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Monday, September 21, 2015

Rhetorical rubbish

In response to recent remarks, Charlie Cooke has some observations at NRO:
The United States, Senator Bernie Sanders declared before a few thousand college students yesterday, was founded “from way back on racist principles.” “That,” he added, after briefly apologizing for bringing the topic up in the first instance, “is a fact — we have come a long way as a nation.”
 ...
 That Sanders should remind voters of this truth is admirable and necessary. That he should do so in the middle of an ideologically hostile crowd is even more so. One cannot enjoy redemption without guilt, and, on occasion at least, that guilt must be given a name.   America has indeed “come a long way.”
...
 It is unfortunate, however, that Sanders felt the need to attach his reminder to a dangerous falsehood. The American escutcheon is indeed sullied by original sin, but that sin is largely one of omission rather than commission. Flawed as it is, the United States was not founded on inadequate or abominable or “racist” principles, but upon extraordinary, revolutionary, and unusually virtuous propositions that, tragically, have all too often been ignored. 
He concludes with remarks by Alexander Stephens:
 Whereas the United States “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” the Confederacy would be “founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” The departure from the settlement of 1789 would be dramatic. “This, our new government,” he submitted, “is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Mercifully, Stephens’s pernicious pseudo-“truth” was smashed and cut into pieces by the Union Army, and the older, more virtuous axioms were restored to the center of American life. Over the next century, by a tricky combination of legal reform and social pressure, the unrealized values of the founding were extended, little by little, to all. Today, we still grapple with them — not because we suspect that they may be wrong but because we worry that they are not being universally enjoyed and that this is unacceptable. When the likes of Bernie Sanders submit that that the creed is flawed per se, they do a disservice not only to America’s North Star — her “promissory note” as Martin Luther King Jr. memorably put it — but to themselves, for to advance the idea that warped men can by their behavior sully self-evident truths is to side unwittingly with the Calhouns and the Stephenses of the world, and to take firm aim at the hard-earned scars on Frederick Douglass’s back.
When a leftist makes such a false assertion about founding principles, are they demonstrating simple ignorance or knowingly lying in order to attack and undermine the country?

58 comments:

erp said...

The FF took blacks and women from the equivalent of farm animals to 3/5th of a human being. That compromise was a huge step up for us non entities without which there wouldn't have been a United States of America.

Why do we care when people without the foggiest sense of history carp about things of which they abysmally ignorant?

Clovis said...

I guess it is only me, ignorant as I am of US matters, but Erp's 3/5 reminder looks a lot like reinvidication for Sanders here.

erp said...

Clovis, ya got me. Reinvidication? What? How? When? Where?

Here's another reminder: Politics is the art of the possible.

Is it better to be considered 3/5th of a person or a 100% piece of chattel? Was creating our founding documents worthwhile even at a price or was it better for all involved, including women and slaves to remain a colony of England.

Sanders is an old commie who never woke up from the early euphoria and no amount of evidence to the contrary will ever convince him that the Soviets weren't on the right track.

Clovis said...

Erp,

From now on I will consider only 3/5 of your writings here, for you look glad enough to be measured so.

Hence I can only answer 4 of you 7 questions above. Fair and generous as I am, I will even allow you to choose which you want an answer from.

Or, next time, bring your husband to answer for you, only then I can take you seriously.

Peter said...

was it better for all involved, including women and slaves to remain a colony of England.

That's an easy one.

The answer to Howard's concluding question is neither. They're not lying because the facts aren't in dispute (Newsflash: People owned slaves in the 18th century and women didn't vote) and they aren't ignorant in the sense that a history lesson would make them change their minds. Leftist demonology is based on taking the rather mundane observation that people don't universally live up to their ideals and ramming it into a general critique of either the ideals or their historical champions. He could just as well have been talking about Christianity, marriage, or (cue the scary music) capitalism. The better question is why so many Americans on both sides think Sanders's musings about the Founding are important to a presidential campaign in 2015.

erp said...

Clovis, thanks. Prior to our FF, I wouldn't be able to make any statement without my male guardian's permission whether it be my father, husband, son ...

Peter, nice try, but even if I could have been a 1.0 person as a colonial in 1776, I'd still prefer that we ended up as we did.

To the left, facts are fungible and since we no longer have the informed citizenry that Franklin said was needed to keep our republic, any nonsense said long and frequently enough becomes the fact du jour.

Howard said...

The facts may be established, but there is the question of principles and legislative history.

