The Other McCain

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

Why I’m Not on the Harvard Faculty

Posted on | May 4, 2013 | 73 Comments

Besides the fact that all I’ve got is a bachelor’s degree from a third-tier state university, there’s also the problem that I don’t think it’s necessary to apologize for saying bad things about dead bisexual British economists, which is now apparently taboo. You can badmouth dead people or defame the British or libel an economist unless any of them happen to be bisexual, in which case, they are beyond reproach.

A friend on Twitter informs me that John Maynard Keynes was an anti-Semite who was also head of the British Eugenics Society, which under ordinary liberal custom would be enough to render someone historically radioactive. However it seems the new rule is that being gay — or, as was apparently the case with Keynes, being nominally bisexual — is sufficient to silence all criticism.

Niall Ferguson says, in effect, “John Maynard Keynes was a bad economist who was wrong about everything and also, he was gay, which might be relevant to the problem.” OUTRAGE!

Well, here you go: Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killer and a cannibal, and also, he was gay, which might be relevant to the problem.

Good-bye, Harvard faculty appointment!

UPDATE: My larger point — and if Ken at Popehat didn’t see this, no one else can be blamed for missing it — is to wonder why this particular molehill has become a peak in the Himalayas. The Ferguson/Keynes controversy was the top thread at Memeorandum, as if it were the most important thing that happened Saturday.

Does this make any sense? Why was this academic controversy magnified out of all proportion? Is necrohomophobia — fear of dead homosexuals — really such a serious problem in America? One of the commenters takes this jab at me:

Robert Stacy McCain is a simple-minded, hateful person, and also, he wears stupid hats, which might be relevant to the problem.

Simple-minded and hateful — and why? Because I did not rush to join the online lynch-mob of ritual denunciation?

It’s this aspect, redolent of the Moscow Show Trials, that alarms me. Also, how dare you call my hat stupid, you hat-hater!

These are the jokes, people. Lighten the hell up.

UPDATE II: Speaking of jokes, Andrew Sullivan has nominated me for the “Malkin Award.” This is my second such honor, the first having occurred in the aftermath of the 2009 Israeli invasion of Gaza, when I outlined my “Mideast Peace plan” as the hypothetical first gentile Prime Minister of Israel. These damned hypotheticals are always getting me in trouble.

 

Category: Economics, Gays, Intellectuals

What Part of ‘Fuck You, Commie Scum’ Is So Hard for @BurkelyH to Understand?

Posted on | May 4, 2013 | 65 Comments

Burkely Hermann, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Class of 2016

Burkely Hermann describes himself:

#Socialist, citizen of the world and college student who fights for global justice and works to challenge the powers that be.

Well, who is Burkely Hermann and why should anyone care? He popped up on Twitter this morning to deny an obvious truth:

Michelle Malkin is never going to bother responding to an insignificant troll like Burkely Hermann, a freshman at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, but it’s Saturday afternoon and what better to do today than to make an example of this ignorant Occupy-loving scumbag?

For some unknown reason which he did not bother to explain, Hermann went on a sort of Twitter rampage of pro-Howard Zinn messages, re-Tweeting three-year-old messages including these from Michael Moore and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal:

As to Howard Zinn’s role in the Communist Party (CPUSA), I wrote about this extensively when Zinn’s FBI file was released in 2010:

Read either or both of those articles, and then read the 400-page FBI file itself, and make up your own mind. No honest and intelligent person could disagree with my conclusion:

The FBI files demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that Zinn — author of A People’s History of the United States, widely used as a textbook or supplement in many of our nation’s high schools and universities — was a card-carrying Communist at a time when the Soviet Union was America’s most dreaded enemy.

Burkely Hermann is neither honest nor intelligent, however, and yet supposes himself both intellectually and morally superior to anyone who calls attention to the obvious facts about Zinn.

