National Review Quotes

Jonah Goldberg has a request:

The Corner on National Review Online: NR Quotes [Jonah Goldberg]: Hello NR Readers (and people who buy NR for the pictures) -- Look over to your right. See that big quote by Rick Brookhiser? Well, we want to put up more quotes from the pages of NR, past, present and future there. We're gonna make it so that every time you refresh the page, a different quote appears from the pages of NR. We want to get so many of them that you could spend hours just hitting reload without ever seeing the same quote twice. But here's the thing: The quotations must be from the pages of NR, the magazine, not from NRO. So, if you ever read something in NR you think should be immortalized (and used as an advertising teaser), please pass it along. That goes for anything from the past as well as anything you might read in the future. Perhaps some day there will be enough to make a book of quotations or a quote-a-day calendar or something. Please send suggestions to Chaka.

I want to contribute! Here are some excellent possibilities:

It was the culmination of a weekend of demonstrations against the admission of a Negro.... [T]he nation cannot get away with feigning surprise at the fact that... the demonstration became ugly and uncontrolled. For in defiance of constitutional practice, with a total disregard of custom and tradition, the Supreme Court a year ago illegalized a whole set of deeply-rooted folkways and mores...

The statute... a law the Reconstruction Congress enacted in 1871.... [T]he President can send in troops... only when... the local authorities must have shown themselves either unable or unwilling to deal with the situation. Yet the authorities in Birmingham [police chief "Bull" Connor and Governor George Wallace] apparently did have the matter under control before Kennedy pushed the button...

[T]he legality of the 14th amendment.... The argument that it was improperly ratified is historically irrefragable...

Martin Luther King will never rouse a rabble; in fact, I doubt very much if he could keep a rabble awake... past its bedtime...

Martin Luther King... [his] lecture... delivered with all the force and fervor of the five-year-old who nightly recites: "Our Father, Who art in New Haven, Harold be Thy name"...

The central question... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes.... National Review believes that the South's premises are correct...

The axiom... was Universal Suffrage. Everyone in America is entitled to the vote.... That, of course, is demagogy.... The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote, and would not know for what to vote if they could...

Bush and Rice are... wrong to insist that support for democracy... [is] support for elections. In reality, supporting democracy... means supporting democrats.... In countries where [democrats] speak for substantial numbers of their fellows as, Walesa and Havel did, it makes sense to press for elections. In countries where they are more akin to lone voices, crying in the wilderness, it does not...

NOT THAT I WANT TO OFFEND ANYBODY [Jonah Goldberg] But it would be pretty cool if Fox... repeatedly referred to the hurricane as Katrina vanden Heuvel. "The destruction from Katrina vanden Heuvel is expected to be massive." "...the poor and disabled are particularly likely to suffer from the effects of Katrina vanden Heuvel ...." "Coming up: how to explain Katrina vanden Heuvel to your children"...

Lincoln was the Caesar Lincoln claimed to be trying to prevent; and that the Caesarism we all need to fear is the contemporary [Civil Rights] movement, dedicated like Lincoln to egalitarian reforms sanctioned by mandates emanating from national majorities...

Francisco Franco was our century's most successful ruler.... [H]e outstayed all his great contemporaries, friend and enemy: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, Eisenhower, de Gaulle.... Franco commanded the winning side in a ferocious civil war... held Spain aloof from World War II...

The whole concept of "fascism" for that matter has been a fraud from the beginning. Like "peaceful coexistence" and "detente," it is a tactical invention of the Soviet Agitprop, and boils down in practice to the simple definition: fascism is any regime that outlaws Communism...

[Francisco] Franco is a part, and an integral part, of Western civilization... [the] convergence of the multifarious political philosophical, religious, and cultural tendencies that have shaped Spanish history... the man to whom the Spanish people look--as the Chinese have looked to Chiang [Kaishek], for all his faults--for leadership...

