02/13/2009
Megan McArdle writes in the Atlantic:
Arnold Kling compares the Obama and Bush administrations to gangs of thugs raiding his home. James Wolcott accuses him of racism.[Libertarians better shut up for the next four years]
Kling isn’t a racist, he’s a weird transnational libertarian, who has a strange way of describing people who care more about the harm immigration does to America’s poor than they do about the gains achieved by Mexico’s poor in America — he calls them, in careful lower case letters, "national socialists."
Now, of course, we have a black president, and James Wolcott stands ready to police any reference to him for signs of racism. This is a charge so serious that it shuts down any possible discourse, and is thus much loved by people who do not care to be disagreed with. Would it be racist of me to note that Mr. Wolcott’s accusations seem vaguely redolent of the tactics of one Senator Joseph McCarthy?
No, of course it wouldn’t, because Wolcott and McCarthy were both white. It’s when you accuse Obama of behaving like Robert Mugabe, or Jesse Jackson, or Adam Clayton Powell that you'd be a racist.
Anyhow, here’s Wolcott:
"And there the matter might have rested had not Kling surrendered to heat of candor today at a Heritage Foundation/Club for Growth confab and decried, "Barack Obama is destroying my daughter’s future. It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs."Now if Kling can’t comprehend the implication of racial menace encoded in daughter-gang-thugs/home invasion … [Et cetera]
I’m tempted to say something like "Kudos to Wolcott for admitting that when a gang of thugs attacks your house and your daughter, they're usually minorities," but he probably thinks it’s a stereotype. As far as I know, the libertarian Arnold Kling was thinking of a SWAT team raid by government forces, i.e. largely white thugs. But even before the election, I wrote "Face It, Anything You Say About Obama Is A Gaffe,"
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