The three-fifths rule for counting slaves is often misunderstood. When the Constitutional Convention debated the issue of how to count population for the purposes of representation, the Southern delegates to the Convention would have been pleased if nonvoting slaves had been counted as full persons.
...
Nor was the three-fifths rule new at the Convention. It was derived from a mechanism adopted in 1783 to apportion requisitions (the national government's only revenue source under the Articles of Confederation) among the states.
...
Furthermore, understood in context, the apportionment rule was not proslavery. Even though slaves were property under the laws of the Southern states, the Constitution itself acknowledged that they were persons. In addition, by tying both representation and direct taxation to apportionment, the Framers removed any sectional benefit, and thus any proslavery taint, from the special counting rule.



As for certain musings - they belie a certain mindset that is quite nihilistic:

You can see what I am getting at. It is exciting that the old “normal politics” is breaking down. But this is just the beginning. Rank and file gentry liberals don’t even realize there is a problem yet, for all is quiet on the NPR front. Let’s go with Bernie for another $18 trillion in new spending, with one more Big Push for the good old liberal “normal science.”

We are in for a long war of the paradigms that will make the Gramscian march through the institutions look like child’s play.


Things could get real interesting.

erp said...

Excellent comment Howard.

erp said...
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erp said...
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Hey Skipper said...

Perhaps OT, Howard, but this reminded me of your post:

When a group confuses its politics with moral doctrine, it may have trouble comprehending how a decent human could disagree with its positions. This is probably why people confuse lecturing with debating and why so many liberals can bore into the deepest nooks of my soul to ferret out all those motivations but can’t waste any time arguing about the issue itself.

That is progressivism in a paragraph, and also why Clovis -- whose opinions I often disagree with -- can never be confused with a progressive.

Harry, on the other hand, is the archetype.

Hey Skipper said...

The United States, Senator Bernie Sanders declared before a few thousand college students yesterday, was founded “from way back on racist principles.”

In order for Sanders to say this, he must be either uniquely resistant to history, an idiot, or displaying the viciously cynical progressive reflex to sow division.

At the time, slavery existed. Essentially everyone, including, had he been alive at the time, Sanders considered Africans to be a decidedly inferior form of human being. So it is fair to say that the US was founded during a time of profound, explicit, racism; the same could be said for attitudes towards women.

But that isn't what he said, is it?

Rather, he said the founding principles themselves were racist. This is a steaming pile of merde: read Locke, the Federalist Papers, etc as much as you want: the principles have not the first thing to do with race. Confusing the environment within which something happens with the thing itself betrays a great deal about the confuser, none of it good.

Of course, just as the MSM can't be fussed to cover the Planned Parenthood scandal, or Sanders' galloping idiocy. Instead, they are barking at Carson for saying something perfectly obvious, and defendable about the prospect of a Muslim president (This recent NYT editorial is hot mess of ignorance, insult, and sentences that are grammatical, but correct in no other regard. It would be laughed out of the newsroom of any self-respecting high school newspaper.) or quibbling with Fiorina over whether she saw a particularly grotesque PP video.

But back to Sanders. He, IMHO, embodies what it takes to be a progressive: sloppy thinking, and a certitude in the absolute correctness of one's opinions. In other words, either an inability, or stout refusal, to see the world as it is.

Hey Skipper said...

Clovis, just to be clear: While I often disagree with your opinions, I find them to be well thought out, soundly based, and intelligently defended. You are the lifeblood of a political blog -- someone who constructively keeps it from being an echo chamber.

Harry Eagar said...

Flash! This just in. Wow, politics is complicated and it was even in the 1780s!

The United States was founded on liberal principles and governed on racist principles.

We now have a national rightwing party whose leading figure speaks liberal policies and is a racist.

My head hurts.

Eartg to NRO: Your magazine should be extra careful when it comes to writing about racism.

Hey Skipper said...

We now have a national rightwing party whose leading figure speaks liberal policies and is a racist.

That is a nasty accusation for which you provide no proof. I'm calling shenanigans.

Eartg to NRO: Your magazine should be extra careful when it comes to writing about racism.

Earth to Harry: I trust you have a point here, so instead of spewing ThoughtStoppers, how about making it?

Howard said...

False accusations aside, anyone taking things so seriously this far from the first primary seems like a fool. In order to discourage his fellow citizens from behaving like such "damn fools" on the matter of race, Walter E. Williams grants the following proclamation.

Clovis said...

