National Review: Each Generation as Stupid and Malevolent as Their Fathers Before Them...
Matthew Yglesias reads National Review so the rest of us don't have to:
Matthew Yglesias (March 18, 2008) - Through the Looking Glass (Media): It's fascinating how unhinged a lot of the reactions to Obama's speech are over at the Corner. Here's Charlotte Hays just flat-out denying that it makes sense to try to understand things in context:
Obama says that we shouldn't "Ccondemn without understanding the roots" of remarks like those Wright made. Whatever the roots, these remarks are to be condemned. Within what context is it correct for the Rev. Wright to say "God damn America?"
There's some kind of reading comprehension problem here if Hays can't see that Obama's not saying it was correct of Wright to say that. Roger Clegg sees the speech as "politics as usual" which makes me think he must have been watching a very different usual politics from me up until now. K-Lo says "Any hopes anyone had that Barack Obama would be a gift to civil rights in America -- that he would shake hands with Ward Connerly and really be a change -- died today, I think." In the speech John Derbyshire heard, "blame whitey, and raise high the red flag of socialism" was the essence of Obama's message.
Matt seems somewhat surprised. He shouldn't. This was to be expected. This is what the National Review writers learned from their predecessors, at their fathers' knees, imbibed in their mothers' milk--no, those are the wrong metaphors: had inscribed in their brains by chemical-hypno-learning as they grew in their vats in the sinister underground Buckley laboratory. Remember this? National Review on Martin Luther King, Jr., back in 1959:
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Economist Brad DeLong's Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based Semi-Daily Journal: The soberly-dressed "clerky" little man... seemed oddly unsuited to his unmentioned but implicit role of propagandist.... Let me say at once, for the benefit of the wicked, fearful South, that Martin Luther King wil never rouse a rabble; in fact, I doubt very much if he could keep a rabble awake... past its bedtime... 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 history of Negro freedom in the United States... according to Dr. King, is actually a history of Supreme Court decisions... in each of these decisions "the Supreme Court gave validity to the prevailing mores of the times." (That's how they decide, you see? They look up the prevailing mores--probably in the Sunday New York Times.)... [V]ictory is inevitable for the Good Guys.... The Negro must... expect suffering and sacrifice, which he must resist without sacrifice, for this kind of resistance will leqve the violent segregationist "glutted with his own barbarity. Forced to stand before the world and his God splattered with the blood and reeking with the stench of his Negro brother, he will call an end to his self-defeating massacre." (I don't think [King had] really examined that one, do you?)... In the words of an editorial from next morning's Yale Daily News, "a bearded white listener rose, then a whole row, and then a standing ovation." Did you ever see a standing ovation rise? It's most interesting! Anyway, I rose and applauded heartily. I was applauding Dr. King for not saying "the truth shall make you free," because actually it took the Supreme Court, in this case, didn't it?... [A] discussion period for undergraduates followed the lecture.... Here was no trace of the sing-song "culluh'd preachuh" chant, the incongruously gaudy phrases.... Martin Luther King... relies almost entirely on force of one kind or another to accomplish integration.... [I]t seems curiously inconsistent to hear him, time after time, suggest power, or force--the force of labor, of legislation, of federal strength--as the solution...
Jes' 'thuziastikally folluwin' in de footsteps, zey iz, ovah theh at National Review...