The Communists, in fact, invented the term "McCarthyism," and devised most of the ideology that went with it.... The liberals, on a roaring civil rights jag... lowered their guard and the Communists closed.... "[A]nti-McCarthyism" as a movement... was a united front, the broadest and most successful the Communists have ever catalyzed in this country...

[T]he bayonets have displaced the law in Little Rock.... General Walker is in Little Rock as the commander of an army of occupation... enforcing unconditional surrender...

What Joe McCarthy was... can[not]... be judged by weighing in the balance the niceness of his discriminations or that tactical acuity of his actions.... His was not a common role. It comes to few men to play it--sometimes to a poet, sometimes to a politician sometimes to someone of no particular position.... Joe McCarthy, who bore witness against the denial of truth that is called moderation, and died for it: "He was a prophet"...

[Joe] McCarthy was in a business that permitted a certain latitude: it was politics, not physics. [Bozell and Buckley say that] "McCarthy's record is... not only much better than his critics allege, but, given his metier, extremely good." Thus he "should not be remembered as the man who didn't produce 57 Communist Party cards but as the man who brought public pressure to bear on the State Department to revise its practices and to eliminate from responsible positions flagrant security risks"...

We cannot avoid the fact that the United States is at war against international Communism, and that McCarthyism is a program of action against those in our land who help the enemy. McCarthyism is... nine parts social sanction to one part legal sanction. But that one part legal sanction is legitimate...

If McCarthy is to be censured for saying he had a list of 57 card-carrying Communists when he did not, what of his nemesis, Senator Millard Tydings, who told the Senate he had in his hand a recording of McCarthy's Wheeling speech when he did not?... What of the many violations of normal standards of procedure and indeed decency committed by the Left? These were never condemned by the Senate, nor were they ever the subject of much attention by the press...

>

Comments

[Commenterlein]

You are having way too much fun.

[Brad DeLong]

Am not!

[christo]

Overload. I felt like I should bow my head and kneel or do whatever the plebs do in 1984 before this brillant NR-Goldberg-Cheney Thought. Better yet than putting it on the web, it should be printed up in a book small enough to display next to the cash registers of our great American economy for easy purchase, and every patriotic blooded American can carry one in his/her pocket for quick inspiration and reference. It's a red state book for sure so print the cover red in pvc or another petroleum based material.

[vtconomist]

How do you have the strength to wade through such garbage to pick out those gems of awesome ignorance?

[howard]

what are the odds that jonah has no frickin' clue of the kind of crap NR ran in the '50s and '60s? i'd say extremely high....

[Robert Waldmann]

Yeah how can you stand reading that crap ?

[Robert Waldmann]

OK admit it.

You searched for "Luther", "negro", "Reconstruction","McCarthy" and maybe "south" Maybe the archive allows you to say "before 1970" too. My guess is that you had to read only one or two aweful articles to find an appalling article using that simple method.

Do not try to claim that you can stand to read through the NR archive. I know you retyped the prospectus for Harvard economics undergraduates from a hard copy just to force yourself to read every word, but you are, after all, only human.

[andres]

If you really, really dislike someone, no experience is as satisfying as rubbing their noses in their own excrement. Brad is someone with an acute moral sense of right and wrong (though his judgement as a political economist fails him sometimes...), but thank all the gods that he's no saint, or else we, and worse of all, Goldberg, wouldn't get to read these gems.

[Pithiness]

howard, what are the odds that JG will read these quotes and agree with them completely?

[andres]

Er, make that Jonah Goldberg, _not_ Jonathan Goldberg who posts to this site.

And I'm sure Brad has e-mailed all these quotes to Jonah (haven't you, Brad?).

[Ba'al]

Is it rubbing someone's nose in excrement when they are unable to perceive it as such? An interesting philosophical quandry.

You might not see quotes exactly like this in the NR anymore but the thinking is the same and it is all written in a not so subtle code now.

[EconAtheist]

Hahahaha!

Nice work, Brad.

/you just made the TotalFark.com submission queue, btw... prepare for a potential greenlight

[Don]

Good work force feeding that ignoramus Goldberg a shit sandwich. Shame he wasn't aborted.

