May 26th, 2010

I was going to write a post on the insipidness, vacuity, falsity, and ahistoricism of Matt Bai’s moronic Page One piece in the New York Times today, but Mark Schmitt beat me to it, so just read it yourself.

Sullivan seems to get a lot of mileage out of his awards, so we’ll start one here: the Halperin goes to, well, vacuous, insipid, false, and ahistorical press coverage by major MSM figures.  Nominate away.

6 Responses to “Halperin Award Nominee”

  1. Eli says:

    Not my generation, but I wonder whether the opposite might be true: that Rand Paul is evidence that to many Americans, the 60′s never happened at all. How else to explain the sort of amnesia that leads people to seriously consider if it might be OK that we allow discrimination.

    This seems a part of the larger view of race, where racism no longer exists and we’re in a kind of post-racial utopia where racial caricatures of Obama are simply “expressions of political anger”, and there’s no such thing as racial bias.

  2. CharlesWT says:

    If private institutions and business were allowed to discriminate, probably most of the discrimination would be minorities against other minorities and non-minorities.

  3. Warren Terra says:

    I think the posting rules limit my responses to CharlesWT’s comment. I will only say that even if he were to be correct, it would not devalue but emphasize the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Act.

  4. David A says:

    Schmitt’s critique is also ahistorical: It is nonsense to say that Blumenthal “volunteered and served.” In the Vietnam years, the Reserves were NEVER called up. At the time it was very well understood that the Reserves and National Guard were simply a minimally respectable path to dodge the draft, but one open only to the well-connected — like Dan Quayle, George Bush, and even Bill Clinton (until he got a high draft number). Blumenthal took that route when deferments were ended and he drew a low draft number. I do not criticize him or anyone the decision to avoid the draft in an insane war. I do object to people like Quayle, Bush and Blumenthal who took advantage of that option then but now pretend that they “served” in the military.

  5. Henry says:

    Like Blumenthal, I got a high draft number so, when I graduated from college and my student deferment ended, I joined the Reserves to dodge the draft. I chose the Reserves over the National Guard because I didn’t want to be called upon to shoot my former college classmates. What David A writes is accurate except that you didn’t have to be well-connected to join the Reserves or National Guard — I wasn’t. It is true, however, that college grads were more likely to be aware of the option, and we predominated among the Reservists.

  6. Warren Terra says:

    My impression is that, while connections were not necessary to join the Guard or the Reserves, there were special units that did require connections to join, and that the unit from which George W Bush went AWOL was among the most exclusive. I have no idea about Quayle’s unit.