Like Marx, who was nicknamed “der Mohre,” I have the misfortune of being the darkest person in my extended family. This used to occasion mirth among my children, who insisted that all of us had black ancestors. When my youngest daughter Sara went to school in Montgomery County, Maryland, she explained to a teacher in a class devoted to “diversity” that her father was black. Most of the rest of the year she received favorable treatment from the school authorities, until the celebration of MLK’s birthday, when she committed an unsettling faux pas. She responded to the question “What was the biggest achievement of this great man?” by explaining: “He forced blacks into public bathrooms.” Presumably that was not the PC answer.

Elizabeth Wright’s excellent commentary on the black liberal elite and the exemplification of its race-hustling behavior by Henry Louis Gates might cause one to reflect on the ultimate enablers in this case, namely the white academic and journalistic elite. But this is not to ignore the obvious. Gates’s charges of racism are ludicrous and outrageous in view of his exalted position as an academic mandarin and because the president of this country, the governor of Massachusetts, and the mayor of Cambridge are all black Democrats, elected largely with white votes. One of the policemen who stopped Gates while he was breaking into his house was black, and the other, whom Gates continues to berate as a racist, teaches diversity training. One could not imagine a more PC community than Cambridge or a more systematically sensitized commonwealth than Massachusetts, or a country that is so willing to transcend “racial division” by electing a black, leftist chief executive than the United States. What else must the U.S,, Massachusetts, and Cambridge all have to do in order to meet the standards of white anti-racism, as conceived by Gates and his fellow Harvard academics?

But even more relevant, what else are white liberals expected to do in order to make black critics like us? The answer may be what the Germans seem to agree is the proper measure of how much atonement their people have to do in order to make up for their collective past. “One can never do enough!” The rage of anti-white nags is like the Calvinist God damning the sinner, who remains exactly that, no matter how much he tries on his own to change his standing. That many whites see themselves as such sinners has nothing to do with back elites. What we are looking at is a white multicultural fixation, from which black elites simply draw benefit. Harvard black academics, Derrick Bell, Cornell West, Orlando Patterson, and Henry Louis Gates are expected to guilt-trip “white racist America,” while taking occasional swipes at sexists and homophobes. But the ones who turned them into widely publicized voices of conscience belong to the white race, and it is whites who revel in the accusations that come thundering down from their accusers. Indeed white professors at Harvard say things far more outrageous against the white race than anything we hear from the token black faculty.

Once when asked why I was not a “white nationalist,” I responded by explaining that it is the whites far more than the blacks who have produced our anti-white and anti-bourgeois regime and culture. The whites have done this to themselves, in a gesture of cosmic stupidity and moral arrogance that I could never imagine any other race engaging in. The people in our government who enact laws and dictate policies discriminating against whites, males and Christians were put there overwhelmingly by white Christian voters. Mayor John DeStefano of New Haven, who was responsible for the anti-white policy leading to the Ricci challenge, is an Italian Catholic elected mostly by white ethnics. The state in which DeStefano resides, which is the one whence I come, is preponderantly white, and most of the whites in Connecticut vote for the political Left. Moreover, the WASP Republican Party makes about as much noise as the Democrats lamenting America’s racist past and promising to make amends for their alleged sins of commission and omission. There is nothing that Obama said this summer while visiting Ghana about our evil past as a slave-holding country that could equal the declaration of shame that his Republican predecessor had uttered on the same continent two years earlier. While Republicans get no credit for their groveling from black Democrats, no one can accuse them of not “reaching out.”

The culture of white guilt has spread so far that it seems entirely incidental if black parasites have joined the game. Far worse than Gates’s chutzpah is the toxic waste that we put into the minds of the young here and in Europe about the burden of Euro-American history. The politics of atonement is based on gross exaggerations and selective treatments of the past, which are then combined with adoration of the bizarre and anti-Western. But this approach to civilization is precisely the one that my students and most academics of my acquaintance have absorbed; and they have taken over this perspective out of inertia or the desire to rise socially. The answer for most of our young is not a crash course in the great books, even if we could decide on which ones to teach. Most people have neither the inclination nor the ability to ponder such funded wisdom; and not a few of those who teach it are already full of the multicultural ideology and politics of guilt that have contributed to our problem.