This is how it always is with leftist punks: They imagine that their ideology confers on them a special insight, providing them with access to esoteric truths which no one outside the Cult of the Enlightened can understand, so that if you disagree with them, the very fact of your disagreement is proof (to them) that you are “ignorant,” etc.

Facts and logic that contradict their arguments are dismissed as somehow tainted because they don’t come from reliable (i.e., leftist) sources, whereas any specimen of counter-factual lunacy is acceptable to them, so long as it supports their anti-social worldview. There is therefore no point in trying to reason with such fools.

Case in point: After I responded to Hermann’s deliberate trolling, he Tweeted to one of his allies a link to an article in The Progressive about Zinn’s FBI file, as though the article somehow disproved Zinn’s CPUSA affiliation, which it certainly does not.

What that article does is to portray the FBI (and its director, J. Edgar Hoover) as unreliable, paranoid extremists who were persecuting Zinn because he “was active in protesting and speaking out at that time,” as Zinn’s daughter is quoted as saying — but this does nothing at all to contradict the evidence against Zinn. It may be true that (a) Hoover was paranoid, (b) FBI agents were sloppy, and (c) Zinn was an idealist, without in any way discrediting the testimony from multiple sources that (d) Zinn was an active member of the CPUSA.

This was a problem with the pro-Communist Left going back to the time of John Reed: No matter what evidence you offered about the evil folly of Bolshevism, they would always find some way to deflect or deny or ignore it. And this problem persists into the 21st century — here with the punk Burkely Hermann, who wasn’t even born when the Soviet Union collapsed under the massive weight of Marxist lies — because American educators and intellectuals will not teach the truth about the Cold War.

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have documented the ways in which historians have obscured the reality of how the CPUSA abetted Soviet espionage during the Cold War, and I can damned well guarantee that Burkely Hermann knows nothing about that book.

There are vast libraries of books that leftists refuse to read, because their worldviews are so fragile that they cannot stand contact with reality. If you ever encounter a leftist who has read Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed or the Peter Collier/David Horowitz classic, Destructive Generation, please let me know, because I’ve never met one such person in the past 15 years.

Notice how conservatives instantly repudiated David Cole (a.k.a., “David Stein”) once his past as a Holocaust denier was exposed, yet the Left dissembles and accepts any flimsy excuse for Howard Zinn’s embrace of the maniacal mass-murderer Josef Stalin. Notice also Burkely Hermann’s “fuck the FBI” response:

Scratch an Occupy/Anonymous activist and a sociopathic cop-hater bleeds — which is one reason I pay attention to trolls like this.

Back in 2009, one such troll decided to get up in my face and I kept an eye on him for the next three years until one day, he melted down in public, threatened an FBI agent and got himself arrested. Can’t say I never tried to warn him, but these fools never listen.

 

 

UPDATE: Re-reading my July 2010 post about Zinn’s FBI file, I see nothing I’d change except a few typos. What I think may confuse some younger readers (and perhaps Hermann is confused by this) is how the FBI or anyone else could determine what sufficed as evidence of CPUSA membership at a time when the CPUSA was effectively outlawed and its members were intensely secretive.

In Zinn’s case, there was at least one CPUSA informant who reported having attended lectures on Marxist-Leninist doctrine at the Party’s Brooklyn headquarters. This unnamed informant, interestingly enough, named George Kirschner as a Brooklyn CPUSA official at that time — evidently the same George Kirschner who later co-authored one of Zinn’s projects. But beyond that kind of direct evidence (including the presence of Zinn’s name on a 1947 CPUSA mailing list), there were multiple incidences of Zinn’s involvement in Communist “front groups.”

You really have to study the history of that era to understand the significance of the fact (to cite just one example) that Zinn served as a delegate from a Communist-infiltrated group (American Veterans Committee) to the national convention of a group blacklisted by the Attorney General in 1947 (Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee). Let anyone ask some of the surviving anti-Communists of the 1950s and ’60s — especially M. Stanton Evans — how conclusive that evidence was, in terms of Zinn’s standing with the CPUSA. And when you fast-forward two decades from there to the late 1960s to find Zinn teaching a seminar entitled “Marxism and Contemporary Problems,” sponsored by an organization founded by Herb Aptheker . . .

