Should-Read: Very nice from the extremely sharp Kevin Drum. Note this well: for neither National Review nor the Atlantic Monthly is informing their readers a mission-critical task: Kevin Drum: National Review Still Has a Race Problem: "The Atlantic recently hired... Kevin Williamson... [who] believes abortion is murder and... any woman who gets an abortion should be executed...
...This is typical of Williamson: he’s happy to say out loud things that plenty of other conservatives believe but are too smart to admit.... Williamson also[:]
East St. Louis, Ill. — "Hey, hey craaaaaacka! Cracka! White devil! F*** you, white devil!" The guy looks remarkably like Snoop Dogg: skinny enough for a Vogue advertisement, lean-faced with a wry expression, long braids. He glances slyly from side to side, making sure his audience is taking all this in, before raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge. Luckily for me, he’s more like a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg, a few inches shy of four feet high, probably about nine years old, and his mom—I assume she’s his mom—is looking at me with an expression that is a complex blend of embarrassment, pity, and amusement, as though to say: "Kids say the darnedest things, do they not, white devil?",...
Describing a black boy as a “primate” is not a good look.... But here’s the thing. Williamson’s piece wasn’t about race. It was a fairly routine takedown of Democratic governor Pat Quinn.... It’s not even a very ideological takedown... alleged corruption in infrastructure spending. If Quinn had an R after his name, I could see myself writing almost exactly the same piece. What leapt out at me, then, is this: what is this paragraph even doing in Williamson’s story, let alone acting as the lede?... It literally has nothing to do with anything in the rest of the piece. To me, this says more about the editorial process at National Review than anything else....
Well, I don’t know. [a] Do they simply have no one on staff who noticed this? [b] Did they notice but give in to Williamson’s demand to keep it? [c] Did they actively like it because they knew it would appeal to their readers? [d] Was the first draft even worse and this is actually the toned-down version?
I bet two thousand dollars on [c], Kevin...