[howard]

pithiness, to make a longer (potential) answer short, jonah is part of a cohort of right-wingers who seem to honestly believe that they were part of the civil rights movement, which is to say, no, i don't think jonah would "agree" with these once he reads them.

i do think that jonah would "agree" with the broader thought process that produced these, because to be a modern right-winger like him is to be perfectly comfortable holding irreconcilable thoughts in your head, mostly based on the premise that liberalism is now, and always has been, wrong about everything whereas conservatism is now, and always has been, correct about everything.

[nick s]

Yet again, Jonah Goldberg shows his passion for research.

[Aurelian]

>>>what are the odds that jonah has no frickin' clue of the kind of crap NR ran in the '50s and '60s?

What do you mean, "in the '50s and '60s"?

[supersaurus]

you must sleep little and have a strong stomach ;-).

[pgl]

Interesting list but nothing from the free lunch supply-side know-nothings?

[Alison]

This was superb. Historical revisionism gets harder when there are online databases and indices.

Hurrah for the smart guys.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/books/14bull.html?ex=1266123600&en=32440f7c34fc8b0e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

February 14, 2005

Between Truth and Lies, An Unprintable Ubiquity
By PETER EDIDIN

Harry G. Frankfurt, 76, is a moral philosopher of international reputation and a professor emeritus at Princeton. He is also the author of a book recently published by the Princeton University Press that is the first in the publishing house's distinguished history to carry a title most newspapers, including this one, would find unfit to print. The work is called "On Bull - - - - ."

The opening paragraph of the 67-page essay is a model of reason and composition, repeatedly disrupted by that single obscenity:

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much [bull]. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize [bull] and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry."

The essay goes on to lament that lack of inquiry, despite the universality of the phenomenon. "Even the most basic and preliminary questions about [bull] remain, after all," Mr. Frankfurt writes, "not only unanswered but unasked."

The balance of the work tries, with the help of Wittgenstein, Pound, St. Augustine and the spy novelist Eric Ambler, among others, to ask some of the preliminary questions - to define the nature of a thing recognized by all but understood by none.

What is [bull], after all? Mr. Frankfurt points out it is neither fish nor fowl. Those who produce it certainly aren't honest, but neither are they liars, given that the liar and the honest man are linked in their common, if not identical, regard for the truth.

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth," Mr. Frankfurt writes. "A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it."

The bull artist, on the other hand, cares nothing for truth or falsehood. The only thing that matters to him is "getting away with what he says," Mr. Frankfurt writes. An advertiser or a politician or talk show host given to [bull] "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it," he writes. "He pays no attention to it at all."

And this makes him, Mr. Frankfurt says, potentially more harmful than any liar, because any culture and he means this culture rife with [bull] is one in danger of rejecting "the possibility of knowing how things truly are." It follows that any form of political argument or intellectual analysis or commercial appeal is only as legitimate, and true, as it is persuasive. There is no other court of appeal.

The reader is left to imagine a culture in which institutions, leaders, events, ethics feel improvised and lacking in substance. "All that is solid," as Marx once wrote, "melts into air."

Mr. Frankfurt is an unlikely slinger of barnyard expletives. He is a courtly man, with a broad smile and a philosophic beard, and he lives in apparently decorous retirement with his wife, Joan Gilbert, in a lovely old house near the university.

On a visit there earlier this month, there was Heifetz was on the stereo, good food and wine on the table.

But appearances, in this case, are somewhat misleading. Mr. Frankfurt spent much of his childhood in Brooklyn, and still sees himself as a disputatious Brooklynite - one who still speaks of the Dodgers as "having betrayed us." And, in any event, Mr. Frankfurt is not particularly academic in the way he views his calling.

"I got interested in philosophy because of two things," he said. "One is that I was never satisfied with the answers that were given to questions, and it seemed to me that philosophy was an attempt to get down to the bottom of things."

"The other thing," he added, "was that I could never make up my mind what I was interested in, and philosophy enabled you to be interested in anything."