Skipper,

---
While I often disagree with your opinions, I find them to be well thought out, soundly based, and intelligently defended.
---
Well, thanks, I guess it means at least I am wrong in intelligent ways. Good, no one wants to be boringly wrong :-)

erp said...

We now have a national rightwing party whose leading figure speaks liberal policies and is a racist. and that figure is ......... ??

Are you referring to Obama?

Harry Eagar said...

No.

Hey Skipper said...

[Harry:]We now have a national rightwing party whose leading figure speaks liberal policies and is a racist.

[Hey Skipper:] That is a nasty accusation for which you provide
[no target] or proof. I'm calling shenanigans.

Harry Eagar said...


you know, Skipper, after a number of comments, especially at RtO, where you called shenanigans, and I provided corroboration; and you simply stuck out your tongue, put your fingers in your ears and said, 'I'm not listening,' your reaction does not surprise me.

Howard said...

If you need to think you got the better of those exchanges Harry, you go right on pretending.

Harry Eagar said...

Skipper never did say what his interpretation of, eg, Huckabee's statement was. I took it literally.

Harry Eagar said...

'Earth to Harry: I trust you have a point here, so instead of spewing ThoughtStoppers, how about making it?'

Derbyshire. You're a fan, I seem to recall.

Hey Skipper said...

[Harry:]ou know, Skipper, after a number of comments, especially at RtO, where you called shenanigans, and I provided corroboration; and you simply stuck out your tongue, put your fingers in your ears and said, 'I'm not listening,' your reaction does not surprise me.

Shenanigans.


Hey Skipper said...

(I'm going on a trip, so I might well be pretty scarce here for the next couple weeks.)

Hey Skipper said...

[Harry:] Derbyshire. You're a fan, I seem to recall.

I don't recall ever saying anything one way or the other about Derbyshire. How about making Google your friend so we can be sure you aren't suffering another attack of the vapors?

Speaking of Derbyshire:

Suppose you were a white person with a deep-seated dislike for black people, and you were intent on training your son to feel the same way. Suppose that, day after day, week after week, you instructed him to study the details of every instance of black-on-white crime. Say you advised your son to extrapolate from these incidents the notion that black people are generally dangerous, and that your zeal to present him with disturbing anecdotes along these lines never waned.
You would be wrong, in just about every possible way: statistically, sociologically, morally. You would be doing your son a gross and damaging disservice. For yourself you would invite, and earn, broad contempt. If your opinions became publicly known, you might well find yourself unwelcome in polite company and your job at risk. Indeed, the National Review contributor John Derbyshire was fired for expressing such sentiments in a blog post three years ago.

And yet for harboring roughly the same level of suspicion, fear, mistrust, distaste, and unease about whites as Derbyshire does about blacks, the essayist and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates has found himself crowned America's leading civic thinker. "It is Coates to whom so many of us turn to affirm, challenge or, more often, to mold our views from the clay," wrote the Washington Post's Carlos Lozada, not inaccurately.

Coates's recent memoir, Between the World and Me, an instant No. 1 bestseller dubbed "immense" by Publishers Weekly and deemed "essential, like water or air," by A.O. Scott, will not only win every prize in sight, they'll have to invent some new prizes for it.

-- Kyle Smith in The Hard Untruths of Ta-Nehisi Coates


Hypocrisy leaves such an awful stench, doesn't it?

Hey Skipper said...

[Harry:] you know, Skipper, after a number of comments, especially at RtO, where you called shenanigans, and I provided corroboration ...

No, you didn't. Not once.

Of course, I could be wrong. So, by all means, give us just one example of where you provided corroboration. And by corroboration, I mean something that withstands even surperficial examination.

erp said...

Hypocrisy leaves such an awful stench, doesn't it?

There's a very vulgar saying about it not smelling to those who push it out that applies nicely here.

In my whole life I never thought that particular "mot" would ever be included in a sentence of mine.

Harry Eagar said...

I have read approximately equal amounts of Coates and Derbyshire.

I see nothing equivalent about them. But if you cannot distinguish between them, then perhaps you are part of the problem.

And while Derbyshire was after many years of rancid racism finally booted from NRO, that came only after he crossed a barrier of polite deniability. Up until then, NRO was content to publicize his views.

Hey Skipper said...

I see nothing equivalent about them.

