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The Endless Wankery of Juan Williams

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Shorter Juan Williams:

The problem with Barack Obama is that he’s not Bill O’Reilly.

Williams’ hackery deserves considerably more attention than it tends to receive. Though his work on Eyes on the Prize seems to have given him a permanent and inflated custodial sense of The True Meaning of the Civil Rights Movement, actual historians generally regard him as a joke. When Timothy Tyson, for instance, wrote about the “sugar-coated confections that pass for the popular history of the civil rights movement,” there’s no doubt in my mind that he was thinking about he provided what I regard as an apt description of Juan Williams, who is to the civil rights movement what the Stephen Ambrose was to World War II (though the comparison is probably unfair to Ambrose, who was infinitely less sanctimonious).

And though lately he’s spent most of his time accusing Obama of “pandering” to black voters, Williams as much as anyone has helped cultivate an image of Martin Luther King, Jr., that’s palatable to contemporary white conservatives who — given the chance — would have foamed at the mouth over speeches like “Birth of a New Nation,” “Beyond Vietnam,” or “Why America May Go to Hell” — the speech King was planning to give on April 7, 1968. Meantime, he’s perfectly content to “nod along” while his BFF O’Reilly recently compared Jeremiah Wright to the cops who sodomized Abner Louima. (Then again, Williams himself once compared David Letterman to John Wayne Gacy, so I’m imagining Williams had already noticed the obvious comparison.)

[ADDENDUM: Predictably, one of our finer trolls has shown up in the thread, this time towing a remora named “wow,” whose role is evidently to remind everyone how far the functionally illiterate have come in recent years. Their bravery is to be commended, and I must admit I find their personal interest in me to be somewhat touching as well. That said, the thread appears to have served some other ennobling purpose, since Timothy Tyson has taken the time to correct the projection error I made in the original post. His view of Williams’ historical work is more charitable than mine, and it was sloppy to insist that Tyson must have had Williams in mind when writing the passage I quoted.]

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