The New Republic finally put its racial smear of Scott Walker up on its website.

Here's the scurrilous hit piece, "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker," which I first saw in my iPad on Saturday. The article went up Sunday evening, after I'd posted about it 3 times Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening, and Sunday morning. My posts:

Saturday afternoon: "Look at the new New Republic cover, smearing Scott Walker for his 'toxic strain of racial politics.'" This post displays the cover, with what I read as a strangely sexualized headline "Scott Walker Is So Hot Right Now"* and the puzzling sub-head "Too bad he owes his success to a toxic strain of racial politics." I noted that headline inside at the article itself (which is also the headline on the TNR website now) was "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker." Sub-head: "A Journey Through the Poisonous World That Produced a Republican Star." I read the article and opined that TNR had nothing racial to say about Walker himself. Walker built his political career in the Milwaukee area, and the article is mostly about the racial demographics of the place and 2 talk radio hosts who are popular there.

Saturday evening: "... I almost feel as though I am bullying The New Republic at this point." The article was still not up, and I took that as a digital-age failure for TNR's editor and publisher, Chris Hughes (who, as the co-founder of Facebook, had seemed as though he was going to make TNR very digitally sharp, which was why I subscribed, and why I got early access via iPad).

Sunday morning: "When is it considered acceptable, in polite company, to refer to the excessive 'whiteness' of a public figure?"

Why did the editors of The New Republic — that venerable journal — think it was acceptable to title an article "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker"? 

I did not give the typical conservative answer, which would be: Because it's liberal, and liberals can and will do to conservatives what conservatives can't get away with doing to liberals. That old rule of thumb is reasonably apt, but I don't think it is generally acceptable among liberals to use "whiteness" as the key word in an attack. I have a different answer, which you can read at the link.

Also, the Sunday morning post ends with a clipped out passage that I believe is intended to float the rumor that Scott Walker is a closeted homosexual:

Walker had an easy smile and impressive 1980s mullet, and he played on the football team, but his friends would apologize if they swore in his presence, and he wasn’t much for chasing girls. “He was a very nice-looking young man, always very neat in appearance,” says Neill Flood, the town’s fire chief, whose daughter was a year ahead of Walker in school. “He was the kind of guy who liked everyone, and everyone liked him. There was never any physical attraction for Scott, girls being all over him.” On Scott’s prom night, his mother recalls, he, his date, and some friends stayed up very late talking politics.

The girls hung "all over him," but "There was never any physical attraction for Scott"? He was "very neat in appearance" and not "much for chasing girls"? He spent prom night — a classic time for sexual adventures — talking about politics? I'm going to write a separate post on this topic, because I remember when the NYT tried a move like this when John Roberts was nominated to the Supreme Court.
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* I'm told "so hot right now" may be an allusion to the movie "Zoolander."

Romney 2016.

Do you think it's "bizarre speculation"?

It's exactly what crossed my mind as I watched him on today's "Meet the Press."  He talked about Iraq and the Eric Cantor loss, but I'll quote on what he said about Hillary Clinton, who, we might presume, would be his opponent, and in fact, the question was: "If you were running for president again, and if she were the Democratic nominee, what's the playbook to beat her?"

When is it considered acceptable, in polite company, to refer to the excessive "whiteness" of a public figure?

Why did the editors of The New Republic — that venerable journal — think it was acceptable to title an article "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker"?


(Click images to enlarge.)

That's the first page of the article in the June 30th issue, which I started blogging about yesterday afternoon and which is still not up at the TNR website. The cover, as you can see in that post, does not use the title "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker," but the strangely sexual "Scott Walker Is So Hot Right Now." The cover has a race-baiting sub-heading — "Too bad he owes his success to a toxic strain of racial politics" — but that's smearing Walker with an insinuation that there's something racist about him, not the racist smear that he's excessively white.

Nor does that "Whiteness" title appear on the Table of Contents page, which refers to the article with the teaser "It was hard to believe that a politician so banal had been the catalyst for such turmoil":



Maybe "so banal" dog-whistles so white, but only insiders — readers who really get inside the pages of the magazine, past the cover, which anyone might see on a newsstand, or the table of contents, to which a casual browser might flip — only insiders see the title that slams a person for his excessive whiteness: "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker."

The idea, I suspect, is that the insiders are in the know and sophisticated and they'll feel pleased with themselves and cocooned within the self-congratulation that comes with their getting the reference: The title is a play on the title "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Ironically, plays on that title are so banal and interest in that 1980s book/movie has got to be at least as white as Scott Walker. (It's "a postmodern novel" about a "Czech surgeon and intellectual" who "is a womanizer who lives for his work... considers sex and love to be distinct entities... copulates with many women but loves only his wife.")

The TNR editors, I suspect, presume that their banal, white readers, lubricated by their own thrill at getting a reference, will accept what is unacceptable, a blatant statement that a politician is unelectable because he is too white.

And as long as I am showing you the inner pages of TNR, where the unacceptable is slipped in anyway, look at this passage, which jumped out at Meade and me yesterday as I read the whole article out loud:


(Click to enlarge.)

