“‘How am I a closet Democrat? I’m racist, I love guns and I hate welfare.'” Michelle Goldberg of Salon checks out the college Republican convention in DC, and discovers many of the attendees to be exactly the bitter, troubled, pugnacious, and ignorant children you might expect (and as the study suggests.) “I’m a Republican because liberals make me sick,” says one deluded soul, for example, “I don’t like whiny people and tree-huggers.” (He then proceeds to whine incessantly about how affirmative action and taxes screwed him over.) Meanwhile, the “adults” at the convention spend their time fostering this hate in the name of the almighty buck. “Gene McDonald, who sold ‘No Muslims = No Terrorists’ bumper stickers at the Conservative Political Action Conference in January, was doing a brisk trade in ‘Bring Back the Blacklist’ T-shirts, mugs and mouse pads.” Scary stuff.
Category: Exhuming McCarthy
Hey, Dubya, I’ve found a “revisionist historian” for ya…
You must be joking. She’s been nutty for years, of course, but now Ann Coulter has really lost it. According to excerpts of her new bile-filled book on Drudge, Coulter has now taken to defending McCarthyism. According to Coulter, the “myth of ‘McCarthyism’ is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times…Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie…Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals.” Wow. It’s pointless to even waste time on this book, I know. Still, this is ignorant on so many levels. Were Eisenhower, the Army, and the Senate all “liberals”? My advice to anyone out there interested in McCarthyism: consult a real historian on the subject. You’ll find that, contrary to Coulter’s swill, McCarthy had enemies – and supporters – on both sides of the ideological spectrum. If the conservative press wants to maintain any credibility at all, they’re going to have to renounce this garbage and soon, ’cause this is just off the deep end.
At long last.
Dubya may have tied up the release of the Reagan papers indefinitely (hmm, whatever for?), but at least one branch of government has the courage to air their dirty laundry. Senators Susan Collins and Carl Levin announce the release of the McCarthy hearing transcripts (available here.) There’s probably a number of good dissertation topics in there…
Card-Carrying Members?
Via a friend of mine in the program, Professors Eric Foner (with whom I’ve taken two classes) and Glenda Gilmore offer a rebuttal to Daniel Pipes’ recent list of academics who hate America. An article like this really doesn’t deserve a response but, simply put, Pipes is a moron. Reading any chapter of Foner’s recent Story of American Freedom — or any of his other books for that matter — belies Pipes’ ridiculous and dangerous charge of anti-Americanism. And finding fault with Dubya’s wag-the-dog Freudian fiasco in Iraq, a soon-to-be-military excursion that has already run roughshod over our Constitution, hardly speaks ill of anyone’s patriotism.
If anything, it’s egregiously anti-American for Pipes to earmark academics who should be constrained from the “outside.” A quote the Daniel Pipes of this world ought to consider: In the words of Cornel West, “To understand your country, you must love it. To love it, you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as how it is, however is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in it which shows what it might become. America � this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes, needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.“