I'll repeat from above:

Suppose you were a white person with a deep-seated dislike for black people, and you were intent on training your son to feel the same way. Suppose that, day after day, week after week, you instructed him to study the details of every instance of black-on-white crime. Say you advised your son to extrapolate from these incidents the notion that black people are generally dangerous, and that your zeal to present him with disturbing anecdotes along these lines never waned.
You would be wrong, in just about every possible way: statistically, sociologically, morally. You would be doing your son a gross and damaging disservice. For yourself you would invite, and earn, broad contempt. If your opinions became publicly known, you might well find yourself unwelcome in polite company and your job at risk. Indeed, the National Review contributor John Derbyshire was fired for expressing such sentiments in a blog post three years ago.


Derbyshire got fired for saying in black exactly what Coates said in white. I can't distinguish between those: if that is even to tar Derbyshire as a rancid racist, than, to me it does the same for Coates.

But since you are the one with the large progressive forehead, perhaps you can tell me what I'm missing.

Hey Skipper said...

By the way, here is an example of NRO's rancid racism.

Harry Eagar said...


I had to quit reading after finishing this sentence:

'The fact is that both conservatives and racists think that considerations about race should play a much smaller part in our political discourse.'


Wow.

Doesn't sound like any racists I know, who want race to be the dominant part of political discourse.

As for Coates, contrast this passionate but carefully reported approach to Derbyshire: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

Still cannot see the difference?

Hey Skipper said...

Doesn't sound like any racists I know, who want race to be the dominant part of political discourse.

You don't stop to think, do you?

Racists want their racism to prevail -- when it does, then it will play no role in our political discourse, just like it didn't before the 1960s.

Non-racists think race, in and of itself, should determine nothing. When reality catches up with that, then race will play no role in our political discourse.

Really, it isn't that hard to figure out.

As for Coates, contrast this passionate but carefully reported approach to Derbyshire:

You do realize that with sentence, you revealed the foolishness of the one preceding, don't you?

It is so obvious I can't believe you don't see it, but if you still don't, tell me. I'll explain it to you.

Also, I can't help but contrast where the goal posts were with where they are now. Derbyshire got fired for saying in black what Coates said in white.

So please answer this for me: why is Derbyshire a racist, and Coates isn't?

And keep your hands off those poor posts, you've whiplashed the poor things enough already.

Harry Eagar said...

' it will play no role in our political discourse, just like it didn't before the 1960s.'

I guess you never heard of Pitchfork Ben Tillman. He might have been a little before your time, but that's why we have history books. But even you should have head of Orval Faubus.


You have hinted around this meme before, so I suppose it must be current among TPers, but this is the first time I have seen you lay out so boldly. erp, of course, has done so often.

There were plenty of occasions before the '60s when racism was a prominent part of political discourse. Even you should have heard about Humphrey's speech to the Democratic Party Convention in 1948. And the Dixiecrat walkout that resulted? No, never heard of them?

erp, you want to know the definition of an American rightwinger: somebody who thinks leftwingers invented political discourse about racism out of thin air in the '60s.

Hey Skipper said...

[Hey Skipper:] ' it will play no role in our political discourse, just like it didn't before the 1960s.'

I typed unwisely. Of course it didn't play no role; however, my point still stands. It didn't play nearly the role it does now, because nearly everyone (except blacks) took black racial inferiority for granted. Which is what racists believe, and want the rest of society to believe.

Which means Doesn't sound like any racists I know, who want race to be the dominant part of political discourse. is still foolish.

Also, I can't help but contrast where the goal posts were with where they are now. Derbyshire got fired for saying in black what Coates said in white.

So please answer this for me: why is Derbyshire a racist, and Coates isn't?

Hey Skipper said...

erp, you want to know the definition of an American rightwinger: somebody who thinks leftwingers invented political discourse about racism out of thin air in the '60s.

The definition of a zealous ideolog: someone who asserts his opponents think leftwingers invented political discourse about racism out of thin air in the '60s. And who then will be completely unable to provide any evidence to support his pronunciamento.

Hey Skipper said...

Speaking of how the disinction between fascists and socialists is without difference, take the Can you tell who said that? test!

erp said...

Skipper, why do you insist on bringing facts into a discussion of leftwing blather?

The left’s current problem is they can’t think of a name to call us that conjures up the nastiness of fascist/racist. It doesn’t matter that the definition of those words doesn’t fit the situation – facts are fungible in their world.

Harry, your gospel is far more mythic than the Christian one which kept its magic at the more believable level of minor miracles and holy people ascending bodily into heaven – their gospel doesn’t move whole peoples post hoc from one side of the political spectrum to the other as yours does.

