The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Glenn Beck Criticizing George Soros? Beck’s a Jew-Hater, Says Media Matters

Posted on | November 11, 2010 | 7 Comments

Sammy Benoit at Yid With Lid disassembles the latest product from the Smear Factory.

Somebody needs to research whether Media Matters rang the anti-Semitism bell when the Left was routinely accusing the Bush administration of being controlled by a sinister cabal of Zionist neo-cons.

Better yet: Why wasn’t it Jew-hating when Media Matters was going after Pamela Geller? (Twenty-one hit pieces in September alone.)

Remember that it is wrong to accuse liberals of not having standards. They have exactly two standards: One for them, and one for everybody else.

UPDATE: Commenter Joe in the previous post links to Jeff Goldstein’s mocking link to a post by Professor Bainbridge telling us that the problem with the conservative movement is . . . Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, Mark Levin and Dan Riehl?

Somehow, I’m thinking that the ghost of Russell Kirk might object to being invoked in support of that argument. And, relevantly, is Professor Bainbridge ignoring the charge of anti-Semitism against Kirk?

“And not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States – a position they will have difficulty in maintaining, as matters drift in the Levant.”

Just kidding. I’m not going to do the full-on Media Matters guilt-by-association smear on Professor Bainbridge. Rather, I’m trying to point out that this argumentum ad verecundiam trick of invoking Famous Dead Conservatives to condemn Famous (or Semi-Famous) Living Conservatives is generally invalid — mainly because the Famous Dead Conservatives you cite were, in their time, denounced by their enemies as hateful Know-Nothings.

Trying to use Mark Levin as Exhibit A in an indictment of anti-intellectual populism is likely to prove a difficult project: He’s Phi Beta Kappa and a magna cum laude graduate of Temple University.

UPDATE II: Mess with the bull, you get the horns:

I cite to several intellectuals in Liberty and Tyranny. [Professor Bainbridge] quotes Russell Kirk. I am a big fan of Kirk’s. I even cite him in my book, which the professor clearly has not read. I also cite Tocqueville, Locke, Montesquieu, Smith, Lewis, Friedman, and many others. Somehow I missed the professor. Does that sound like an anti-intellectual? And I routinely do the same on the air.
I don’t cite Bainbridge in anything I do because he is sadly inconsequential. . . . His influence, intellectual or otherwise, appears minimal in academia or elsewhere. I’m sure he’s a smart guy. He might even be likeable. But who knows? Who even cares?

Levin links to Bryan Preston’s fisking of David Frum:

When the Democrats all but locked Republicans out of the health care bill negotiations, Frum denounced . . . the Republicans, for not “compromising.” When the Democrats passed that bill over the objections of the majority of the people, Frum denounced. . . the Republicans. Now that the Republicans have won big over the Democrats, here comes Frum to denounce . . . the Republicans. Seeing a pattern in any of this?

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Category: Atlas Shrugs, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Yid With Lid

Comments

  • Joe

    Jeff Goldstein’s retort to Professor Bainbridge:

    Comment by Jeff G. on 11/11 @ 12:59 pm #

    Bainbridge closed comments after responding to SporkLiftDriver thusly:

    What happened to me? I got pissed off. The party I have supported and the movement of which I have been a part for decades has been taken over by a bunch of people who are either lightweights (Palin and O’Donnell), ranters (Riehl and Levin), warmongers (all the neo cons), not to mention outright bigots (like Tancredo before he went independent). The GOP in which I grew up was full of smart guys like Jack Kent, Newt Gingrich, Steve Forbes, Howard Baker, Jim Baker, and, yes, Ronald Reagan.

    Speaking of Ronald Reagan, one of his great lines was that 1980 debate when he said “I paid for this microphone.” Well, I pay for this one, and I’m giving myself the last word.

    Presumably, Bainbridge has some reason to call a woman elected governor and then made a candidate for Vice President a “lightweight” — and I’m guessing it has something to do with her folksy delivery and her appeal to people who really shouldn’t be worrying their little prole heads over something so intellectual as day-to-day politics; too, I’m guessing he has grounds for calling Levin a mere “ranter,” despite the fact that Levin graduated law school at 22, worked in the Reagan administration under Ed Meese, is President of Landmark Legal, and according to Jeffrey Lord and others (although, yes, mostly those wretched Tea Party types who just returned the GOP to power) is responsible for the conservative manifesto, Liberty and Tyranny, that became the clarion call among classical liberals and conservatives to return government to its Constitutional roots.

    As to the charge of “warmongering,” well, that’s the kind of garbage one would expect from a wannabe-country club Republican who would prefer to go back to those heady, old sport times where “his party” was the party of the rich northern elites, hobnobbing Rockefellers engaging in wonkish discussions with the boys over single malt or brandy on lazy afternoons at the lodge. That is to say, it is to expected, howe those Arab barbarians acted in their attacks on us, especially given their desert dwelling stock — and not something to make such an enormous fuss over. Very Heinz-Kerry, this idea — and the reason I suspect that Bainbridge is closer in ideology to, say, John Kerry, all things considered, than he is to someone like Sarah Palin: Kerry, at least, is an educated Brahman. And while Bainbridge may disagree with the erstwhile Donk presidential candidate on gentlemanly topics like policy, at least at the end of the day they could put their disagreements behind them and enjoy a nice sail.

    Bainbridge calls Tancredo a bigot, but his post illuminates the kind of bigotry people like Bainbridge use to define themselves. That he doesn’t recognize it only reinforces for me the fact that the modern academy, as you’ve heard me say on several occasions, is in many respects the objective correlative for real anti-intellectualism these days.

    In an era where a socialist cabal is threatening to finish off the project begun by Wilson and Roosevelt and then extended by Johnson and Carter, if what you find yourself railing about is the unhelpful and insufficiently polished tone of those who are doing the heavy ideological lifting, you might be best served by taking a brief sabbatical and engaging in some serious self reflection.

    And I can offer that advice. I went to Hopkins, and summered at Cornell. Sniff.

  • DaveP

    Bainbridge lost me when he posted his little “I Hate Everybody” tag- just before he locked the post so he couldn’t be criticized any more.

    I personally found his “The Party I Love has been conquered by icky nonelites and people from flyover country” riff.
    Little dude, how well was ‘the Party you Love’ doing as leaders of the nation in ’06? In ’08, when it got shellacked by a community organizer with a history of drug abuse and oddball statements? And of course, the key to the turnaround this year was… all those peole you mistakenly feel superior to.

    Bainbridge, when you’ve contributed to the good of the Republican Party or to the good of the United States to the sum of one-tenth the contributions of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin (how many winning Congressional campaigns have YOU fundraised for, Steveo?) , or Mark Levin… THEN come back and we’ll talk.