Those interests found expression in a small and scrupulous body of work that tries to make sense of free will, desire and love in closely reasoned but jargon-free prose, illustrated by examples of behavior (philosophers speak of the "Frankfurt example") that anyone would recognize.

"He's dealing with very abstract matters," said Sarah Buss, who teaches philosophy at the University of Iowa, "but trying not to lose touch with the human condition. His work keeps faith with that condition."

Mr. Frankfurt's teaching shares with his prose a spirit Ms. Buss, who was once his graduate student, defines as, "Come in and let's struggle with something."

"He was very willing," she added, "to say, 'I just don't understand this.' "

The essay on [bull] arose from that kind of struggle. In 1986, Mr. Frankfurt was teaching at Yale, where he took part in a weekly seminar. The idea was to get people of various disciplines to listen to a paper written by one of their number, after which everyone would talk about it over lunch.

Mr. Frankfurt decided his contribution would be a paper on [bull]. "I had always been concerned about the importance of truth," he recalled, "the way in which truth is foundational to civilization and the various deformities of it that were current."

"I'd been concerned about the prevalence" of [bull], he continued, "and the lack of concern for truth and respect for truth that it represented."

"I used the title I did," he added, "because I wanted to talk about [bull] without any [bull], so I didn't use 'humbug' or 'bunkum.' "

Research was a problem. The closest analogue came from Socrates....

[Anderson]

"Kick me," said Jonah Goldberg. "Right here in the buttocks. Please!"

[anne]

American values :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/arts/music/21pare.html?ex=1305864000&en=916802c60a537929&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

May 21, 2006

The Dixie Chicks: America Catches Up With Them
By JON PARELES

THE DIXIE CHICKS call it "the Incident": the anti-Bush remark that Natalie Maines, their lead singer, made onstage in London in 2003. "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," said Ms. Maines, a Texan herself.

It led to a partisan firestorm, a radio boycott, death threats and, now, to an album that's anything but repentant: "Taking the Long Way" (Open Wide/Monument/ Columbia). The Dixie Chicks — Ms. Maines, Emily Robison and Martie Maguire — were the top-selling country group of the late 1990's and early 2000's. After country's gatekeepers disowned them over politics, they decided to keep their politics and let country music fend for itself.

The Incident is very much at the center of "Taking the Long Way." The album could have been "way safe and scared," Ms. Maines said. "We could have pandered." They didn't. The new songs are filled with reactions, direct and oblique, to the Incident. There are no apologies.

"We had to make this album," Ms. Maines said. "We could not have gotten past any of this without making this album. Even if nobody ever heard it."

The Dixie Chicks were in New York this month to make media appearances and to perform at the party for this year's Time 100, the magazine's list of influential people, which includes them. Sitting around a dinner table in a Chelsea loft that Ms. Maines owns but hasn't used much — a former gallery with artist friends' paintings parked on the brick walls — the three Dixie Chicks dug into takeout Italian food and sipped red wine. "I've thought about all this way too much," Ms. Maines said.

"Taking the Long Way," due out on Tuesday, is the first Dixie Chicks album on which group members collaborated in writing all the songs. The first single, "Not Ready to Make Nice," declares, "I'm not ready to back down/I'm still mad as hell," and starts with a tolling guitar more suitable for a Metallica dirge than a honky-tonk serenade. The Dixie Chicks and their manager insisted to their record company that "we need to approach everything like not one radio station is going to play one single song," Ms. Maines said. Asked about country radio, she said, "Do you really think we're going to make an album for you and trust the future of our career to people who turned on us in a day?"

Instead the album wraps gleaming California rock around its raw emotions. Although there's plenty of country in the music, "Taking the Long Way" reaches not for the lucrative yet insular country airwaves but for an adult pop mainstream. Meanwhile the core country audience may not be so hostile anymore. The album arrives at a time when approval for President Bush has dropped to as low as 29 percent, in a recent Harris Interactive poll.

On Amazon.com, preorders recently placed "Taking the Long Way" at No. 5 in a Top 10 that also includes albums with antiwar songs by Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Paul Simon and Pearl Jam.

