Who (or What) is James Kirchick?
This James Kirchick character who smears Taki in TNR has quite a rep in the blogosphere, best summed up by liberal blogger Matt Yglesias:
“Kirchick has a promising future in conservative journalism, having mastered the time-honored techniques of rising through the ranks without any demonstrated ability in fields other than arguing with straw men and making things up about his opponents.”
Kirchick is a real piece of work: here he is retracting his youthful distaste for the Gay Freedom Day Parade, and eagerly endorsing it now that it provides some opportunity to bash Russia and create an international incident. The neocons hate the Russians these days, don’t you know: they won’t cooperate with the targeting of Iran, and Putin is “anti-American,” i.e. on to the neocons’ game.
Naturally, Kirchick defends Bush’s get-out-of-jail-free card for Scooter, but the comments section of his blog post over at TNR’s “The Plank” have his number.
And, of course, Senor Kirchick hates Ron Paul, cluelessly writing:
“The burden lies on Paul (as well as those commentators who claim that he somehow represents a welcome breath of fresh air to the GOP) to identify specific aspects of our foreign policy that are wrongheaded. This is something Paul has not yet done.”
Poor Kirchick: do they keep him locked up in a closet, so to speak, over at TNR, and let him out only when they want to smear someone? He has only to go to Youtube, or even Antiwar.com, where he’ll find that Dr. Paul is very specific indeed when it comes to identifying the many destructive aspects of our utterly wrongheaded foreign policy.
For someone who claims to hate “racism,” it’s passing strange that Kirchick finds the virulently racist perambulations of his boss, Martin Peretz, tolerable—but, then again, we all know that anti-Arab racism isn’t really racism, at least not according to the neocons. Here he is gloating over the death of Rachel Corrie. What a guy!
With the characteristic thuggishness of the left-neocon, who combines a leftish fetish for confiscatory taxation with a neoconnish vindictiveness, Kirchick bitchily snaps: “The best argument for the Estate Tax--next to MTV’s ‘My Super Sweet 16’--is Taki.”
There is no good argument for the Estate Tax. However, if there was such an argument-by-example, it would be Marty Peretz’s ownership-control of The New Republic, which, up until recently, he owed to his wife’s money. In 1974, Peretz purchased TNR with $380,000 contributed by his wife, Anne Labouisse Farnsworth, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine Company fortune.
Comments
I understand the circulation for TNR is dropping like a rock, no?
Or is that The Atlantic?
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Auburn War Eagle…
While I don’t necessary agree with you, I respect your writing. As a neoconservative once told me, “Raimondo writes as if his hair is on fire”. So, in the great scheme of things, that’s probably a compliment. Of couse, I ask...Hair on fire. Fire in the mind. What’s the difference?
But will you please answer the following. In you introduction to Rothbard’s “Wall St., Banks and Foreign Policy” you write, among other things:
“Rothbard eagerly reclaimed the concept of class analysis from the Marxists...One of Rothbard’s many great contributions to the cause of Liberty was to restore the original theory, which pitted the people against the State. In the Rothbardian theory of class struggle...”
Are you not endorsing the idea of a Marxist class struggle but one simply pitted against the State? If so, then doesn’t a Marxist dialectic endorse determinism and, in fact, preclude the notion of individual human action as described by Ludwig Von Mises? Doesn’t such preclude the idea of a sacred duty that may have arisen with the concept of public service?
Correct me if I am wrong but it seems that you are inferring a perpetual war against the State until there is no State. In other words, the idea of a limited government, as framed by our Founding Fathers, is not possible if Rothbard’s theory of perpetual class war against the State is taken to it’s logical fulfillment.
Why is that no different than the “fire in the mind” of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed?
Honestly...is a Rothbardian merely a bizarro Marxist?
That said, I think now is the time for you because indeed our government, especially in foreign policy, has taken an imperial turn. So your contributions are needed and entertaining to read.
Sid
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Should not the focus of all this be “Screw George Bush”? Why waste time writing about the idiots who support and write about the idiots that are ruining our country? After some thought I might re-prhase that to read “have ruined"…
This is exactly what those who have seized control of the governmental process want: for the chattering classes to keep chattering while they do their thing…
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Maybe I’m just confused, or maybe I’m paranoid, but
I’ve concluded none of you can be trusted, and thus
I won’t support government at all, especially not an
elected government when it deems its election to be
a license to screw society at large.
Democracy, it seems, is not the solution.
The best solution is to have government run by a
House of Chance, whose members are selected by lot.
Fernando Leza
Spring, Texas
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Justin (to my mind, inexplicably) writes “There is no good argument for the Estate Tax.”
WHAT? THE? FUCK? ARE? YOU? TALKING? ABOUT?
Marty Peretz is only one of the paradigm cases in favor of it.
Another? The Bushes, pere et fils.
Others? Any Walton heir you’d care to name.
Paris Hilton.
Tucker Carlson.
The entire Koch (oil) family.
Mr. “Flat Tax” Steve Forbes.
No less a wealthy and successfully progenitor than Bill Gates, Sr, is on record: “The estate tax should be regarded as just paying back to the country for all the wonderful things it’s made possible for the people who have that wealth,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any great societal goal being served by inherited wealth.”
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I don’t know about Bill Gates, Sr, but I haven’t taken anything from society without paying for it immediately. And I don’t mean taxes. When my time for book-closure comes I’ll have nothing to pay back to society. My wealth, if any, will be squarely mine, and it’ll be my right to give it to anyone I please. The society has no claim on a penny of it.
I believe an individual is his own end. He does not live for great societal goals.
MCLA
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@konopelli/wgg
Gates’ second sentence is probably true. OTOH, the state confiscating money is a positive evil. While I don’t approve of his choice of charities, they are almost certainly all better than those which bureaucrats would choose.
His first sentence, though, is simply bizarre. What do you think that he would say if the thieves came is and took his money when he attempted to give it away instead of waiting until after he was dead?
And why on earth would anyone think that thieves confiscating resources somehow benefits the country?
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The rationale for the estate tax is that without it, the wealth would become even more concentrated in a small number of families.
Wealth buys power and too much concentration of wealth, you can say good-bye to democracy.
If you are very wealthy, you oppose the estate tax.
If you are just a working person and you oppose the estate tax, you should ask yourself why you prefer plutocracy to democracy.
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If we have to tax wealth at all, and apparently we do, the inheritance tax should be the first tax imposed. Given a choice of having my money taken while I am still alive or have it taken when I am dead, I will choose dead. Let’s see, take the money I can spend, or take the money I can’t spend, uh, duh.
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