The vaunted 60's activist movement of your youth was orchestrated and funded by the Soviets as you know. Vietnam was only the hook to grab the attention of draft age teenagers, the object was to get where we are now – a fascist country no longer ruled by law, but by consortium of world power brokers whose face in the U.S. is Obama.

Humphrey and McGovern and the rest of the cast were actors not chosen for their brains and certainly not for their good looks or charisma, but for their naiveté, a characteristic not easily feigned.

Believe it or not and I know you won't, but race relations were very much better in the postwar 50's than now and would have continued to improve slowly in a much more orderly manner without all the phony baloney marches, rioting for fun and profit and forced integration of public schools and private facilities which only served to polarize each side of the race issue just as it was intended to do.

Fifty plus years later, black ghettoes are isolated violent hell holes run by drug dealers and “the welfare,” black school children are warned “not to act white” by excelling in their lessons, children are born into poverty and hopelessness with no families or communities, conditions are so much worse now they would have been unimaginable back when – except, of course, for the fascist elites getting rich on the backs of their constituents.

Mazel tov. Job well done!

PS: Harry, don’t bother bringing up your tar paper shack shtick again. Yes, they existed and poor people, black and white, lived in them.

Harry Eagar said...

You might want to ask a Jew -- should you know one, which I suspect you do not -- of he or she would agree that his parents or grandparents thought race relations were very much better in the '50s.


I missed out on the Rooskie money. Not a ruble did I get for demanding, once at gunpoint, fair treatment for my fellow citizens.

If you feel like aligning yourself with the slavering creeps who were on the other side of the movement, suit yourself, but it does not reflect well on you.

erp said...

Harry, I went to high school and college in NYC and practically all my friends then and now are Jewish. Our next door neighbors were Orthodox Jews growing up, not that matters.

Of course, you didn't get a ruble or a dime. You were just a useful idiot who didn't know what was going on ...

I don't align myself with anyone and the slavering creeps were all on your side as these ensuing years have made so graphically clear.

Hey Skipper said...

[Harry:] If you feel like aligning yourself with the slavering creeps who were on the other side of the movement, suit yourself, but it does not reflect well on you.

That entire comment reflects very, very badly on you.

By the way, So please answer this for me: why is Derbyshire a racist, and Coates isn't?

Since there has been nothing but exhausted crickets so far, I'm going to guess the stench of hypocrisy is wafting from Oahu.

erp said...

Skipper IIRC Harry is back on the mainland now -- Florida if I'm not mistaken -- probably an upscale condo with armed guards patrolling the perimeter and an armed gatekeeper.

s/off

The part about living in Florida is, I think, correct.

Harry Eagar said...

As usual, when I offer a link that destroys Skipper's position, he pretends it does not exist. That was quite a long piece by Coates, plenty of space for him to let his antiwhite bias out, but -- unlike Derbyshire with his hatred of black people -- he didn't.

Hey Skipper said...

[Harry:] As usual, when I offer a link that destroys Skipper's position, he pretends it does not exist.

The hell you did. Not here, and not anywhere else, either.

The link you provided is indeed very well written and compelling (per the NRO review, and I agree) although it suffers from a few logical deficiencies, not least of which is to be careful what you ask for. And it is also completely irrelevant.

Why? Because that isn't the point you brought up. You referred directly and specifically to the NRO piece that got Derbyshire fired because of its racist content. As it happens, Coates latest book, published to so much progressive acclaim, contains passages with the same content in white that Derbyshire was guilty of in black.

Remember, you brought up Derbyshire's racism. So, the question to you isn't about what else Coates has written, no matter how excellent it might be, but rather why Derbyshire is a racist, and Coates isn't: what they wrote were flip sides of exactly the same coin.

Stop yanking those poor goal posts around Harry, it is getting so bad as to offend the Geneva Conventions on torture.

erp said...

Unlike you Harry, we learn from history and don't click on your links.

Hey Skipper said...

erp:

Au contraire, I always follow Harry's links, when he deigns to provide them.

erp said...

Sorry, I was sure you said you didn't bother following them.

Harry Eagar said...

You haven't shown us any of those statements.

Hey Skipper said...

HuhWot? The heck I didn't:

Suppose you were a white person with a deep-seated dislike for black people, and you were intent on training your son to feel the same way. Suppose that, day after day, week after week, you instructed him to study the details of every instance of black-on-white crime. Say you advised your son to extrapolate from these incidents the notion that black people are generally dangerous, and that your zeal to present him with disturbing anecdotes along these lines never waned.