Well, for crying out loud, if you think further proof than that is required, you probably wouldn’t believe Zinn was a Commie even if his membership file turned up in the KGB archives in Moscow.

 

Category: #Occupy, History, Progressivism

Obama Administration’s Benghazi Lies Exposed as State Department Cover-Up

Posted on | May 4, 2013 | 20 Comments

Flaming skull alert at Ace of Spades for the release of e-mails confirming that (a) officials knew from the outset that the attack on the consulate in Libya was the work of terrorists, but (b) this information was suppressed for political purposes:

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland, worried that members of Congress would use the talking points to criticize the State Department for “not paying attention to [CIA] warnings.”

So, it was CIA vs. C.Y.A. at the State Department which, quite frankly, has been infiltrated by Edward Said-influenced Arab specialists to such an extent that it was practically a Muslim Brotherhood outpost even before the Obama administration took over.

Seriously, you can ask Bush administration people about this: Middle Eastern scholarship within academia is so dominated by anti-Western views that, insofar as anyone has the credentials to qualify as a specialist in the field — i.e., to get hired into and promoted within the bureaucracy — they’re certain to have been saturated in ideas about “Western imperialism” and the legitimacy of Arab/Islamic grievances. And while this has also been a problem at the CIA and the Pentagon, the State Department is absolutely chock-full of such people in staff positions, so that even with hawkish neocons in the political appointee roles during the Bush years, the pro-Arab/pro-Muslim culture at Foggy Bottom never really changed.

I feel the need to point this out now because some of my well-meaning conservative friends, who (quite correctly) complain about the dubious influences within the Obama administration, often neglect to discuss the larger problem, which pre-dates Obama. However, there is good reason to think it is more of a problem now:

In 1998 Obama attended a speech by [Edward] Said, in which the scholar called for a nonviolent campaign “against settlements, against Israeli apartheid.” In a well-publicized photo, Obama and Said can be seen talking over dinner at this pro-Arab event.
According to the Los Angeles Times, in the early 1980s Obama had been one of Said’s students in an undergraduate English class at Columbia University.

None of this is necessarily related to the Benghazi cover-up — I don’t mean to feed anyone’s conspiratorial paranoia — but it does highlight the nature of the larger problem, what Jeanne Kirkpatrick rightly called the “Blame America First” mentality.

There is a sort of  perverse narcissism involved in this worldview: Encountering people who hate us, liberals think, “It’s about us.”

This error was what crippled liberalism during the Cold War. If the Soviet Union wanted to destroy America, liberals imagined, this must be because of something wrong with America, rather than something wrong with the Soviet Union. So liberals wanted to change American foreign policy — détente! — in a more pro-Soviet direction, accepting the Leninist critique of “Western imperialism” as essentially accurate, so that you had Jimmy Carter claiming (and evidently believing) that a U.S. commitment to “human rights” would somehow repair the damage to American international prestige.

Except it wasn’t about us. It was about them. Read more

Category: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Intellectuals, Islam, Libya, Terrorism

FMJRA 2.0: Beer For My Horses

Posted on | May 4, 2013 | 8 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

The Dreaded Wyoming GOP Facebook ‘Hatef–k’ Rapist Has Been Apprehended

Where Were You in 2002?

University Logo as Rorschach Inkblot

Still No Confirmation of ‘Sleeper Cell’ Connection in Boston Marathon Bombing

FEATURE: McCain Jauntily Raked Again

Syria: Another Casualty of ‘Hope’

Have You Heard the One About the President Who Was a Miserable Failure?

