Am I to blame if reading this made me kind of hate Shelby Steele?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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if you’re just now starting to hate Steele, you must not have been paying attention when he had his 15 minutes of fame back in the 80s. His act hasn’t changed.
It’s behind a firewall, but the teaser paragraph was enough to tell me this person wasn’t engaged in serious discussion, he was just trolling, which is all those people ever do.
I thought most was pretty standard Wall Street Journal crap. The sort of sniffy disdain of Merrill Lynch employees for Obama, written by someone who has read too much Bill Buckley for his own good. But, this is worse:
Actually, the left “captured the moral imperative” because right wingers like him at the time were utterly opposed to acting on any moral imperatives at all.
In fact Conservatives utterly deny there are any moral imperatives whatever, except to ban abortion. That is it. So, no Conservatives rallied to champion integration, an end to racism and racist codes in local and city governments, no Conservatives stood up and said “this war is immoral, and we can’t support it!”
Conservatives have lined up and supported every immoral cause to date, and fought against every “moral imperative” that ever came along. You’ll always see them manning the barricades crying “NO!” at every chance we have to make any progress in America.
There is certainly no social compact of poor and rich, no notion of helping struggling cities and rural areas cope. There’s no concept of organizing publicly to accomplish any moral objective whatever. You’re on your own like the Marlboro Man. That’s been the Conservative war cry.
I don’t suppose they are quite ready yet, at the Wall Street Journal to say that the Alex Jones racist right is what they support. They’d all much rather Jeb! were still around, but they’ll make do with Trump so long as they get their tax cuts.
. . . that they subscribe to:
I said “moral imperatives”, not “immoral imperatives”!
What’s moral about making America “white” since the only way to do that would be to kill or expel the better part of 137 million people, which not even the Alt-Right racists really envision?
Very few people outside of Alex Jones are ready to say that any of those things are “moral.” In fact, rich people clearly deny all of them form any part of their agenda. The evidence would suggest otherwise of course!
It’s a standard Lib gaslighting article. Steele used to be hired a lot in the 90s to write them until Doughy Pantload came along to do it better. But the best answer to his bullshit is “Yes.” “We hate you. And we will channel that hate to defeat you at the polls and in the streets if necessary.”
I wasn’t very fond of him to start with.
Shelby Steele, an Uncle Tom’s Tom.
Reading something like that has as much value as arguing with a crumbling brick wall.
It’s much more efficient and effective to respond to nonsense like that, by asking, “Why do Republicans hate America?”, and leave it at that.
Sorry, Martin, I couldn’t get past the headline – you get to read this drivel so I don’t have to. Let’s get to something immensely more important like the 538 analysis of the Eagles chances for a super bowl.
Gird up your loins for tomorrow is another day…
. . . bullshit “arguments” about how and why “the left is consumed with hate” consume you with hate for the propagator of the bullshit “argument”?
Seems perfectly valid to me!
(Was I sposeta read the linked WSJ bullshit in its entirety before commenting? Cuz I only got as far as “Suscribe” or “Sign In”, what with being unwilling to do either ‘n all.)
I’m very selective about subscriptions – WSJ won’t make the cut. Not worth the bother.
. . . worthiness: If you were going to kick limited $ to some news-gathering org, based on assessment of their news-gathering-and-reporting competence and reliability, WSJ would actually rank pretty high. Higher, for example, than NYT, the supposed “paper of record”, who seem to get tooken and used on a fairly regular basis by rightwing propagandists seeking to insert their preferred narrative into the public discourse — and I mean in NYT’s supposedly “straight news” articles, not on the opinion page (though lotsa awful stuff there, too) — based, it seems to me, on NYT’s corrupting lust after “access”.
It has long been my sense that WSJ is among the more reliable “straight news” orgs, at least within the areas they choose to focus on. It’s their opinion section that’s horrendous. This sense goes back at least to Franken, in Lies, and the Lying Liars…, documenting then-editorial-page-editor Paul Gigot essentially admitting knowingly publishing opinions containing/based-on false claims. I.e., basically confessing it’s bullshit, and they know it’s bullshit.
When Murdoch bought WSJ, there was great concern expressed about this changing under his influence. Honestly, I haven’t looked into evidence whether that happened or not, certainly not sufficiently to register an opinion on it. But so far, my impression persists that they’re pretty good for actual news reporting, godawful in the opinion section. As this example would seem to confirm.
I could give a fuck.
Tonite I threw a friend of 25 years who has worked with my wife for 30 years out of my house over the opiod crisis.
The gist of the argument was:
HIM: I’ve studied this for THREE months and the EXPERTS are unanimous in their answers … more studies to find the silver bullet (no shit … that was his statement).
ME: Your experts lie. They are paid off by big pharma. And EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE DOSES OF OXYCODONE FROME WV WERE SIGNED OFF ON BY A DOCTOR.
talk about white privilege.
I did not realize that Shelby Steele was Claude Steele’s brother.
Up until this moment, I was only really aware of the latter.
Kinda off topic – Brett Kavanaugh is going to have a very fun week. Let’s see – not long after news that a second woman had come forward to allege sexual assault, but Michael Avenatti is apparently representing a third woman willing to step up.
This is called “massive projection.” You literally have to soak your head in a bucket for 3 days to swallow all of this stuff. That or live on a stead diet of Fox News, Hannity and Limbaugh, with a sprinkling of Alex Jones on top like a rancid cherry.
When an actual “leftist” deliberately drives into a crowd of American Nazis and kills and injures a bunch of them, THEN we can talk about “leftist hate.” Until then Shelby Steele and the Wall Street Journal can just kiss my ass!
Since the only thing that actually exists is right-wing violence and hate, only profound insanity or a supreme blind dedication to your own propaganda could come up with an article like that.
Which makes it pretty standard fare for the Wall Street Journal these days of course. If Mussolini were running today they would probably endorse him!
Don’t forget that Strongman Trump campaigned on…Making America Great Again, which explicitly provides that America ain’t great.
It’s cognitive dissonance and projection all the way down.
. . . to its logical conclusion: Cuomo and BLM agree with Trump re: putative American “Greatness” circa 2016.
So Shelby Steele’s dissing them all, Trump included.