The answer, insofar as one is possible, is to make clear to the predominantly white public that what they have been supporting is foolish and destructive. It is ruining their society, distorting their learning, and turning minorities into hateful people who are rewarded in proportion to how rudely they behave or how cleverly they milk misplaced white guilt. Gates, Sharpton, and Jackson have thrived because they conduct themselves in a way that pleases anti-white whites. They are expressing the kind of scripted “indignation” which elicits from my fellow-academics the predictable response: “They’re entitled to act out after the way we’ve treated them.” What this really means is that we should continue to hold white, Christian heterosexuals, and particularly male ones, responsible every time black race-hustlers decide to insult white people—or, better yet, to incite riots against them.

At the same time, there may be emotional and practical limits to public patience when confronted with the anti-white vibes of those whom the masses empowered. The public reaction to Obama’s statements about the police “behaving stupidly” in dealing with Gates made me think that while voters will put up with a leftist black president who pushes quotas, they don’t want him to show his true feelings too openly. Obama pushed the envelope, by taking the side of a mouthy race-hustler against an immaculately liberal white policeman and his black fellow-officer. What then happened indicates that some white people are suddenly beginning to wake up to political reality.

Watching the GOP’s Voice of Faith, Laura Ingraham, fill in last Friday for the even more tiresome Bill O’Reilly, I was reminded once again why I despise Republican talk-show hosts. Although Laura is attractive, speaks in whole sentences, and according to her biography, is the “eighth most listened to radio talk host,” what came from her mouth on FOX was intellectually worthy of Oprah. Laura brought on two blacks, one a professor of political science at UCLA and the other a leader of a group practicing GOP outreach to black voters. The black Republican expressed indignation, which Laura hastened to justify, that the president was acting contrary to the wishes of the “black community” by pushing for a medical program that “would make us more dependent on government.” This supposedly offended the sensibilities of American blacks “who [like all good Republicans] believe strongly in family values.” 

The other speaker, who turned out to be a conventional academic leftist, with dark pigmentation, pointed out that American blacks have benefited disproportionately from their connection to big government. They have found employment with the state, receive government social benefits and can count on judges and administrators to look after their being given special access to promotions and college admission. If blacks therefore were opposed to having the state interfere in their lives, this black professor saw no evidence of that trend.

What might have been added to this counter-brief are two other facts.

1) GOP leaders, in pandering to black voters, have not stressed positions that we might associate with the Right. To the contrary, they’ve gone after black votes by muting any opposition to set- asides and affirmative action and by putting into party posts liberal Republican blacks like Michael Steele and, before him, J.C. Watts. Right now Republicans who are going after the Hispanic vote are leaning toward voting for the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor. The accommodating Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana not only intends to vote for Sotomayor but has already announced his support for the new Democratic hate-crimes bill. Meanwhile media toady Lindsay Graham “sees something in her [Sotomayor] that very much impresses me.” And Bill O’Reilly’s frequent guest and not very funny GOP comedian, Dennis Miller, is urging Republican senators to back Sotomayor in order to pick up more Hispanic votes in the next election.

2) Much of the “black community” is so plagued with an out-of-marriage birth rate, soaring into the mid-seventieth percentile, that black “family values” are becoming pathetic. Blacks have become increasingly the wards of public administration; and although the GOP hasn’t challenged this status quo, blacks, for better or worse, are committed to the Democrats as their source of welfare and compensatory justice. And even those blacks who furnish socially conservative answers on Marist, CNN, and FOX polls are not inclined to vote Republican. In fact they see no contradiction between voting for the Democratic Left and overwhelmingly opposing gay marriage.