They don't come right out and say it, but they've put the idea in your head, haven't they?

What 17 cases is the Supreme Court about to deliver?

A summary.

Father's Day.

That's a drawing of my father, Richard Althouse, blogged on Father's Day 2011.

A photograph:



Previously blogged on Father's Day 2006.

And here's the "Records From My Father" series I did last summer.

Why I'm not clicking on Google doodles for a while.

The one that's up today is quite charming, but I have learned my lesson. I will resist caving to curiosity until I'm sure the World Cup is over. I'm not just uninterested in soccer. I am actively hostile to the notion that I should be interested.

Sorry, World!

Do you believe that "senior officials from the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and other agencies" struggled desperately to figure out how to catch Edward Snowden?

WaPo reports: "U.S. officials scrambled to nab Snowden, hoping he would take a wrong step. He didn’t."

Something seems off about this — pumping up the legend of Snowden (never a wrong step!) and scrambling/desperate/bumbling government officials. It's got a movie-script quality that makes me skeptical.

U.S. officials offer conflicting accounts of how much they know about Snowden’s situation in Russia.

“It’s an ongoing investigation,” U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in an interview. “We have done the appropriate things at this stage of the investigation, and we know exactly where Mr. Snowden is.”

What really happened?

By the way, I love the phase "We have done the appropriate things." So all-purpose!

About that "Brady Bunch" fanfic in The New Yorker and how I almost feel as though I am bullying The New Republic at this point.

The June 30 issue of The New Republic just popped up on its own in my iPad. I only noticed because I was in my magazine-reading app finishing reading a story called "Here's the Story," by David Gilbert in The New Yorker, which I'd been "reading" via podcast while out and about. This is a great story, by the way, and though you'll need a subscription to read it at that link, anyone can read this interview with Gilbert in which he explains something that's not necessary to liking the story: It's the story — here's the story... — of the first husband and the first wife who had to die to lay the groundwork for the merged family of Mike and Carol Brady.

With the Bradys, I think I understood the ridiculousness of the parents and the kids, the goody-two-shoes attitude... I spent a few weeks watching old episodes and reading a slew of Brady quotes to try to incorporate the language of Mike and Carol—like in the pilot, Carol asks a haggard Mike if he needs a tranquilizer. I also wanted Don Drysdale in the story, because of his appearance in the show. Longfellow, too. A vague Hawaii reference. The Sunflower Girls. All these little details that hopefully add to the heartbreak of Ted and Emma....

Since the world of the Bradys is such an artificial world, I wanted the world of Ted and Emma to be absolutely real. That was very important to me, for them to fly above the construct of the show, to take on the appearance of living, breathing souls and perhaps, for a moment, gain their humanity and transcend their non-origin origins...

Hitting the home button within that app doesn't get you back to the iPad home screen but to your whole collection of magazines, each one represented by the cover of the newest issue. That's the only reason I saw the hit piece on Scott Walker, attempting to smear him as somehow a racist — he "owes his success to a toxic strain of racial politics" — so I took a screen shot of the cover and blogged it, then came back a while later to let you know that the article — "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker/A Journey Through the Poisonous World That Produced a Republican Star," by Alec MacGillis — has nothing racial about Walker himself. (The racial material is about the demographics right-wing radio of Milwaukee.)

I noted — at 3:00 pm, yesterday — that the cover and article were not yet up on the TNR website, but I expected to see them momentarily, and even commented 2 hours later that I was surprised at the lag. It's now almost 8 a.m. the next day, and my attack on the article you can't read yet has been linked on Instapundit and Power Line. I almost feel like I'm bullying TNR... kicking it while it's snoozing. Come on, TNR.

You know, I subscribed to The New Republic because it seemed to be poised to leap forward in digital media. I wanted to witness the roll out of the new design and effect of the new editor-publisher Chris Hughes — the 30-year-old co-founder of Facebook.

How did I catch Chris Hughes, et al., flat-footed. Me, an old professor with a Blogspot blog, an iMac, and an iPad... me, reading a short story in The New Yorker about the year 1967, the year when I was 16.

UPDATE: TNR put the article up Sunday evening: here.

"If women are the model on which most sexbots are based, we run the risk of recreating essentialized gender roles, especially around sex."

"And that would be too bad, because sex technology has the potential to alleviate longstanding human problems, for both men and women. Sex tech can help us take on sexual dysfunction and profound loneliness, but if we simply create a new variety of second-class citizen, a sexual creature to be owned, we risk alienating ourselves from each other all over again."

From "Sexbot slaves/Thanks to new technology, sex toys are becoming tools for connection - but will sexbots reverse that trend?" by Leah Reich (via Andrew Sullivan).

Look at the new New Republic cover, smearing Scott Walker for his "toxic strain of racial politics."

