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When in Doubt , bring out the Race Card
Of course, anyone that is not on board with the WON’s policies is a racist. It is not like anyone can disagree with his lack luster Porkulus, Pandering to every Left Wing constituency, or his absence of any kind of Foreign Policy. It has to be racism.
Also check out Dana’s post
Thomas Hearings Shame the Dems – not Vice Versa
Today I heard Rush cite this article in the Wall Street Journal On-line Opinion Journal feature "Best of the Web Today". It’s a great article by James Tarranto about the new trashing people are doing of Justice Thomas – claiming that he a bitter man for no reason. Rush’s money quote:
"They imagine him to be "angry" and "bitter" because he holds up a mirror to the darkness in their own souls."
Here’s the whole thing – he’s got it nailed.
BY JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, October 4, 2007 2:51 p.m.
Here Is a Strange and Bitter Crop
In the coverage of and commentary about Justice Clarence Thomas’s new memoir, "My Grandfather’s Son" (buy it from the OpinionJournal bookstore), a predictable theme has emerged: that Justice Thomas is a "bitter" and "angry" man, who really has no reason to feel that way. After all, as a USA Today editorial sneers, "Are we meant to feel sympathy for the plight of a Yale-educated Supreme Court justice with enormous power, long summer holidays and seven-figure book contracts?"Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Perfectly encapsulating this attitude is a letter to the editor that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times (second letter):
If Justice Clarence Thomas had lost his bid in 1991 to be appointed to the Supreme Court as a result of Anita Hill’s testimony about his behavior as her supervisor, it might be understandable that he remembers that testimony with anger and bitterness. However, he was appointed in spite of Professor Hill’s allegations.
It seems that Justice Thomas has spent the last 16 years reliving that testimony and nurturing his wounds, as he reports in his memoir, "My Grandfather’s Son." Perhaps no one warned the Supreme Court nominee that those hearings would be political and acrimonious.
To Justice Thomas, I say: You received the appointment you sought. You are being "touchy" and overreacting to "slights." It is time to move on. The country needs you to focus your energy, attention and intelligence on the work of the Supreme Court.
Janet G. Puente
Newtown, Pa., Oct. 2, 2007
A point of personal privilege: We know Justice Thomas, having met him in 1993; and the caricature of him as "angry" and "bitter" is wildly at odds with our own experience. We have always found him to be warm, gracious and avuncular. The last time we saw him, at the Heritage Foundation on Monday, he was ebullient, smiling widely and laughing often. When we arrived, he greeted us with a vigorous handshake and a "Hey, buddy!" If he is bitter and angry, he certainly hides it well.
This is not to say that he has always been at peace with himself and the world. As a younger man, he went through periods of rage and confusion, as many intelligent and intense young men do. Yet his memoir–which ends in 1991, with his taking a seat on the Supreme Court–is not a lament but a story of struggle and redemption.
It has its bitter chapters, and the bitterest is Chapter 9, "Invitation to a Lynching," in which, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent Thomas’s appointment to the high court, a disgruntled former employee named Anita Hill reappears on the scene with tales of ribaldry. This was a bitter experience not, as USA Today and Janet Puente smugly suggest, because it was an effort to thwart Thomas’s ambitions, but because it was an attempt to destroy him personally. As Thomas testified on Oct. 11, 1991:
I think that this today is a travesty. I think that it is disgusting. I think that this hearing should never occur in America. This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation.
How would any member on this committee, any person in this room, or any person in this country would like sleaze said about him or her in this fashion? Or this dirt dredged up and this gossip and these lies displayed in this manner, how would any person like it?
The Supreme Court is not worth it. No job is worth it. I am not here for that. I am here for my name, my family, my life, and my integrity. I think something is dreadfully wrong with this country when any person, any person in this free country would be subjected to this.
This is not a closed room. There was an FBI investigation. This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace.
And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.
Justice Thomas says that Hill’s claims were false. We believe him because we know him to be a man of character and integrity. Also because there was no evidence to substantiate her claims, because (as National Review Online’s Matthew Franck points out) his corroborating witnesses were persuasive, and because, as we noted Tuesday, her statements since the release of his book reinforce his portrayal of her and undermine her credibility further.