Laura, Hannity, and the rest of the GOP-auxiliary troops should take note of political reality. Blacks are not about to vote for the party of Bush and McCain, no matter how much authorized conservatives hallucinate about Martin Luther King and his supposed “family values” and “race neutrality.” And the price the GOP will have to pay for trying to push up their Hispanic vote totals a few points, as Steve Sailer has demonstrated repeatedly, may be exceedingly high and may not even work in the end. What did the GOP gain in pr by putting blacks and Hispanics in high-profile federal positions? And how did Karl Rove’s plan, which he was able to sell to the gullible George W. Bush in 2005, to put pressure on banks in order to make sub-prime loans to Hispanics and blacks, turn out for the GOP? The party lost the Hispanic and black votes by enormous margins, after having done its part to wreck the economy, in a desperate effort to win over minorities.

There is an alternative to this pandering, and it begins with the perception that there are certain voting blocs that are not likely to fall to the GOP, no matter how loudly Laura and her friends talk up black and Hispanic “family values.” The GOP and its hired guns should just give up going after the impossible dream and try to increase their size of the white Christian share of the electoral pie, at least up to that percentage that the GOP had as late as twenty years ago.

And count on the worst happening! At some point the results of this administration mixing socialist economics with cultural Marxist social policies will hit white Americans very hard. When that happens, the Right must be there to assume control. And either the GOP will become something resembling a Right; or else it will remain what it is, a toothless opposition that disgusts the real Right as much as it irritates the leftist media whose favor it seeks. What a hideous prospect if the faux opposition represented by Steele, Lugar, and Graham gained the most from the inevitable reaction to Obama’s disastrous policies! 

Although I certainly don’t want to cramp Keith Preston’s style or libertarian persuasion, his polemic today is so full of factual errors and fallacious comparisons that I feel obliged to respond. For the record, Kaiser Wilhelm II was not a socialist, as Preston would learn from reading Eberhard Straub’s study Kaiser Wilhelm II in der Politik seiner Zeit (2008). The last German emperor ruled over a highly decentralized federal state, in which most internal governance took place in the constituent administrations of the Empire, which were a collection of kingdoms, duchies, and free cities. The total tax burden for German citizens in 1900 was somewhere below 7 percent for those who were employed, which was the lowest tax rate in Europe at the time. Although the German working class was the most literate and enjoyed the highest living standard in the world, the German welfare state had hardly taken off in 1900, if one discounts modest workers’ pensions and something like medical insurance. Wilhelm described himself as a “Volkskaiser” and oozed sympathy for the German Arbeiterschaft, but he did not place his country on the road to Obamaism. And one suspects that at least some of his rhetoric about standing up for the workers was related to his concern that the Socialist Party of Germany, which was theoretically Marxist and which by 1914 had become the largest party in the Reichstag, would not become a true revolutionary force. By the way, I have never encountered the statement ascribed to Wilhelm, that he would support American socialists if they became Prussian militarists. It sounds like something The Weekly Standard would manufacture to kill two birds with one stone, by beating up on the Krauts for the umpteenth time while linking socialism to evil reactionaries.

I’m also disappointed that Preston has fallen for another neocon trick, previewed by S.M. Lipset and Arthur Schlesinger, assigning everyone who doesn’t fit the ideological grid to an axis of anti-democratic evil. Socialists and traditional Tories are not the same simply because neither would accept Preston’s anarcho-capitalist worldview or because neither group would arrive at the eighteenth-century liberal views embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The hierarchical, status-based universe of traditional conservatism has nothing to do with the socialist Left, except that neither would likely embrace market economics, albeit for different reasons. Traditional conservatives look back to a pre-capitalist, agrarian past, while the Left wants to build on capitalism while moving beyond it into a more egalitarian future. I’ve no idea how the two positions are similar, except that neither would appeal to Preston.