You would be wrong, in just about every possible way: statistically, sociologically, morally. You would be doing your son a gross and damaging disservice. For yourself you would invite, and earn, broad contempt. If your opinions became publicly known, you might well find yourself unwelcome in polite company and your job at risk. Indeed, the National Review contributor John Derbyshire was fired for expressing such sentiments in a blog post three years ago.

And yet for harboring roughly the same level of suspicion, fear, mistrust, distaste, and unease about whites as Derbyshire does about blacks, the essayist and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates has found himself crowned America's leading civic thinker. "It is Coates to whom so many of us turn to affirm, challenge or, more often, to mold our views from the clay," wrote the Washington Post's Carlos Lozada, not inaccurately.

Coates's recent memoir, Between the World and Me, an instant No. 1 bestseller dubbed "immense" by Publishers Weekly and deemed "essential, like water or air," by A.O. Scott, will not only win every prize in sight, they'll have to invent some new prizes for it.

-- Kyle Smith in The Hard Untruths of Ta-Nehisi Coates


Hey Skipper said...

Link.

erp said...

Skipper, your link restated the obvious.
All the sturm und drang of the past and present is a deliberate attempt to divide us into armed camps fighting each other instead of fighting them, the fascist elites.

Bret said...

Harry wrote: "You might want to ask a Jew -- should you know one, which I suspect you do not -- of he or she would agree that his parents or grandparents thought race relations were very much better in the '50s."

Ummm. You do realize that at least 2 of the three bloggers here had Jewish parents and grandparents? Therefore, since Skipper knows us he knows Jews?

Good question what my grandparents would think of race relations now relative to the '50s. They've been dead for quite a while so I can't really ask them. I think they'd be happy about some stuff and unhappy about other stuff. There was certainly anti-jewish bigotry in the '50s and even when I was a child, but there was no lack of opportunity for jews in the United States. Unless they resort to violence (which we're seeing more of now), racism primarily hurts the racist.

P.S. I've been on vacation for a couple of weeks. Back now.

Harry Eagar said...

No, I don't know about your grandparents, but the suggestion was to erp; and her reply confirmed what I suspected: she doesn't know any Jews.



Hey Skipper said...

Harry:

Also, I can't help but contrast where the goal posts were with where they are now. Derbyshire got fired for saying in black what Coates said in white.

So please answer this for me: why is Derbyshire a racist, and Coates isn't?

erp said...

What about my statement confirms that I don't know any Jews and BTW one of my bridesmaids was Jewish and when I told the priest (we got married in a Catholic church to please my husband's grandmother) in the pre-wedding chat, he said the wedding would have to take place below the altar because she wasn't baptized, I said all the better.

Unless you can produce proof that my statement is untrue, I'd like an apology.

Lefties and projection -- you guys invented it. Just because lying and rewriting history is your MO, doesn't mean the rest of us do it too.

Harry, I went to high school and college in NYC and practically all my friends then and now are Jewish. Our next door neighbors were Orthodox Jews growing up, not that matters.

Of course, you didn't get a ruble or a dime. You were just a useful idiot who didn't know what was going on ...

I don't align myself with anyone and the slavering creeps were all on your side as these ensuing years have made so graphically clear.

Harry Eagar said...

Actually, you did align yourself with the rancid racists of the Allen Ellender type by adopting his never-substantiated claims about commie support of civil rights.

You didn't make that up; you got it from your antiblack (and antisemitic too) buddies.

It's curious, though, that if your claims are accurate, the commies devoted more effort to supporting American values tan you do. Weird.

If you had a Jewish bridesmaid, I apologize. But your story is fishy, since all Catholic weddings I've seen were below the altar, whatever that means.


erp said...

If by "civil rights" you mean the civil disruption of the 60's, it was indeed led by commies. So wrong about that.

I don't know or care who Allen Ellender is. Wrong again.

I don't have any buddies who shape my thinking. Wrong here too.

Commies who support American values? Ain't no such animal. So very very wrong.

Another typical harryism: were below the altar, whatever that means. You don't know what it means even though I explained what it meant in our case, yet it sounds fishy to you. Perfect.

Too bad you don't put your exquisite ability to ferret out fishiness to your borg-like adherence to leftwing blather you've been inhaling all your life.