You are under no obligation to believe him or to disbelieve her. But no one has suggested that her charges were substantial enough to hold up in court, even civil court. To be sure, Senate confirmation is a political proceeding, not a judicial one, so that the standard is political: not reasonable doubt or preponderance of the evidence but merely whether enough senators can be induced to switch their vote. This standard is so low as to be almost subterranean, but Hill failed to meet even it. Her testimony changed at least three votes; she would have needed three more.
Even by political standards, Justice Thomas was treated unjustly, for Hill’s charges never should have seen the light of day under the procedures designed to protect nominees from unsubstantiated accusations.
To our mind the most telling detail about Hill in Thomas’s book is something he mentions only in passing, on page 242: that when she approached the Judiciary Committee with her accusations, "she initially requested that her name be withheld from the members." Anonymous character assassination was too low a tactic even for Joe Biden, who said no.
Hill gave a confidential statement to the FBI, which conducted an investigation and presented the results to the committee. The charges became public not because senators, after due deliberation, decided they were worth airing, but because some rogue senator or staffer decided to leak them to reporters.
Just days before–and we’d completely forgotten about this, as it was overshadowed by the Hill circus–someone at the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where Thomas then served, leaked a copy of a draft opinion Thomas had written. As he explains on page 246:
This breach of confidentiality was unprecedented. One of the hallmarks of the federal judiciary had always been the absolute secrecy in which it worked. Leaks were unthinkable–until now. The case in question involved preferences given to women by the Federal Communications Commission in awarding radio-station licenses, and it was clear that my opinion had been leaked by a person or persons who wanted to portray me as unsympathetic to women’s causes.
With this pair of leaks, Thomas’s political foes managed to violate the integrity of the FBI, the Senate and the D.C. Circuit–that is, of all three branches of government. This behavior was unethical, unconscionable and possibly criminal, and no one has ever been held to account for it.
Thomas’s opponents believed that the end justified the means, as a former foe tells the justice’s wife on page 232:
Years later a young woman who had worked for one of the many groups opposed to my nomination approached Virginia. "We didn’t think of your husband as human, and I’m sorry," she said, tears streaming down her face. "We thought that anything was justified because our access to abortions and sex was at risk." The woman went on to explain that she had subsequently had a religious conversion and now felt that it was her duty to apologize to us.
Now, those who remain unrepentant are reduced to arguing, pathetically, that Justice Thomas–and the rest of us–should countenance the means because they failed to realize the end.
They are uncomfortable being reminded of this travesty because they know it implicates them. In "On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century," Sherrilyn Ifill writes of the impunity with which people committed that atrocity:
The willingness of lynchers to act publicly is tremendously significant. It reflects the lynchers’ certainty that they would never face punishment for their acts. The willingness of the crowd to participate in lynching–to cheer, to yell their encouragement, or just to stand and watch without intervention–is perhaps equally terrible.
To be sure, the lynching of Clarence Thomas was only a figurative one, and he managed to slip the metaphorical noose. But we can understand why those who cheered his tormentors on would now feel put upon by his refusal to pretend the whole thing never happened. They imagine him to be "angry" and "bitter" because he holds up a mirror to the darkness in their own souls.
Bar and Hill
Is the District of Columbia Bar Exam one of the hardest, as Anita Hill, who not only passed the D.C. Bar but also graduated from Yale Law School, claims? Or is it one of the easiest, as several of our readers wrote us yesterday? This comment, from a reader who prefers not to be identified, may shed some light on the subject:
The D.C. Bar Exam had a very low pass rate. That does not mean it was necessarily harder than other bar exams (it’s actually not terribly challenging). The low pass rate is explained by the fact that those most likely to pass the exam didn’t have to take it.
Most members of the D.C. bar waived in, without having to take the exam, by virtue of doing well enough on the multistate. So the people actually sitting for the bar were those who hadn’t done well enough on the multistate to waive in. In other words, those who had to take the exam were already more likely to fail than the average candidate elsewhere.