It is also never fully explained how the founders of the American republic were more leftist than the socialists. Perhaps Preston, echoing Murray Rothbard, wants to tell us that the American regime “conceived in liberty” was truly a novelty in the eighteenth century. I’ve no doubt that it seemed so to our founders, as I am reminded each time I look at our fiat money. But would this perception prove that the American republic was more “leftist” than socialist states in the twentieth century? There is no evidence this is the case. The work of Christian merchants and slaveholders, who were interested in protecting their property and controlling popular passions, the American founding document by modern standards was not leftist in any sense. Needless to say, this modest, clearly framed document had to be vigorously reinterpreted and steadily modified to make it into what it has become, under philosopher-kings. But that is a wholly different story.

I greatly appreciate Tom Piatak’s gentle attempt at mediating between two of his favorite commentators. Moreover, there is nothing in his statements about Scott Richert I could possibly disagree with. Scott and his wife Amy are exemplary parents, and I applaud their godliness and energy in trying to raise seven children, and especially in our morally decayed American society. Nor would I ever attribute to Scott the slightest sympathy for the pro-choice movement or the socially radical feminists behind it. And in no way do I consider him to be front-man for GOP party hacks, who can’t wait to give evidence of their “moderateness” by reaching out to the media.

Where I differ from Scott are on two points. First, I do not see any moral parity between the mass-murderer George Tiller and the outraged Christian who took his life. One was a thoroughly evil person engaged in infanticide for fun and profit. The other was someone who stopped Tiller’s rampage by drastic means. While relatively little good can come out of this violent act, it was morally defensible. What Tiller did was not. Note this is not an attempt to whitewash the obvious political recklessness of what the killer did. It will no doubt be turned into grist for the mills of our cultural Marxist regime, which will go after people like John Zmirak, Tom Piatak, and Scott, all of whom have been vocal opponents of abortion. But there is no moral parity between Tiller and his slayer, given the kind of services Tiller was “providing.” Nor will Scott gain friends on the cultural left by forcing comparisons between the two killers’ actions.

Second, Scott’s attempt to prove his case by citing the bible and medieval philosophy is less than convincing. I simply don’t see how Aquinas’s view of tyrannicide, which is borrowed from Aristotle, can provide sufficient guidance for dealing with the evils of the modern managerial regime. The reason is not that classical and medieval analyses of government are wrong. They are simply outdated and do not take into account political developments that have occurred in the late modern era.

Scott also quotes biblical passages, especially Romans III, in order to buttress his positions and the effect is far from compelling. Paul’s epistle does not show that Tiller’s killer acted wickedly “because good cannot come out of evil.” The cited reference, which is a leitmotiv in Romans, pertains to actions taken without or without faith (pistis). The previous discussion is to whether one could fulfill the Law of circumcision merely by performing that commandment and whether someone who was not circumcised in his flesh (akrobustos en sarki) could nonetheless observe that commandment “in his heart.” Section III ends by reminding the reader: “therefore through the works of the law no human body is justified in His presence. Affirmation of the Law is affirmation of error (dia gar nomou epignosis hamartias).

As a devout Catholic, Scott may not read these passages in the same way as the Protestant Reformers. As he might know, they were pivotal texts for Luther. But the passages in question should not be pulled in to attack Tiller’s assassin. Taken in context they have a very different meaning.

Although Justin and I have been friends for many years, and allies against the neo-Trotskyist scourge, fairness compels me to note his overstatement of my critical remarks about Jared Taylor. It was not my intention to treat Jared as a representative of leftist victimology.  I was simply commenting on the reactive character of his white nationalist ideology, which seems to have been developed as a mechanical response to the present dominance of anti-white, anti-Western elites. I then offered reasons that white nationalists have not been effective in counteracting the multicultural Left. And finally I made a few observations about the overlaps and dissimilarities between the traditional Right and the white nationalist movement. Although white nationalists stress hierarchy and the recognition of natural inequalities, which are hallmarks of the authentic Right, they give no evidence of a traditional class sense or of any rooted identity. In this sense white nationalists are different from European counterrevolutionaries or Burkean conservatives, but also typical of the deracinated world from whence many white nationalists come.

