Meyerson makes ridiculous attack on GOP

Aug. 31, 2012

By John Seiler

I have a lot of problems with the Republican Party. They don’t come nearly close enough to supporting as much liberty as I do. But it’s also worth pointing out ridiculous attacks on them, such as a new one by Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect.

After reading his article, most liberals are expecting the delegates departing Tampa to form gangs to roam the South lynching blacks.

He begins:

“The Republican ticket may hail from Massachusetts and Wisconsin, but Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan head the most Southernized major U.S. political party since Jefferson Davis’ day.”

Wait a minute. Jefferson Davis was the president of the Confederate States of America, so by definition he wasn’t a member of a “major U.S.” — that is, United States — “political party.”

“In its hostility toward minorities, exploitation of racism, antipathy toward government and suspicion of science, today’s Republican Party represents the worst traditions of the South’s dankest backwaters.”

“hostility toward minorities…exploitation of racism”? It seems to me the GOP bent over backwards to feature black and Latino stars such as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Sen. Marco Rubio.

“antipathy toward government”? Except that the Romney plan for the budget — and the somewhat different Ryan plan — don’t cut overall government spending; they only reduce the growth in spending. And like most liberal Democrats, Meyerson simply ignores not only the $16 trillion debt, but the incredible $222 trillion unfunded liabilities of the federal government.

Even if you expropriated all the money of all the “1 percent” in America, and waterboarded them to reveal where they hid their gold, you couldn’t come within a fraction of paying that down.

Climategate

“suspicion of science.” He later mentions “global warming” — apparently not aware that the politically correct nomenclature now is “climate change.”

Yet one of the biggest climate-change “deniers” was not a Republican, but the late Alexander Cockburn, the far-left Nation columnist, which enraged his and Meyerson’s fellow leftists.

And what about the Climategate scandal? After that, it’s not surprising that people have suspicion, not of “science,” but of tax-funded science bureaucrats on a mission to grab more of our money while producing fake results to push their controlling agendas.

I’m not a “climate scientist,” but to quote Bob Dylan, “You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

On “suspicion of science,” he also brings up the “Scopes trial” and “Republicans’ willful resistance to science and, more broadly, simple empiricism.”

Meyerson is under the impression that the Scopes trial was about evolution, probably from seeing the play and movie, “Inherit the Wind.” Actually, it was about eugenics and branding blacks as somehow genetically inferior.

Here’s an actual quote from the evolution book used in the classroom, which Tennessee wanted to ban:

“At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other … the highest type of all, the Caucasians, [is] represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”

Is Meyerson supporting this “science”? I hope not.

The book Scopes used also said,

“future generations of men and women on the earth [can also] be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.”

That is, by eugenics. That’s the reason the sterilization of blacks, as well as supposedly mentally defective whites, was imposed in the United States, and won the backing of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927. American eugenicists were influential on the even more demonic eugenics of the Third Reich.

California eugenics

And there’s a California angle. This is from the book, “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race,” by Edwin Black:

“Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called “Master Race.”

“But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn’t originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement’s campaign for ethnic cleansing.

“Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed “unfit,” preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

“California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the Twentieth Century’s first decades, California’s eugenicists included potent but little known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate and Polytechnic benefactor Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, as well as members of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

“Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics’ racist aims….

“The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz….

“Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California’s quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as the Pasadena-based Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations–which functioned as part of a closely-knit network–published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such asEugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis….

“The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior–the so-called “unfit.” The eugenicists hoped to neutralize the viability of 10 percent of the population at a sweep, until none were left except themselves.”

After Hitler seized power in 1933 and started attacking Jews and others, eugenics lost much of its force in the United States. And after World War II, the Holocaust and the opening of the death camps discredited the movement.

But it’s well to remember that, back in 1925 and the heyday of eugenics, as exemplified by the book used by Scopes, the country bumpkins of Tennessee actually thought that the Bible told them God created everyone equal, and that doing things like sterilizing blacks was evil. By contrast, Clarance Darrow, the “defense” lawyer who defended the teaching of eugenics and black “inferiority” in Tennessee schools, was the “enlightened,” supposedly “pro-science” person Meyerson is backing!

Meyerson again: “today’s Republican Party represents the worst traditions of the South’s dankest backwaters.”

What a way to smear an entire large section of the country. But remember, it was Tennessee in 1925, whatever racism might have existed in the state at the time, not Massachusetts, that in the Scopes trial defended the equal humanity of blacks and whites by banning a racist textbook.

Do a 180?

Meyerson continues:

“No other party in U.S. history has done such a 180.”

Does Meyerson know any real U.S. history?

The Democratic Party was founded by Thomas Jefferson, the guy who said, “Government governs best which governs least.” He’s one of the few men in history who actually cut government. OK, so the Louisiana Purchase wasn’t constitutional. Nobody’s perfect.

But Jefferson’s small-government beliefs were the bedrock of the party for at least a century — and are 180 degrees opposite of today’s behemoth-government, max-tax, total-control-of-our-lives Democratic Party. In Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolution of 1789, he basically said that the states have almost total freedom from the federal government, and implied that they even can secede. Here’s the first plank:

“1. Resolved, That the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes — delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral part, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.”

Think even a word of that will make it into the Democratic Party platform to be adopted next week?

And get this. Meyerson wrote:

“They also exploit racist resentments in a way not seen since the Willie Horton spot of 1988.”

But in that election, it actually was Democratic Sen. Al Gore who first up brought up the furlough issue (although not specifically Horton) against Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in the Democratic primaries. V.P. George H.W. Bush only ripped off the accusation for use in the general election. (Horton, who was black, was paroled when Dukakis was governor, and went on to brutally assault and rape a woman.)

Let’s just chalk it up as another example of Meyerson’s historical ignorance.

Enough. It’s Meyerson himself who exemplifies the ultra-intolerance now exhibited by the Left toward anyone to the right of Joe Biden.

Again, I’m well aware that Republicans and conservatives have a lot of intolerance of their own, for example toward the Ron Paul section of their party. And their talk of balancing the budget doesn’t make sense when they want to start more expensive wars.

But if Meyerson and other leftists want to see extremist fanatics, they should just look in the mirror.