There are a significant number of candidates who take the D.C. Bar Exam as their first exam, of course, and so don’t have a previous multistate score that would get them waived in. These candidates are more likely to be similar in ability to the average candidate elsewhere. But those who take the exam because they didn’t qualify for the waiver certainly skew the pass rate dramatically downward.
If this is right, then passing the D.C. Bar shows Anita Hill that she is smart in the same way that infant-mortality rates show Nicholas Kristof that America isn’t so great.
One complication in all this, though, is that–as even Media Matters acknowledges–Hillary Clinton failed the D.C. Bar. Although maybe that means Miss Hill is better qualified to be president than Mrs. Clinton!
Julia
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Segregated Graduations at UCLA
Unbelievable. This is what is happening in California thanks to identity politics and hostility to assimilation. Schwartzenager needs to do something about this. He’s already told Hispanic prents that they should turn off the Spanish TV if they want to get ahead in the US. He needs to get braver still and address this problem at UCLA, too. The writer, John Leo, used to have a nationally syndicated column which was also in US News & World Report, if my memory serves me correctly.
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City Journal Let the Segregation Commence Separatist graduations proliferate at UCLA. John Leo 13 June 2007 |
Commencement weekend is hard to plan at the University of California, Los Angeles. The university now has so many separate identity-group graduations that scheduling them not to conflict with one another is a challenge. The women’s studies graduation and the Chicana/Chicano studies graduation are both set for 10 AM Saturday. The broader Hispanic graduation, “Raza,” is in near-conflict with the black graduation, which starts just an hour later.
Planning was easier before a new crop of ethnic groups pushed for inclusion. Students of Asian heritage were once content with the Asian–Pacific Islanders ceremony. But now there are separate Filipino and Vietnamese commencements, and some talk of a Cambodian one in the future. Years ago, UCLA sponsored an Iranian graduation, but the school’s commencement office couldn’t tell me if the event was still around. The entire Middle East may yet be a fertile source for UCLA commencements.
Not all ethnic and racial graduations are well attended. The 2003 figures at UCLA showed that while 300 of 855 Hispanic students attended, only 170 out of 1,874 Asian-Americans did.
Some students are presumably eligible for four or five graduations. A gay student with a Native American father and a Filipino mother could attend the Asian, Filipino, and American Indian ceremonies, plus the mainstream graduation and the Lavender Graduation for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students.
Graduates usually wear identity-group markers—a Filipino stole or a Vietnamese sash, for instance, or a rainbow tassel at the Lavender event. Promoters of ethnic and racial graduations often talk about the strong sense of community that they favor. But it is a sense of community based on blood, a dubious and historically dangerous organizing principle.
The organizers also sometimes argue that identity-group graduations make sense for practical reasons. They say that about 3,000 graduating seniors show up for UCLA’s “regular” graduation, making it a massive and impersonal event. At the more intimate identity-group events, foreign-born parents and relatives hear much of the ceremony in their native tongues. The Filipino event is so small—about 100 students— that each grad gets to speak for 30 seconds.
But the core reason for separatist graduations is the obvious one: on campus, assimilation is a hostile force, the domestic version of American imperialism. On many campuses, identity-group training begins with separate freshman orientation programs for nonwhites, who arrive earlier and are encouraged to bond before the first Caucasian freshmen arrive. Some schools have separate orientations for gays as well. Administrations tend to foster separatism by arguing that bias is everywhere, justifying double standards that favor identity groups.
Four years ago Ward Connerly, then a regent of the University of California, tried to pass a resolution to stop funding of ethnic graduations and gay freshman orientations. He changed his mind and asked to withdraw his proposal, but the regents wanted to vote on it and defeated it in committee 6–3.
No major objections to ethnic graduations have emerged since. As in so many areas of American life, the preposterous is now normal.