Unlike Justin’s response, my comments were not an invective against people whom I despise and wish to isolate. I respect Jared Taylor as a gracious Southern gentleman whose writings are beautifully crafted and abound in timely observations. Despite our disagreements, I consider him to be a perceptive and audacious critic of our political culture.

Justin’s effort to compare Jared to the failed painter from Vienna who did so much harm is a very low blow. This comparison is certainly not justified on the basis of what Jared posted on this website. Jared’s comments reprise themes and concerns that have been dealt with in a similar way in conventional movement conservative publications. Except for Jared’s greater sarcasm, I really don’t see how his interpretation of the Ricci case in New Haven, Connecticut, differs much from those comments I’ve seen on the same subject by GOP syndicated columnists in my local newspaper.

The real source of Justin’s outrage lies in the contradiction between his ideology and Jared’s emphasis on cultural and biological specificity. The world as conceived by Justin is a collection of self-determining individuals, who should be free to work out their social and economic affairs, providing they do no physical harm to anyone else. In this ideal society, all humans, at least adults, however one defines them chronologically, will be free to develop themselves on the basis of their feelings and self-interests. Personally I couldn’t imagine how such a chimerical society could come into existence, let alone sustain itself, except in the minds of libertarian intellectuals or on a very provisional basis among likeminded ideologues.

Such ideas are the modern counterparts of nineteenth-century utopian communities, all of which were attempts to restore a natural human condition that as far as I can tell never existed. Without authority structures, whether created by traditional hierarchies or by the modern managerial state, human beings have never lived together for any length of time. This generalization would apply to, among other societies, early America, which was a stratified and family-focused place. Our sharp difference of views is reflected in the divergent ways in which Justin and I define the American Old Right. From his perspective, that American Right, about which he wrote an entire book, featured radical individualists resisting societal pressures and state authority. On my reading the interwar Right stood for a small-town and predominantly Protestant America faced by bureaucratic centralization and the rise of the modern culture industry.

I am also perplexed, though perhaps I shouldn’t be, by Justin’s attempt to equate his radical individualism with the “legacy of Christianity.” Christians by and large until recently defended traditional social hierarchies, and they showed no compunctions about using the state to enforce Old Testament morality. Although Christ and his disciples addressed themselves to individual bearers of souls, they never denied the “exousia,” or authority, of those who commanded our bodies in a sinful world.

Justin should read Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and particularly section 15, and then follow that up by looking at Aquinas’s tract On Princely Regimes—and just about anything produced by Luther and Calvin on the subject of political authority. That way Justin might get an idea of where traditional Christian teachers have stood on the need for governance. 

Although by no means precursors of the anarcho-tyrannical regime that has now established itself in the Western world, these theologians would not have identified Justin’s worldview as particularly Christian. Certainly they would not have advocated the individualism that he and other modern libertarians have in mind, when they talk about our natural right to do our own thing. I’m not sure that one could find biblical or patristic passages suggesting a right to trade in psychedelic drugs or which would authorize the taking of multiple sexual partners?  Perhaps Justin should investigate this matter before claiming to speak for an ancient religious legacy. Pace Justin, Hitler was not a failed “portrait painter.” He was a highly talented commercial artist, who should have been allowed to continue studying in his field. He and the rest of the world would have been better off if he had. 

Austin Bramwell deserves kudos for noticing my hand at work in the caricature of Jonah pleading on behalf of his colleagues for a return by the Obama administration to a neoconservative foreign policy. Since I was asked to be satirical, I cannot claim that every position attributed to Jonah in my spoof is one that he actually took. Nonetheless, positions that are mentioned, on the transfiguration of MLK, the redemptive political value of blowing up the homes of our undemocratic enemies, and the need for a more belligerent foreign policy, can certainly be found in NR and on NRO.  Austin is urged to look at my most recent book on American conservatism, which is now out in paperback and which abounds in evidence of NR’s leftward trajectory during the last thirty years, and especially since the coming on board of its current editor-in-chief.

