saying this argument is the simple truth, and that Churchill's statements about 9/11 were influenced by it?
If it's the latter, I have to disagree with you. I don't think that US foreign policy is irrelevant.
But I think it's also inaccurate to overlook how threatening "our freedom" -- e.g. equality between the sexes, a secular lifestyle, the ability to make your own destiny instead of being forced along a traditional path -- is to Islamic extremists, whether Taliban, Al Qaeda or Khomeinist.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-13 06:45 pm (UTC)And our freedom, while threatening in the abstract, is not a concern for most of the Muslim world, and not even for most of the sorts who resort to terrorism.
If we weren't seen as trying to export it; or to expose them to it, they could care less how we go to hell.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-02-14 03:17 pm (UTC)Alas, there aren't more people who are capable and willing to apply critical thinking skills to statements of those in "authority".