‘A History of Psychiatric Problems’

Obama’s Syrian Dilemma

The Internet Never Forgets

Just When You Think Democrats Couldn’t Possibly Get Any Crazier …

Does UMass-Dartmouth Have a Department of Crazy Foreigners?

Liberal Media Bias and Self-Selection

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.03.13

No Wonder They Couldn’t Find Her

The Left Hates Howard Kurtz, Which Doesn’t Mean We Should Love Him, But …

Economics, Translated to Plain English

No list of top linkers this week as nobody managed to clear the five-link requirement. Thanks to Smitty for taking up the FMJRA duties last week while I was indisposed in Minneapolis; at this point, I wish to deny the rumor that I was laid low by toxoplasmosis contracted from unspayed catgirls. Rule 5 Sunday will be back tomorrow with a triple-scoop of springtime goodness.

Category: FMJRA Award

Jeff. G. Heroically Resists

Posted on | May 3, 2013 | 34 Comments

The epic saga of Meg Lanker-Simons continues to yield rich and varied opportunities for the deployment of vicious satire:

Last night, a bit tipsy on Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey, I’ll admit, I was subjected to (but nevertheless was able to rebuff) a sudden and violent attempt to hate fuck myself. Unfortunately, the rebuff made me quite angry, and outraged, I then forced myself on myself  in a fit of pique — this was violence, not sex, let me remind you — managing to feel myself up a bit, all the time shouting nasty, very personal and very violent epithets: I was evidently going to “teabag” myself until I “turned into a good little progressive bitch,” I snarled at me.

Such restraint obviously requires tremendous willpower, nearly as much as is necessary to keep a straight face while trying to take the ludicrously absurd rape hoaxer seriously:

“If the rape panic runs parallel to the the now nearly forgotten drugs-and-rock panics of the 1950s and 1960s (and many others like them, before and after) we should expect it to actually be rooted in an attempt to assert control of or cultural dominance over some threatening Other. And there is indeed evidence that points in that direction. . . . Women like Meg Lanker-Simons are caught in a trap that has nothing to do with (mythically) rape-minded men and everything to do with the world easy contraception and feminist ideology have given us.”

Ann Althouse quotes the university spokesman’s blah-blah-blah about “vigilance” and “security” and then cuts loose on him:

While you’re continuing all the vigilance, how about a little vigilance about self-dramatizing fraud? People need better bullshit detectors! Arm the students for real life in every possible way.

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal:

Why are phony “hate crimes” so common, especially on college campuses? We’d like to go through a few obvious answers, all of which have merit, and then delve a bit deeper into the psychology of such incidents.

Do we need to delve into the psychology? I’m with Chris Rock: “Whatever happened to crazy? … What, you can’t be crazy no more?”

Finally, Da Tech Guy points out that Ms. Lanker-Simons is actually married, a frightening thought, although perhaps not quite as frightening as the couple’s wedding photo.

Please don’t hate me for posting that link. I’m just reporting the news.

And selling Brain Bleach.





 


Category: Crime, Education, Wyoming

Economics, Translated to Plain English

Posted on | May 3, 2013 | 14 Comments

The eminent James Pethokoukis gives you the technocratic jargon:

US job growth in April beat economist expectations as nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000, and the jobless rate fell to a four-year low of 7.5%. But the report contained worrisome signs that President Obama’s health care reform law is hurting full-time, high-wage employment.
While the American economy added 293,000 jobs last month, according to the separate household survey, the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons — “involuntary part-time workers” as the Labor Department calls them — increased by almost as much, by 278,000 to 7.9 million. These folks were working part time because a) their hours had been cut back or b) they were unable to find a full-time job. At the same time, the U-6 unemployment rate — a broader measure of joblessness that includes discouraged workers and part-timers who want a full-time gig — rose from 13.8% to 13.9%.

Which is all very interesting, although for those of us who lack the necessary expertise — and hell, I can barely even spell Pethokoukis — further simplification may be required:

“Low-information voters.”