It is true that NR has not participated in the worship of King as unconditionally as have other movement conservative organs, such as Human Events. NR writers still occasionally point out King’s human frailties while listing his presumed virtues. But what they write about King is still cloying enough. The essay on him to which Austin is alluding was a guest puff piece by the Director of American Studies at Heritage, Matthew Spalding, which was run, not accidentally on January 21, 2002. Spalding’s piece abounded in the usual movement conservative boiler-plate about how King was against “moral relativism, wanted a colorblind society, and expressed ideas that were rooted in the “Western tradition of knowledge.” One can easily show by quoting from his writing that King favored a comprehensive system of set asides and possibly reparations for blacks.

But in any case the praise that Spalding dishes out could just as easily have been made about Barack Obama. Our president also quotes selectively from the Bible, mentions the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence, and supports a colorblind society, at least as consistently as MLK. Perhaps next year NRO will commission a panegyric to Barack or Michelle celebrating the “conservative aspects” of their public oratory. By then of course both of these celebrities will have been lifted up into NR’s pantheon of democratic heroes, a lofty height from where they will be able to mingle in the minds of magazine readers with the likes of King, Trotsky, and Benjamin Netanyahu.

In the matter of NRO’s (read Goldberg’s) decision to publish Steve Schwartz’s hymn to Trotsky, if that was meant to be a joke, I can’t find the humor. Schwartz’s piece read like a quintessential neoconservative paean to a great global democratic revolutionary, who had given his life to fight fascism and anti-Semitism. Is Austin suggesting this was merely satire? Most of Schwartz’s words could have come from any old neocon, highlighting the merits of democratic antifascism. Whether some other neocon would have mentioned Trotsky specifically the way Schwartz did is less certain. But the principles attributed to Trotsky in his piece were the ones that all neocons value.

It is exceedingly interesting that while NR is willing to reach out to the Trotskyist Left, its editors have not shown the slightest tolerance toward those who are perceived as being too far on the right. Unlike Trotsky and other anti-Stalinist leftists, the editors have nothing but loathing for those who are excessively “conservative.” In 2003 they hired their close friend David Frum to slime members of the “unpatriotic Right,” who are accused of (youbetcha!) anti-Semitism and other damning idiosyncrasies, for opposing a global democratic foreign policy or for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the civil rights revolution.

For the record, I’d cease inveighing against NR and its editors, and even forget about their unkind treatment of my aged person, if only they stopped calling themselves “conservative.” I’d be delighted if they referred to themselves as members of the twenty-some generation, who celebrate the civil rights and “moderate” feminist revolutions and advocate a liberal internationalist foreign policy. If this change in labeling could be arranged, no more ridicule against them would be coming from me. The problem is not really that such “mainstream conservatives” are “perfidious,” which is what Austin thinks I think they are. It’s that they’re wet behind the ears but in a commanding position to mold minds on the right. Their hazy view of the past and their vulgar presentism are typical of my college students, who just happen to be Democrats. But I’m sure these students, even the social work majors, would change their party affiliations if they could get jobs working for a “conservative” magazine in New York. 

Evan McLaren is correct that the question of legalizing drugs is a no-win situation for our side. While the present anti-drug campaign has created a never-ending round of police-raids, I’m not sure that legalization would settle the issue very well. More likely it would coincide with the increased use of mind-altering drugs, as a form of recreation, as legalization has done in some European countries. The addicts would also be covered by the odious American with Disabilities Act, as has already begun to happen, as the courts have interpreted “disabilities.” Before long we’d be swamped with cases of stupefied drug-users bringing legal actions against employers who would be accused (have you guessed?) of “discrimination.” Without stretching my imagination, I could easily imagine a drug-users’ month being inserted into our multicultural liturgical calendar, along with feast days and Lenten months for other designated victims. Advocates of drug legalization could make a better case for their side once we manage to abolish our present welfare, PC regime. (Alas that may be never!)

