The NYT has been printing some wretched op-eds over the past few days. I wish I’d had time to hit them all, because they are truly terrible. Seems like the woes of the newspapers are inspiring their staffs to let all their inner liberal demons out to romp around in print.
Anyway, though I couldn’t get to all of them, I did have time to get to Bob Herbert’s stinker, dated yesterday. Bob was talking about Jack Kemp’s political career, lauding his attempts to bring minorities into the GOP. But then:
One of the writers who influenced Kemp’s thinking about politics, William F. Buckley, was at the opposite pole of Kemp’s progressive thinking about race. Buckley took a scurrilous stand in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated the nation’s public schools.
Whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks, according to Buckley. “The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race …”
Buckley’s appearance is supposed to represent the GOP’s resistance to Kemp’s attempt to integrate the party. Except that Buckley made that statement in 1957, and renounced it completely in the 60’s:
Buckley changed his views and by the mid-1960s renounced racism. This change was caused in part because of his reaction to the tactics used by white supremacists against the civil rights movement, and in part because of the influence of friends like Garry Wills, who confronted Buckley on the morality of his politics.
And Jack Kemp’s political career didn’t really start until 1970. Buckley’s errant and fully retracted statement had nothing to do with Kemp or the GOP during Kemp’s time in public office.
Then Herbert wanders off into economics, where he expends quite a bit of energy saying nothing substantive about supply-side economics.
We are talking about weirdness of a very high order here, and that weirdness dominated the economic policies of the United States for years.
Working people were told they should sign onto this craziness because the economic benefits of supply-side tax policies would ultimately benefit everyone. …
We’ve seen how it all worked out.
Really? That’s his interpretation of the economic situation? That it had something to do with supply-side tax policies? Are we talking about the same economy?
What an embarrassment in an already-bigoted column.
May 7, 2009 at 12:23 pm
That really is the left’s position on the economic crisis. Obama has said as much, himself. He thinks that the FDR proved that Keynesian economics is the way to go, and that’s not even debatable.