SOURCE: http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-06-13jl.html
This is really getting rediculous. At my undergrad, we had the general graduation and also ceremonies with awards for individual departments and graduate schools. At the huge state school I attended later, each grad school had its own graduation ceremony and hardly anybody went to the general graduation which was mainly for the massive numbers in undergrad Liberal Arts. Don’t recall any ethnic groupings at either place or at my sons’ colleges. When will UCLA start having one with different graduation garb for Bhuddists, atheists, Baptists, Muslism, etc. – so no one is inadvertantly insulted or made to feel uncomfortable about wearing medieval Catholic university outfits and hats. I wonder how many graduates realize just what it is that they and their professsors are wearing? Oh, the horror!!! shhh, don’t tell he he he he
Julia
More Censorship in the UK
US Universities aren’t quite this bad yet, but we’re getting there.
This is David Frum at the National Review On-Line:
This is downright scarey. It seems that the UK is paralyzed withi fear. Prince Harry’s recent public antics don’t much help the cause for kids whose parent[s] went to university, does it? Julia |
More Censorship in the UK
US Universities aren’t quite this bad yet, but we’re getting there.
This is David Frum at the National Review On-Line:
This is downright scarey. It seems that the UK is paralyzed withi fear. Prince Harry’s recent public antics don’t much help the cause for kids whose parent[s] went to university, does it? Julia |
How Obama became Politics’ Tiger Woods
Interesting article re-printed in Salon Magazine by a Chicago reporter about Barak Obama before he turned into a rock star. It seems he had a slow start in Chicago and as a legislator in Springfield. It took some knocks to his pride to turn him into the political wonder we see today. Here’s highlights of the article. Be sure to read the whole thing at the link below.
How Obama learned to be a natural
Today he drips with charisma and inspires fawning admiration from all quarters. But Obama began his journey as a smug young man with little political future.
By Edward McClelland
OK, Obama is tall (6 feet 2 inches), intelligent (Harvard Law, two bestselling books), and damn, he’s ambitious (running for president after two years in Congress). But he’s no natural.
As a correspondent for the Chicago Reader, I covered Obama’s 2000 campaign to unseat Bobby Rush, the ex-Black Panther who’s been a Democratic congressman from Chicago’s South Side since 1993. It’s the only election Obama has ever lost. As even one of his admirers put it, "He was a stiff." You think John Kerry looked wooden and condescending on the campaign trail? You should have seen this kid Obama. He was the elitist Ivy League Democrat to top them all. Only after losing that race, in humiliating fashion, did he develop the voice, the style, the track record and the agenda that have made him a celebrity senator, and a Next President.
I got my first sight of Obama early that winter, at a church in the South Side’s Bronzeville neighborhood. It was a Saturday afternoon — as a greenhorn challenger, Obama wasn’t getting the Sunday pulpit invitations — and maybe a dozen people were scattered in the worn pews. Obama was a mere two-term state senator, and this was half a decade before "-mania" was added to his name. Weak December light strained through the stained glass. Obama wore a suit and tie — he hadn’t yet pioneered high-fashioned, open-necked campaign casual — and, posing uncomfortably before the baptismal, tried to relax the crowd with self-deprecating wit.
"The first thing people ask me is, ‘How did you get that name, Obama,’ although they don’t always pronounce it right. Some people say ‘Alabama,’ some people say ‘Yo Mama.’ I got my name from Kenya, which is where my father’s from, and I got my accent from Kansas, which is where my mother’s from."
At the time, Obama was teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and this was the sort of awkward, beginning-of-the-semester joke you hear from a professor trying too hard to prove a sense of humor. If anyone caught that Obama was trying to connect himself both to the birthplace of civil rights and a time-honored black party joke, they didn’t laugh or nod. He went on to give a speech attacking Rush as "reactive." Afterwards, when I polled his listeners, one told me Obama represented a new generation of black leadership, which is the wrong way to sell yourself in a primary election dominated by senior citizens. Another was a hip-hop poet. He handed me a business card with a photo of himself wearing clown makeup.
