Next on MSNBC: Chomsky Country
By In yet more evidence that the right is doing a great job “muzzling its idiots“, I note that the Klan’s favorite junk scientist has been given three hours of softballs on C-SPAN this afternoon. It is a remarkable look at all the pathologies of the crackpot right: callers complaining they can’t get laid because of legalized abortion and AFDC, Murray claiming that no living writer or composer has produced an enduring work of art (although he will make an exception for one film: Groundhog Day), anecdotes intended to prove that menial laborers can easily find $30/hour jobs, Murray arguing after a tour of his huge estate that he wouldn’t want to be “coddled” by the government after his stocks went down, every comment starting with whining about how he keeps “getting in trouble” with those silly liberals who actually think racism is problematic. Anyway, I was for some reason reminded of this oldie-but-goodie from Ted Barlow:
Do you remember Catherine MacKinnons passionate speech at the 1992 Democratic National Convention? Remember the surprisingly strong showing that Andrea Dworkin made in the Democratic primaries in 1999? Remember the buzz after Catherine MacKinnon joined the McLaughlin Group? Remember the short-lived cable talk show, Andrea Dworkin is Making Sense? Remember the millions of dollars that the Radical Feminist Coalition steered into the 1988 presidential race? Of course not. Radical anti-sex feminists can occasionally be seen at open mike night at the Coffee Clatch, but no one else is paying attention. In contrast, conservative buzz-killers are part of the backbone of the Republican Party, where they exert tremendous influence and help write the platform.
Still relevant today–who says the work of modern writers won’t endure! (By the way, I should say that I’m not drawing a direct equivalence between Catherine MacKinnon and James Dobson or Charles Murray; I just mean to reiterate that the idea that leftist radicals dominate the American left while right-wing cranks are marginalized is just self-evident nonsense.)
While we’re on the topic, uggabugga does the service of putting the key part of Reynolds’ argument in boldface for posterity:
The very image of the left is someone who says the Al-Qaeda crew that attacked on 9/11 were not terrorists, that those who died in the WTC were not innocent, and victims of 9/11 were little Eichmanns.
To be clear, the devastating responses to Reynolds are, I’m afraid, not strawman-burning. He really is a despicable McCarthyite hack, all the way down.
UPDATE: Murray is now arguing that the problem with modern American society is that we’ve gotten away from our “historical commitment to indvidual merit” (paraphrased.) Yep, Plessy v. Ferguson,women not allowed by law to practice law or serve on juries, the south consisting of apartheid police states–those were the days!