Although Stacy McCain is entitled to his preference for Rush and Palin over their critics, I must seriously question his ascription of a rightwing populist label to either figure. Stacy is describing people with conventional GOP leanings who cultivate a populist style. Rush is a very predictable advocate of whatever left-leaning centrist the GOP is running for president, while he and Sarah Palin both hold generic liberal internationalist views on foreign policy. Palin to my knowledge has never distanced herself from the John McCain-Bush position on amnestying illegals, and during the campaign she talked up government measures to ban gender discrimination from the workplace and educational institutions. Far from representing an alternative to her running mate in the recent presidential race, Palin ran around flaunting his positions.

Yes I know the liberal media has gone after both of Stacy’s heroes but this hardly suggests that we on the right have a duty to defend everyone who sports a populist style and whom the media decide to go after. The media also skewered McCain during the campaign as a heartless right-winger. Should we then support him as a man of the Right because of his critics? Or should we applaud Karl Rove, who has never seen a Democratic ethnic constituency he has failed to slobber over, because the Democratic media has castigated him as well?

The neocons and bogus conservative movement are able to use their power in order to frame areas of contention while controlling both sides in the debate. While Frum may have attacked his erstwhile ally Rush, the two of them nonetheless continue to be joined by shared associations and a shared foreign policy. Does Stacy believe for a moment that National Review even after apparently taking sides with Rush against Frum would not welcome Frum back as a member of its editorial board? Conversely the same magazine would have nothing to do with either one of us, no matter how loudly we screamed in favor of Rush.

When it comes to alliances, we should remember Socrates’s teaching in Plato’s Republic. While the Greeks are naturally friends even if they occasionally fight, foreigners are the natural enemies of the Greeks, even when they seek their friendship. In this instance it is we who are the barbaroi, while Frum, Lowery, Rush, Palin and Bill Kristol are all natural allies. We can’t change this simply by imagining that all of us are “populists” and therefore in the same camp with those who hate our guts. Nor do we make Rush and Palin into something different from what they are, voices of a neoconservative-led Republican Party, by attaching to them an ill-fitting label that would have suited George Wallace. Being a rightwing populist is about more than peppering one’s fractured syntax with “You Betcha.” It’s about reactionary substance, as Sam Francis used to remind his readers.

The only sensible rightwing course at the present time is to tune out on the name-calling among our enemies. Does Stacy believe that Palin because of her critics would actually side with him against the neocons if she were the presidential candidate in 2012? Nothing in this lady’s record in national politics would suggest anything of the kind. Yes, she is pretty and yes she jabbers like a provincial graduate from a third-rate college! But that’s not enough to make her fit the job description Stacy has in mind. Let’s not confuse her with George Wallace appealing to blue-collar social conservatives in 1972 or with Pat Buchanan taking on the GOP establishment in 1992.  Those were rightwing populists, which Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh are unfortunately not. And let us not allow the useful mess that Obama is plunging this country into to be wasted on the bogus opposition being sold to us by the GOP-neocon elite. All of this potentially productive misfortune would be for naught if we get Ms. Title Nine, talking up wars for democracy, as our alternative to Obama in 2012. And I wouldn’t trust having Rush certify anyone as a good populist, before he checks with Karl Rove. 

On purely aesthetic grounds, I’d be on Rush’s side. Although a fat blowhard, he looks minimally less ugly than the Frumbag.

Moreover, unlike the person who just attacked him as a “racist,” Rush, to my knowledge, has never insulted me personally. Of all those targeted in Frum’s attack on the “unpatriotic Right,” it was I who had to endure the most gratuitous insults.. At the time, I had not castigated W for having dragged us into the Iraqi quagmire; and the Frumbag’s only gripe against me was that he considered me a babbling lecturer, who was emotionally unfit to be a college instructor. This charge was totally fabricated and was an obvious ettempt to get me dismissed from my place of employment. Still and all, Frumbag does not wield the kind of influence that Rush does at the present time; and his efforts to ingratiate himself with the Obamaites, which have been going on for months, look like acts of desperation. As a neocon and GOP frontman, Rush is the more formidable personality, and the fact that NR has rallied to him against their longtime hitman indicates who is our more powerful enemy on the bogus right.