Every account of that campaign points out that Obama was tagged as "not black enough" for the South Side. State Sen. Donne Trotter, the third wheel in the primary, told me then, with a sneer, that "Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community." Black nationalists grumbled about an "Obama project," led by the candidate’s political godfather, former Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva. But no one appreciates how hard the man tried to earn his ghetto pass. At a rally for South Side teachers, held in a dim, tiny nightclub called Honeysuckle’s, Obama lashed out at the critics who were calling him too bright and too white.
"When Congressman Rush and his allies attack me for going to Harvard and teaching at the University of Chicago, they’re sending a signal to black kids that if you’re well-educated, somehow you’re not ‘keeping it real.’"
The air quotes hung over the silent gathering.
Wherever Obama went, he talked like a poli-sci thesis. Here’s how he bragged on himself back then, as I reported in the Reader: "My experience of being able to walk into a public housing development and turn around and walk into a corporate boardroom and communicate effectively in either venue means I’m more likely to build the kinds of coalitions and craft the sort of message that appeals to a broad range of people."
"Senator, that’s a distortion!" Obama snapped. His baritone went full fathom five, but he never unbent from his patrician pose
Obama may have been testy because he did have a reputation as an ineffectual legislator — for many of the same reasons he was tanking as a campaigner. Some of his colleagues saw him as a self-righteous goo-goo who thought he was too cool for the chamber and who disdained the hard work of digging up votes.
"Barack is a very intelligent man," Rich Miller, publisher of Capitol Fax, a statehouse news service, told me in 2000. "He hasn’t had a lot of success here, and it could be because he places himself above everybody. He likes people to know he went to Harvard."
Obama had been a golden boy for so long: embraced by the Ivy League, profiled in the New York Times, published by Times Books. At 38, it gnawed at him that others his age were already moving up the political ladder. U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, whose seat Obama now holds, was only a year older. But for the first time in Obama’s life, his ambitions were blocked. The world was pushing back. His impatience showed in condescension to his surroundings.
[Obama went on to lose abyssmally, but he learned from his loss.]
Around that time, Obama also had a soul-searching drink with Miller, the Capitol Fax publisher. He was upset about the way Miller had characterized him, but "he took that criticism the right way," Miller remembers six years later, "and he could have taken it the wrong way."
"A lot of politicians, they know that they’re smart," Miller says. "They know that they’re capable. It messes with their minds. Politics is not a game of qualifications. It’s a game of winning. That congressional campaign really showed that to him." [emphasis is mine]
On the state Senate floor, Miller saw a more focused, more collegial Obama, who began to take his work — and his fellow legislators — seriously. Using his experience in constitutional law, he passed legislation to curtail racially motivated traffic stops and to require police to videotape murder confessions. He sponsored legislation that added 20,000 children to the state’s health insurance program.
"I just can’t emphasize enough how much this guy became respected, and how transformative it was," Miller says. "By 2004, he just had this aura about him."
[So, it was a different Obama who ran for the Senate and spoke at the Democratic Convention.]
I’d thought Obama had campaigned like an ass, but I expected him to run for the U.S. Senate. And I expected him to win. His white upbringing would appeal to suburbanites, while South Siders might figure that Obama was as black a senator as they were going to get, after the Carol Moseley Braun debacle. His braininess, his haughtiness, his sense of entitlement — they could only be pluses in a Senate campaign. They don’t call that place Ego Mountain for nothing.
[snip]
As a black candidate, he’d been too inhibited, too embarrassed, to force out phrases like "our community." Finally, he was comfortable in his own skin, now that he’d accepted that the skin was half-white. Obama wasn’t born to be a voice of black empowerment, like Rush or Jesse Jackson. It’s not just a racial thing. It’s generational, too. Confrontational ’60s-style politics are not his bag. But as a multicultural politician, trying to find the unified theory of ethnic politics, he was rolling like Tiger Woods at the Masters. The aloofness was gone as well. Very intently, he laid out his plan for a federal Children’s Health Insurance Program.
"I think it’d be a good opportunity to lay the groundwork toward expanding health care to all the uninsured," he said.
