The Archives: December 30
Most worth remembering:
But there are two other things well worth remembering in addition:
- Harry Jaffa, Willmoore Kendall, the Crisis of the House Divided, and the Party of Abraham Lincoln
- Casey Mulligan Nominates Himself for This Year's Stupidest Man Alive Prize (Yes, New York TImes, Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Edition)
Andy Ferguson's love of Wilmoore Kendall is very powerful evidence that he should be shunned by all of polite society. And the fact that The New York Times hired and paid the astonishingly ignorant Casey Mulligan... I'm still waiting for anyone at the New York Times to make a profound apology to their entire readership.
From One Year Ago: David Bell Praises "The Old New Republic" as "Not Predictably Reaganite"
From Two Years Ago: Tim Duy: What Is the Fed Going to Do?
From Five Year Ago: Casey Mulligan Nominates Himself for This Year's Stupidest Man Alive Prize (Yes, New York TImes, Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Edition)
From Ten Years Ago:
- Harry Jaffa, Willmoore Kendall, the Crisis of the House Divided, and the Party of Abraham Lincoln
- A Hundred-Year Storm Just East of San Francisco
David Bell Praises "The Old New Republic" as "Not Predictably Reaganite": I really do not think David Bell has a clue how badly he looks when he feels he has to:
cut all ties with The New New Republic upon the firing of Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier and their replacement by Gabriel Snyder; and yet:
proudly and blithely and without protest continued his association with The Old New Republic and its editor-and-chief Martin Peretz who thinks and writes: 'Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.... So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.
To be the kind of person who doesn't quit in protest but stays to influence is one thing. To be the kind of person who quits in protest is another. But if one is that second kind, in those episodes when one does not do so, one's silence speaks very loudly indeed.
David Bell: On ‘The Old New Republic’: 'For me, the debates over TNR’s legacy...
...are personal. I sold my first article to the magazine in the spring of 1984, and spent a year there soon after as a ‘reporter-researcher’ (translation: underpaid intern). When the year was up, I headed off to graduate school.... From my perch in academia I continued to contribute several articles and book reviews each year, mostly on European history and politics. And I read almost every word in each issue. Like nearly every other Contributing Editor, I resigned after the December blow-up, in my case above all out of loyalty to the legendary departing literary editor, Leon Wieseltier...
[...]
In foreign policy, a subject in which [Michael] Kinsley took relatively little interest, the magazine adopted a more recognizably ideological line, driven by long-standing liberal anti-communism and Peretz’s strong pro-Israel stance (which indeed sometimes degenerated, in his last years owning the magazine, into anti-Muslim and anti-Arab tirades). But here, too, TNR was anything but predictably Reaganite...
'The OTNR: Not Predictably Reaganite'--I am going to treasure that for quite a while, I think...
