This is what is in the print edition of National Review's November 10th issue—the treezine, as we e-types call it:
“During the Korean War, Douglas MacArthur wanted to attack Manchuria, and he let that be known to everyone who would listen. That was not U.S. policy, however, and President Truman promptly sacked the great man. During the Cold War — in fact often pretty hot — NATO general Edwin Walker was instructing his troops in the theorems of the John Birch Society. That the U.S. government was 60 percent under Communist control was not the view of the Kennedy administration, and Walker was gone. Flash forward to today.A three-star general, William 'Jerry' Boykin, has been lecturing, in public and in uniform, to the effect that we are in a war with Islam, than whose god his God is bigger, that this is a war against Satan, of whom he has a photograph in the sky above Mogadishu. President Bush has made it national policy that we are not in a war with global Islam. Furthermore, it is hardly good for the morale of troops to understand that their commander is a wacko who goes around photographing Satan zooming overhead. General Boykin is manifestly insubordinate, and should be sacked. Yesterday.”
This editorial has the appearance of having been written by William F. Buckley, the only man on the staff likely to remember General Walker, and the only man in America capable of writing a phrase like “than whose god his God is bigger,” or talking about the “theorems of the John Birch Society.”
Oddly enough, it was the subject of an almost immediate retraction on NRO (the e—well, web—zine):
“CORRECTION ON BOYKIN [NR Editors]“National Review, in the issue out today, runs an editorial paragraph that it did not mean to run. We had a debate among the editors—as we debate many things—about Gen. William Boykin, who recently made some highly provocative remarks about the war on terror. Some editors felt that he should be fired forthwith; others demurred. A draft editorial paragraph was prepared, stating the position that Boykin should be fired; at just about the last minute, we decided to withhold judgment–to see how the investigation into the general's behavior proceeded, and to reach a conclusion then.
“Because of a production error, that paragraph–the one calling for Boykin's head–went to the printer. And thus appears in the magazine. We removed it from our html edition, [That's apparently the one they want you to pay for, for some reason it's still up on NRO] but about the “hard copy edition,” we could do nothing.
“We will weigh in again–finally and definitively–on General Boykin, when we, along with everyone else, know all that we should know.
Posted at 02:24 PM
This leaves us in some doubt as to what NR's editorial board actually believes. Mr. Buckley's experience as a yachtsman should have told him that when you have two hands on the wheel, you generally end up on the rocks.
The obvious difference between the Boykin case and the MacArthur and Walker cases is that MacArthur and Walker were both removed for criticism of their civilian superiors, Boykin was being threatened with removal for criticism of the enemy. This, by an odd coincidence, is more or less why Ann Coulter was fired by NRO—for a column she wrote on September 14, 2001.
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Lefty blogger Ezra Klein (send him mail) posted this on NotGeniuses.com.
“We're going negative. Weapon? Strange causal links viewed in the worst light possible. Let's go.“Is Instapundit a racist? Well, he might be. He links approvingly to this post by Vodka Pundit, which is really just a pointer to this post by Henniger [sic, actually Daniel Henninger] (got all that?) which says:
'The most significant voting bloc in California's famous recall election isn't Hispanics or angry male Democrats but the people who were so eager to weigh in that they've already voted–with their feet. According to a report out this month from the U.S. Census Bureau, an astounding 2,204,500 Californians threw in the towel from 1995 to 2000 and highballed it out of the “Golden State.” The state's net migration figure for the period is –755,536, and would be worse if Latin American immigrants didn't still drop in for a look. This is the first time the net migration number for California has ever gone negative…
'If you look down the Census Bureau's coming-and-going column nearby, the consistent breakdown of Democratic blue-state population losers and Republican red-state gainers is striking (there are exceptions; Oregon and Washington state gained, while Louisiana lost). This may leave the blue states bluer than ever, but not very pleasant places to live if their most industrious, motivated citizens are loading up one-way U-Hauls.'
“So the article seems to say that Latinos are coming in and everyone else is leaving. The everyone else, for some reason, are called California's 'most industrious, motivated citizens.' Now, I'm not calling Henniger a racist, but the only differentiation he makes is that the 'good' citizens are leaving and the brown citizens are coming. Draw your own conclusions.
My simplistic conclusion: It's the American citizens who are leaving. It's the Mexican citizens who are coming.
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Presidential candidate Howard Dean, who has done the math, and decided that he needs white votes, said recently that:
“Southerners must stop basing their votes on 'race, guns, God and gays' and forge a multiracial coalition that focuses next year's presidential election on jobs, health care and a foreign policy reflecting American values.”
I meant to do an item pointing out that he's asking them to not vote on all the issues where he and the Democrats are sticking it to the South. However, James Taranto, of OpinionJournal.com, beat me to it. Here are some links provided by Taranto. (Well done.*)
I'll add that Dean is asking Southern whites to vote for his socialist programs on what Paul Krugman calls their “economic interests.” That is, to engage in purely mercenary voting, in the hope that the Dems will take some money from the “rich” (believed by Krugman to be close friends of George Bush) and transfer it to voters in Tennessee and West Virginia.
Krugman claims that the GOP's Southern Strategy is “racially charged symbolism to get Southern whites to vote against their own economic interests.” Does that mean that what Dean and Krugman are doing is using economically charged symbolism to get Southern whites to vote against their own racial interests? That they should vote in favor of reverse discrimination, against their own race, vote in favor of persecution of their own religion, vote for confiscation of their own guns, and vote for the … I started to type the word “penetration” but let's not go there, let's just say that Southerners in general are not in favor of gay sex, and don't want to vote for someone who feels that there should be more of it in their home town.
But, like it or not, these are the issues in this election. And how much of this sort of self-hatred would Dean or Krugman expect any other ethnic group to vote for?
* But we still like the WSJ about as much as Taranto likes the French: Here's why:
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