Obama was no longer selling himself. Now, he had a legislative goal and a strategy for making it happen. Or maybe, because he knew I was one of his skeptics, he was selling me on the idea that he wasn’t selling himself. In the words of an old police reporter, Obama makes grease look gritty. Just as he was looking two moves ahead, politically, I’m sure he was two moves ahead of my expectations. It was working. I was impressed that he finally believed in something. He was a big-government liberal, no weaseling about it.
[snip]
A few weeks after that, I heard him speak at a North Side organic restaurant known for its liberal politics. The Heartland Café had welcomed Harold Washington during his run for mayor, and now it welcomed this new South Side phenom. Obama climbed up on the bandstand and filled that dining room with the same energy he’d project across the Fleet Center: "If there is a child on the South Side who cannot read … If there is an Arab-American family who’s being rounded up by John Ashcroft!" I was startled. The pedantic lecturer had been retired. Now, Obama was a fight announcer, a preacher and a motivational speaker, all on the same platform. Full of conviction, he drove his words into our ears like a carpenter pounding nails. The white folks loved him because he was liberal. The black folks loved him because, as one said to me, "We need someone who can reach beyond the race. He can go to Washington and talk their language."
That wasn’t the Obama I’d known. But it was the Obama America came to know. I was sold. I voted for him twice that year. That July, the Democrats made him the keynote speaker at their convention. It was partly a defensive move against a rumored candidacy by ex-Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka. Obama delivered a maiden speech to rival that of Hubert Humphrey in 1948, or William Jennings Bryan in 1896.
Terry Link believes that losing that congressional race liberated Obama to be the real Obama — the bright young charmer Link had met as a fellow freshman in Springfield.
Edward McClelland is the author of "The Third Coast," a Great Lakes travelogue to be published by Chicago Review Press. His writing has also appeared in Stop Smiling, Utne , and Lost.
Here’s the link to the whole article in Salon
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/12/obama_natural/
Julia
Some Unpleasant Democratic Party Facts
The Claremont Institute Review of Books has an eye-opening review of a nuew book about the Democratic party in the 1800s. Below are the first few paragraphs and then a few other clips.
Good Democrats and Bad Democrats
A review of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz
What the Democratic Party has most liked to say about itself—that it is the party of the working man, the voice of the oppressed, the tribune of the people—loses some of its strut in the light of a rather long list of inconvenient facts, chiefly having to do with slavery and race. Such facts as these: that the Democrats were the party that championed chattel bondage, backed an expansionist war to expand slavery’s realm, and corrupted the Supreme Court in order to open the western territories to the cancer. The party’s Southern wing then led the nation into civil war in defense of slavery while its Northern wing did its best to stymie the administration of Abraham Lincoln, widely regarded by the Democrats as an accidental, even illegitimate, president. Thereafter, the party embraced Jim Crow as slavery’s next-best substitute, elected a president who imposed segregation on the federal workforce, and remained the chief opponent of racial equality in much of the United States (though with important dissenters) up to the brink of the 1960s. The wonder, however, is not that the Democratic Party survived its six-decades-long infatuation with slavery and its century-long alliance with segregation, but that the party repressed all memory of that infatuation and that alliance so quickly—and made so successfully the argument that it had never ever, in its heart of hearts, been slavery’s best friend after all.
This argument was made in the broadest terms in 1945 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in The Age of Jackson, and it has now been made once again, with even greater scope, by Sean Wilentz in The Rise of American Democracy. No one, in fact, is more aware of the line that connects The Age of Jackson with The Rise of American Democracy than Wilentz himself, who pays lavish tribute to Schlesinger in his preface. (Schlesinger returned the favor in an essay published in the New York Review of Books, April 27, 2006.) According to Wilentz, it was Schlesinger’s great achievement to place "democracy’s origins firmly in the context of the founding generation’s ideas about the few and the many…seeing democracy’s expansion as an outcome of struggles between classes, not sections." This is an elegant, and somewhat deceptive, way of saying that Schlesinger rescued the history of the Democratic Party from the opprobrium with which Charles Beard and J. Allen Smith had covered all the founders, as the evil twins of the robber barons, who constructed the Constitution in order to rob ordinary folk of the economic egalitarianism promised by the Declaration of Independence. No, replied Schlesinger, the Jacksonian Democrats were genuine keepers of the Progressive flame; Andrew Jackson was a sort of antebellum FDR (and FDR a latter-day Jackson) restoring democracy and care for "the little guy" to the republic. This is the gauntlet Wilentz sees himself taking up.
