Charles C. W. Cooke has a piece up on Max Boot that starts out like this:
Before yesterday, my primary criticism of the Washington Post’s Max Boot was political in nature. As I wrote in a recent book review, I found it regrettable that Boot’s opposition to the president had not prevented him from “succumbing reactively to Trump’s cult of personality, or from making Trump the origin of every graph onto which he plots himself.” As of yesterday, my primary criticism of the Washington Post’s Max Boot is that he is a narcissistic, dishonest, calculating, manipulative writer who is prone to engaging in precisely the sort of willfully dishonorable conduct that he claims to disdain in others.
And then gets nasty.
Max? What say you, Bill Kristol, Jenny Rubin, Jonah Goldberg and others like you stop pretending? All of you know perfectly well that the reason you Got Trump was Mitt Romney. He was and I guess still is a wonderful human being. But he was a GODAWFUL presidential candidate and basically the reason why us conservative unwashed decided to stop taking instruction from Professional ConservativesTM like you, Bill Kristol, Jenny Rubin, Jonah Goldberg and others like you and vote for someone who could actually win the damn race.
And someone who wanted to win the damn race.
Before yesterday, my primary criticism of the Washington Post’s Max Boot was political in nature. As I wrote in a recent book review, I found it regrettable that Boot’s opposition to the president had not prevented him from “succumbing reactively to Trump’s cult of personality, or from making Trump the origin of every graph onto which he plots himself.” As of yesterday, my primary criticism of the Washington Post’s Max Boot is that he is a narcissistic, dishonest, calculating, manipulative writer who is prone to engaging in precisely the sort of willfully dishonorable conduct that he claims to disdain in others.
And then gets nasty.
Max? What say you, Bill Kristol, Jenny Rubin, Jonah Goldberg and others like you stop pretending? All of you know perfectly well that the reason you Got Trump was Mitt Romney. He was and I guess still is a wonderful human being. But he was a GODAWFUL presidential candidate and basically the reason why us conservative unwashed decided to stop taking instruction from Professional ConservativesTM like you, Bill Kristol, Jenny Rubin, Jonah Goldberg and others like you and vote for someone who could actually win the damn race.
And someone who wanted to win the damn race.
7 comments:
Romney sure is wonderful.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/01/10/romney-2020-touted-by-nevadas-harry-reid-calling-trump-amoral/
But you are known by the friends you keep.
I would want to see evidence, provided by someone more rational than Max Boot, that National Review defended Jim Crow in the 1950s. The Democrats were the origin of, and the defenders of, segregation. I was a child then, and not reading the magazine, although my dad did, and he was no segregationist.
He's referring to a 1957 editorial from which leftoids have quoted one sentence == again and again and again and again.
Here's the full editorial:
https://adamgomez.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/whythesouthmustprevail-1957.pdf
Thanks, Art Deco. Hmm. I certainly would not endorse such an editorial today, although circumstances today are dramatically
different than they were in 1957. However, it is not in any way a full-throated defense of Jim Crow, as charged. Max Boot is wildly overstating his case and ignoring the passage of sixty-three years.
It's only tangentially related to Jim Crow. Its subject is the suffrage and control of public institutions. Presumably the author was Buckley. The editorial was challenged in a later issue by Brent Bozell. I haven't read the full text of the challenge or the reply to the challenge, but the controversy was discussed in George Nash's 1976 volume on starboard opinion journalism. IIRC, the gist of the reply to Bozell was that Southern states should have a restricted suffrage regulated with literacy tests and property qualifications. Of course, that is what Southern states had, notionally. It's just that the administration of same was shot through with chicanery and abuse of power. The original editorial was affected and obtuse. The smart money says Buckley wrote it in ten minutes.
Now, there were critiques of what we used to call 'civil rights laws' then proposed which identified real problems with them and those problems have been biting us on the ass for some time, but those problems weren't the subject of that editorial.
Human capital deficits in Kenya and the American South were also a problem, and remain so. The editorial errs in using witless and insulting language ('barbarism')to refer to them.
I realize many people revere Buckley, and their admiration is reasonable, mostly. For myself, I found much of his writing "affected and obtuse," as you say. Barry Goldwater, for instance, opposed the 1960s Civil Rights Act, not because he opposed equal rights, but because he thought it should be done state by state, consistent with our federal structure. He personally was a major funder of the NAACP lawsuit in Arizona, which resulted in desegregating the schools there the year before I began an Arizona kindergarten.
The American South today suffers far, far less from that human capital deficit. If only they had realized, in 1865, that they'd do far better as a society by educating the freed slaves rather than having a perpetually ill-educated serf class, which is not a prescription for economic growth.
do far better as a society by educating the freed slaves rather than having a perpetually ill-educated serf class, which is not a prescription for economic growth.
Negro schooling was substandard but it was provided. By 1900, most blacks over age 15 were at least minimally literate. As early as 1880, about 60% of black heads of households were employed outside the agricultural sector.
There was at one time much more regional variation in per capita product than there is today. So, in 1929 real income levels were 15% below par in the Rocky Mountain states, 19% below par on the Plains, 33% below par in the Southwest, and 48% below par in the South. OTOH, income levels were 25% above par in New England. There's been a great deal of regional convergence since then and the least affluent region (again, the South) is only about 13% below par. (European countries tend to have more regional disjunction in income levels that is the case here, btw). Evan at 48% below par, the American South maintained levels of real income per capita on a par with those of Scandinavia and the Low Countries. There was a measure of prosperity in the South, just less than there was elsewhere.
Post a Comment