Posted on 03/20/2015 8:01:11 AM PDT by Kaslin
Sound the trumpets. The New York Times announced on March 18 that is bringing in 20 new online-focused writers as contributors for its op-ed and Sunday Review sections. In an interview, Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal claimed, "We were looking for a broad range of viewpoints and subjects and backgrounds and geographical locations and every kind of form of diversity that you can think of."
Lower the trumpets. Bring in the fact checker. It seems the viewpoint-diverse Times can't seem to locate a conservative acceptable to executives prowling the halls in the snooty Times offices in midtown Manhattan.
Some names on the list are easily identified as radical-left. Start with Michael Eric Dyson, MSNBC contributor known for comparing Obama to God and suggesting Rush Limbaugh "is trying to foment a universe of bigotocracy."
Roxane Gay is a leftist darling of the NPR set and the author of a book called "Bad Feminist." She told Mother Jones, "The older I get, and the more I learn, the more I try to create a space within feminism for women of color, for working-class women, for queer women, for transgender women."
Some tout hard liberal political activist resumes. David Kirp is a professor at Berkeley who served on Obama's transition team. Novelist Lydia Millet used to work for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Others are longtime liberal journalists. Judith Shulevitz spent years on the staffs of Slate and The New Republic, and married the dean of the Columbia Journalism School. Mimi Swartz is an executive editor of Texas Monthly and worked in the 1990s for Tina Brown at Talk magazine, and then at The New Yorker.
Then there are the liberal fools. Molly Worthen began a Times book review last June by claiming "Jimmy Carter may be the most pious man ever to have occupied the White House." She even compared him to Jesus, and said that he could not retire "while child brides are raped and mothers break their backs hauling buckets of polluted drinking water. In high office, this kind of fellow-feeling may have been a political liability, a distraction from sober grand strategy. But it has been the Passion of Jimmy Carter."
Just as the Times believes David Brooks is a true conservative, so, too, does it believe it has recruited conservatives in the Gang of 20. Why, look at William Baude. He was a legal clerk to John Roberts, chief justice of the Supreme Court. Yes -- but a conservative? Not even close. On Tuesday, he argued in the Times that if Obama loses in the King v. Burwell decision at the Supreme Court, he should ignore its orders on Obamacare completely except for the actual plaintiffs in the suit.
Peter Wehner is another Brooks clone, happily wearing the conservative moniker while savaging the right. He worked in George W. Bush's White House, advancing one cause after another antithetical to conservative orthodoxy. Now he just wages rhetorical war on Reaganites. Last November, in a written attack on Mark Levin and the "Jacobin right," he asserted, "By their own logic, Reagan would have to have been deemed a RINO (Republican In Name Only)." He tried to embrace Reagan as "extremely impressive. Yet he could not even approach the standards of purity embraced by today's radicals on the right."
The New York Times is nowhere closer to viewpoint diversity. The ideological range is still radical-left to country club liberal Republican.
“bigotocracy.”
Now theres an issue I can scarcely WAIT to read about.
does diversity mean racing at full speed to into the “progressive” ABYSS??
The NY Slimes thinks anyone to the right of Chairman Mao is a conservative.
A white liberal
A black liberal
A gay liberal
A bisexual liberal
A trans-gender liberal
A young liberal
An old liberal
A new liberal
A red liberal
A blue liberal
All the sophistication of a Dr. Seuss children's book... but without the charm.
One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish...
Never let them wield the word Bigot.
It is they that sneer in contempt at the peaceful, the industrious, the conscientious, the good and well meaning.
Criticizing those who seek to subvert, undermine, disrupt and destroy is what leads them to throw that word around. They cant stand being outed. Sunshine and logic are their worst enemies.
They are the bigots. They hate stable and harmonious societies and the people who make them - the “bourgeoisie” that the Marxist Left always deride, but cannot do without.
Never, ever, ever let them use it. They are the Bigots with a capital B.
Liberals always talk that way to everyone else.
Because of course they are educated, Sohpisticated!, wise and knowing...and the rest of us are Bigoted Bumpkins, only comprehending monosyllabic sing songy lectures.
The Lecturing Liberals, regurgitating agitprop they internalized in an obscure and sterile class.
Institutionalized shallowness is why newspapers are dying...
Of course, nobody there will think of traditional Judeo-Christian conservatism.
Actually, this is in and of itself a very conservative position. Going all the way back to before Marbury.
I believe A. Lincoln advocated something like it for the Dred Scott case.
Should Obama do it, it will create a very interesting precedent that say a Walker or Cruz administration could use for all sorts of things.
Also, I’m not sure Lincoln counts as a conservative — after all, he really started the move from the Founders’ federal system to what we have now, essentially a unitary state with the “states” being somewhat autonomous provinces.
*note, I suspect he will be dropped in the future because of such his prior discussions on Islam, race, and immigration.
You can argue about the appropriate answer to that question, but not that it's an entirely relevant one.
Wars always result in an expansion of central power. That's because nations that don't expand their central power in time of war tend to lose the wars and often disappear. Reference Poland, in the process of disappearing at the same time our country was being Founded.
The question is whether Lincoln had intentions of keeping federal power permanently expanded or planned to return to something like prewar conditions asap.
I have never seen any convincing evidence that Lincoln viewed significant expansion of federal power as in and of itself a good thing, or that he intended its expansion during the War to be permanent.
Indeed, most of it wasn't permanent, with the federal government returning to something close to its original role for most of the rest of the century. It's really only with the Progressives from the 1890s on that the remorseless expansion of federal power began.
I have also never seen anything even remotely resembling evidence that the Progressives based their proposals on Lincoln's wartime precedent, or that they would not have felt as they did without that precedent. Most who have studied the Progressives find their beliefs based more on European values than anything in previous American history.
As far as your basic comment of Lincoln not being a conservative, if he were around today he'd be considered far to the right of Ted Cruz.
Where he fit in terms of his own day is a little more difficult to figure. "Conservative" in the American sense, means, IMO, conserving the ideals of the American Revolution and Constitution. The whole conflict between North and South, and the war that resulted, was basically over what those ideals were and how they should be applied to the times. IOW, what was America to be? What did "conservative" mean in 1860?
He routinely, and often viciously, attacks Tea Party Conservatives.
Tea Party people aren’t thin-skinned cry babies.
I agree.
My point was that Peter Wehner claims to be a Conservative, and the New York Times apparently agrees.
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