There have always been several unpleasant difficulties with this argument, beginning with Andrew Jackson himself, who has not survived the trampling of biographers as an entirely admirable character. Michael Paul Rogin’s enormously influential Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975) portrayed a Jackson who suffered from "manic omnipotence, paranoid rage, and occasional deep depression." . . . . .
Not only is Jackson himself in question, but the Democratic Party whose fortunes Jackson revived in the 1820s has to some appeared less as the forerunner of the New Deal than as a congealed mass of ethnic and cultural alliances. Neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School or of the Gramscian persuasion have insisted that political parties in the Jacksonian era served less as vehicles for specific policies or political programs than as networks of ethnic and religious clans. . . . . .
Enter Sean Wilentz, with a ringing re-affirmation of the basic Schlesinger premise: politics really is central to the story of Jacksonian America, which really is a story about the struggle to eliminate the artificial political privileges of the "monied aristocracy"; and Jackson and the Democratic Party really are the heroes. . . . . But then there is the nagging problem of slavery. How can anyone believe seriously in the democratic bona fides of a president who cheerfully owned slaves and a party whose instinctive reaction to any question involving slavery was to defend it? Wilentz’s answer is kin to a good cop-bad cop routine: there were good Democrats and bad Democrats.
Jackson, says Wilentz, represents the good "city Democrats", who are the antecedents of today’s good Democratic Party
. . . . . . [T]he bad Democrats were the "country democracy," the "Virginia Quids" whose first spokesmen were John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, who abhorred "strong national government," made a fetish out of states’ rights, and defended slavery as a "positive good." Their only real kinship with the "city democracy" was their shared hatred of "capitalist consolidation" and "federal complicity" in it through the First and Second Banks of the United States. . . . .
[P]olitical Jacksonianism is betrayed to the southern "country" slaveholders. In this scenario, the Republicans of 1856 and 1860 are really good Democrats who had been forced out of their party by the Calhounites, and Wilentz is not slow to point out that "the planners" of the Republican party were "all men with either strong past Democratic links…or Democratic affinities." Abraham Lincoln becomes almost an honorary Democrat. . . .
There are howlers in this book which Wilentz should have known far better than to patter-up. Anti-slavery "fusion" Democrats never made up more than a fraction of the Republican vanguard, which was largely dominated by ex-Whigs like Abraham Lincoln; Henry Clay did not lose the 1844 election because nativist Whigs turned against him, but because the newly-swollen immigrant vote went largely to Polk; Lincoln’s original proposal to Stephen A. Douglas was for over fifty debates, not nine.
Read the whole thing to get a full dose of the Democratic penchant for deluding itself about itself.
Julia H/T Power Line
DePaul U Goes PC for Muslim Students
An Article in the American Thinker reports that a beleagured professor has been given the green light to procede to trial on his claim that a "PC" DePaul University defamed him and wrongfully fired him. All the professor did was argue with some pro-Palestinian students outside of the classroom who were passing out anti-Israel brochures the professor said contained incorrect "facts". Really incredible how twisted higher education has gotten. Here’s some highlights:
A defamation suit was filed in Illinois’ Cook County Chancery last June charging that DePaul University and its leadership defamed Professor Thomas Klocek when DePaul publicly characterized arguments he presented to members of Palestinian and Muslim student groups as racist and bigoted. The suit seeks damages against DePaul for maligning Klocek’s integrity and professional competence. The defendants named include: DePaul University; Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, President of DePaul; and Susan Dumbleton, Dean of DePaul’s School for New Learning.