For those who expect knee-jerk Republicanism from country singers, the Dixie Chicks never fit the stereotype to begin with. "I always knew people thought that about us, and it bugged me," Ms. Maines said. "Because I knew who we were, and I knew who I've been my whole life. So to me it was such a relief for people to know."

The Incident occurred on March 10, 2003, 10 days before the United States invaded Iraq. "It felt pretty trite to me to be doing a show on what was supposed to be the eve before war," Ms. Maines said, "and not say anything about it. At that stage too everyone in Europe, or everyone outside of the U.S., talked about the U.S. like we all thought one way. So it was important for me to let them know that you can't group us all into one."

Her remark was reported in Britain and quickly picked up. Right-wing blogs and talk shows vilified the Dixie Chicks as unpatriotic and worse, and the Incident reached the nightly news....

[howard]

Aurelian, just to note, i mentioned the '50s and '60s because a lot of brad's quotes have to do with the institutional racism of NR in that period, which i'm willing to bet jonah is completely ignorant of.

more current stupidities from the national review (as pgl suggests) are on the boy wonder's watch and he probably admires them....

[neil]

wow. any chance of having the authors added on to the end of the quotes, even though some of them are quite obvious?

[cactus]

As I recall, one of the NR folks (Nordlinger?) predicted that GW was going to be judged by history as a Mount Rushmore caliber president. I think he hedged his bets though, saying something to the effect that if history didn't judge GW that way, history would be wrong. I wonder if Nordlinger still feels the same way. Even some of the NR folks are showing doubts now and then.

[Jason C.]

Here's my favorite Jonah Goldberg quotation, the one that, in a just world, would be appended to his draft notice:

WHY IRAQ?
So how does all this, or the humble attempt at a history lesson of my last column, justify tearing down the Baghdad regime? Well, I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago (Ledeen is one of the most entertaining public speakers I've ever heard, by the way).

Jonah Goldberg

[Rebecca Allen, PhD, ARNP]

I hate to say it, but I think they're right about the elections one. Elections in countries with few true democrats tend to have illiberal results, and produce governments that don't respect minority rights. Fareed Zakaria has written extensively on this point, I believe. The rest of it, of course, is utterly vile nonsense.

[Emma Anne]

I learned a new word though:

irrefragable \ih-REF-ruh-guh-buhl\, adjective:
Impossible to refute; incontestable; undeniable; as, an irrefragable argument; irrefragable evidence.

As in:

"T]he legality of the 14th amendment.... The argument that it was improperly ratified is historically irrefragable..."

[Dave]

I hope you really did send those in to NR. Classic.

[Basharov]

I would bet Goldberg's mother's hoohah against his doughy pantload that the "irrefragable" quote was written by the NR's founder and head racist, William F. Buckley. A normal person, not a supercilious twit like WFB, would have used "irrefutable" or "undeniable."

[alwsdad]

I'm late, but I thought I'd toss in a couple of my favorites:

"At the boys' school I attended, the repressed pederasts were far and away the best teachers." - John Derbyshire

"I confess that when I got high school and college internships partly through family connections, I always felt like I had to prove myself more than the next guy." - Jonah Goldberg

[Odysseus160]

My favorite Jonah Goldberg quote, indeed the only one that I remember, is his characterization of the French people as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" when they refused to join the "coalition of the willing." Goldberg is a dog that wags its tail, waiting to be petted by the right wing.

[Jacob]

Goldberg was asking for quotes from NR so his Corner post about Katrina wouldn't count. Also "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" is from the Simpsons (Goldberg populerized it during the run up to the Iraq War)

[Bruce Moomaw]

Don't forget some of John Greenway's lines from his review of Susan Sheehan's "A Welfare Mother" in one of NR's Sept. 1976 issues -- especially the one that describes said W.M. as "Mongrel dam of mongrel spawn, dropping children as a sow drops piglets..." (although his description of the inhabitants of India as "Satan's ensanguined horde" is almost as memorable).