Has anybody heard from Peggy Joseph lately?

 

Category: Barack Obama, Economics

Dear English Teachers: You’re Welcome

Posted on | May 3, 2013 | 58 Comments

What’s wrong with this headline?

Jason Collins’ Other Hidden Secret

Everybody was beating up on Howard Kurtz for the factual error of his story, but the headline was also ungrammatical. The possessive form of a proper name ending in “s” — e.g., Jones — requires the apostrophe-S: The pistol was found in Jones’s car. And, while we’re picking at nits, the plural in that case would be “Joneses.”

English grammar is extraordinarily complicated, and few of us are always right, but somewhere I hope my seventh-grade English teacher Mrs. Clark is smiling to think I remembered that rule. Now, if we could only persuade Justin Bieber to teach his fans subjunctive . . .

ADDENDUM: The past tense of “plead” is pleaded. I don’t give a damn how many times you’ve seen it or heard it as “pled,” that’s just wrong.

Category: Education

The Left Hates Howard Kurtz, Which Doesn’t Mean We Should Love Him, But …

Posted on | May 3, 2013 | 27 Comments

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”
— Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 1965

The Internet never forgets, and I’m sure someone (probably Ed Driscoll) will unearth the details to remind us why the Journolist mob hates Howard Kurtz, so that the cycle time between his screw-up and his defenestration from the Daily Beast was about 20 hours.

Grant that there are conservatives who hate Howard Kurtz because he’s a liberal, but there have been occasions in Kurtz’s career as a media critic when he’s called out errors resulting from liberal bias, or when he has been critical of the Left’s sacred cows.

My guess — and I’m just guessing here — is that Ezra Klein or some of the other Juice Box Mafia types put Kurtz on their Enemies List during George W. Bush’s first term, as being someone who didn’t go along with the Bush-hating anti-war mentality. The old-fashioned sentiments of patriotism in time of war and respect toward the Presidency (whoever may hold the office) was anathema to the Marcusean worldview of the young leftist intellectuals who learned their politics in the dozen years between the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the inauguration of President Obama. And so the memory of Kurtz critically examining some episodes of Bush Derangement Syndrome probably accounts for the Left’s sudden urge to pounce on what was a clumsy error as an excuse to destroy him.

So conservative critics of Kurtz ought not be too hasty to celebrate the downfall of an Old Liberal, knowing that the Young Left is also celebrating. We should always credit our antagonists with having sense enough to know what’s good for them.

“The inherent corruption of what he did was a simple background fact, like the background fact of his dullness and mediocrity.”
— Tom Scocca, Gawker

If Kurtz is corrupt, dull and mediocre, whom does Tom Scocca view as honest, exciting and excellent? Probably not anyone a conservative would admire, and this should give us pause.

While “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is rather simplistic, the venom directed at Kurtz from the Angry Young Left is significant. Kurtz likely represents to them the liberal who tries to be fair to Republicans, whereas the Marcusean ethos of “liberating tolerance” permits only unrelenting hostility toward “movements from the Right.”

As recently as February, Media Matters was excoriating “Howard Kurtz’s Hollow Defense Of Fox News.” and you can examine the rest of  the Media Matters dossier on him as a guide to understanding that the Left viewed Kurtz as an unreliable ally — a Menshevik, as it were — useful to them when he attacked their chosen enemies, but susceptible to occasional errors of fairness toward those enemies.

Kurtz’s blunder on the Jason Collins story — wrongly accusing Collins of having omitted reference to his previous heterosexual relationships — was laughably clumsy and, because it involved an issue that is central to the Left’s agenda, was unforgivable. But conservatives tempted to join the schadenfreude festival over Kurtz’s Daily Beast downfall ought to ask themselves whether Tina Brown is likely to hire a replacement for Kurtz who will be more fair to the Right.

Magic 8-Ball says, “Outlook not so good.”

 


Category: Intellectuals, Media Bias
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