Yesterday, Judge Stuart Nudelman of the Illinois Circuit County Law Division Court agreed that Klocek’s claims have merit, which will allow his suit against DePaul to move forward toward a trial by jury. Klocek’s advocates characterized the Judge’s statements in court this way:
Judge Nudelman believes that DePaul’s actions to discipline Professor Thomas Klocek went to such extreme that their conduct rose to the level of defamation. He noted that DePaul exhibited destructive political correctness when it gave way to its fear of students’ reactions to Prof. Klocek’s challenges to the student groups’ literature and perspective on the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Judge Nudelman also commented that if such limited debate took place when he was a student, it would have resulted in having an inferior educational experience.
Judge Nudelman also stated that DePaul’s public disclosures about Prof. Klocek defamed him in that they denigrated his ability to perform as a professor. . .
Klocek says the discussion was heated at times, and he admits to raising his voice. He says he told the students that Palestinians were Arabs who lived in the West Bank and Gaza – that they had no unique national historical identity. He challenged one student’s assertion that Israel was behaving like the Nazis. He stated that while most Muslims were not terrorists, pretty much all terrorists these days were Muslim. This statement had originally been made by the manager of an Arab news channel, and had recently been quoted in the Chicago Sun Times. It has the incidental merit of being true.
Clearly, the students were not used to such a challenge. DePaul in fact has gone out of its way in recent years to make the campus dialogue “safe” for Muslim and Arab students. The University administration warned the campus community after the September 11th attacks that offensive speech hostile to Muslims would not be tolerated. . . .
The University wasted little time after hearing of the students’ complaints about Klocek. The students first met with their advisors and then with a series of University administration members. They said that he had insulted them and their religion and (imagine this!) acted as if he was right and they were wrong. DePaul accepted the charges in toto and without holding a hearing (to which Klocek was entitled) quickly suspended the Professor.
The Muslim students also sent out an email to a large population at DePaul declaring a fatwa on Klocek for insulting Islam. With the recent history of the murder of Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands, and the secret life of Salmon Rushdie for more than a decade since the Iranian fatwa directed against him, one might have expected DePaul to have viewed this email as possibly threatening to Professor Klocek, and as potentially criminal behavior.
DePaul has argued that they object to Klocek’s behavior, not to his speech nor to his views. This is nonsense. Susanne Dumbleton, Dean of the School of New Learning, Klocek’s boss, made the following priceless remark about the Klocek case:
“No one should ever use the role of teacher to demean the ideas of others or insist on the absoluteness of an opinion, much less press erroneous assertions.”
So what Klocek argued was erroneous (meaning of course that the pro-Israel position is wrong). But at the same time, no opinion should ever be argued as right or wrong (the absoluteness of an opinion). And no teacher should ever tell a student that he is wrong about anything. Make these three contradictory statements in one sentence, and you too qualify to be a dean at DePaul. . .
As for forcing the students to accept his views as true, if that were indeed the case, then Klocek presumably should have stuck around until he forced the students to accept his views, rather than walk off realizing the discussion was not changing anybody’s minds (neither his nor theirs). Klocek clearly accepted that failure to ever agree. What the students seemed to resent, in his view, is that somebody on campus did not accept their views.
Dean Dumbelton said in an interview with the campus paper that she was
“deeply saddened by the loss of intellectual empowerment that the students suffered.”
She later wrote a letter to the same paper that the
“students’ perspective was dishonored, and their freedom demeaned. Individuals were deeply insulted.”
She said she had met with the students and apologized to them for the insult and disrespect they endured.
“I regret the assault on their dignity, their beliefs, their individual selves.”
Remember that these alleged abuses and injuries were all suffered as a result of one 15-minute conversation with Professor Klocek in the cafeteria. One wonders how the University might describe a rape or murder victim. Could such an offense to a victim be any greater than that supposedly suffered by the Muslim students who were forced to discuss their propaganda with somebody who did not agree with them?
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Read the whole thing to see how the Dean accuses the professor of oppressing the students with his professorial power (none of them were in his classes) and then with his power as a person of greater age (my words, I just couldn’t resist).
Julia
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