I live in Wisconsin, and I've been following Scott Walker since the 2010 election here, and I have no idea what the "toxic strain of racial politics" refers to. But congratulations to TNR for its eye-catching and weird sexualization of Walker: "Scott Walker Is So Hot Right Now" and for having the nerve to sub-head with "too bad" as you smear him with the accusation of "toxic strain of racial politics." That "too bad" belongs in the annals of self-refuting statements. Anyone can within one second perceive that The New Republic isn't the slightest bit sad that there's this dirt to throw at Walker... this invented dirt for all I can tell.

If you look at the TNR website right now, you won't see this cover. It's still displaying last week's cover. I subscribe to the magazine, and this new issue just popped into my iPad.

ADDED: I can't link to the article, but I can read it on my iPad. It's titled — creepily — "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker." Sub-head: "A Journey Through the Poisonous World That Produced a Republican Star." It's written by Alec MacGillis.

AND: I have now read the long article, and the closest thing to anything racial coming directly from Scott Walker is his support over the years for voter ID laws. Much of the article is about the demographics of Milwaukee and the suburban counties around it, including the history — going back into the early 20th century — of how black people migrated to the city and did not — as white people did — relocate into the suburbs.

Milwaukee is an extreme example of this historical pattern, but Scott Walker didn't make this happen, and given that Scott Walker built his political career in the Milwaukee area, it's actually impressive that TNR could not find racial incidents and slips to pin on him.

The article also focuses on 2 talk radio hosts — Mark Belling and Charlie Sykes — who have big audiences in Milwaukee. TNR has little direct racial material on them, but it forefronts the one truly ugly thing it has: Belling mocking a specific black person, Milwaukee Congresswoman Gwen Moore. Mostly, TNR accuses Belling and Sykes of indulging in dog-whistle politics about crime and dependence on welfare.

I suspect that Alec MacGillis wrote a more balanced and sane draft but that TNR editors punched it up, trying to make it racial so they could justify that ridiculous sub-heading on the cover and the title and sub-head at the article. The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker! Terrible. MacGillis provides some material about Scott Walker's early life, mostly about how he's the son of a Baptist preacher who took religion and politics very seriously from an early age. Some of that is sympathetic, though it's dotted with quotes from individuals who have reason to want to block Walker's ascent.

ALSO: Linking here, Instapundit says:

When Chris Hughes relaunched TNR, he promised that TNR would go “deeper than the headlines in a timely, unbiased fashion.” Nah. Just more Democratic operatives with bylines.

AND: I wonder if TNR meant to send out the iPad app version before the material is up on its website. I think it's damned strange that I was able to show you that cover 2 hours ago, and it's still not up on the website, and that I could read the whole long article and give you my subjective understanding of what is in it before you can check the text. Do you think it's lack of website/app coordination at TNR, which would be inept, or do you think they want subscribers to get a special advantage, a sneak peak, which would be naive in a world with bloggers?

UPDATE: It's 6 hours since I posted this, and neither the cover nor the article are up at the TNR website. 

UPDATE 2: TNR put the article up Sunday evening: here.

A propos of the Lois Lerner spoliation: Spooooooool!

The news of nothing.

Drudge has looked like this for quite a while:



That links to a Daily Mail story — "Obama rules OUT sending troops back into combat in Iraq but promises to review military options – including air strikes" — that includes an effort to extract a comment from George W. Bush:

Former President George W. Bush has been reluctant to weigh in on the latest developments in the region where he spent years deploying military assets that Obama would later pull back.

A request for comment from the former president was met with a non-response from his communications director Freddy Ford, who told MailOnline: 'I don’t have a comment for you. When he left office President Bush decided not to criticize his successor.'

Everyone already knew that, but the Mail made it into something that could be reported, and Drudge is featuring what is, essentially, the news of nothing.

With so many newsworthy things happening right now — the VA scandal eclipsed, the Bratquake reduced to a 1-day story, the Lois Lerner spoliation, Bergdahl (Bergdahl? Who's Bergdahl?), Hillary snapped — the news of nothing rises to the top and just sits there.

What is the ever-enigmatic Drudge trying to say?

Nothing?

Jill Abramson — the executive editor axed by the NYT — finds other work, teaching "narrative nonfiction" at Harvard.

Here's the way the NYT reports it, decorously... fit-to-print-ishly.

Harvard said in a statement that Ms. Abramson would be a visiting lecturer in the Department of English for the 2014-15 academic year and would teach in the fall and spring semesters. In the statement, Ms. Abramson said she was “honored and excited.”

Narrative nonfiction, she said, “is more important than ever. Its traditions and how it is changing in the digital transition are fascinating areas of study.”

What is the evidence that Abramson should be teaching writing at the highest level? Is she going to teach the brainy, aspiring kids to use words like "important" and "fascinating" as they tell their stories of things that are actually happening in the real world?

I'd like to see the reading list. There's lots of great narrative nonfiction out there. Read The New Yorker. I assume there's something to be gained from studying the writing techniques, and someone with high-level editing experience might be a good guide through the literature. There are careers in this kind of writing, and understanding the point of view of a NYT executive editor would be helpful.

You might scoff: a fired NYT executive editor.

But she wasn't fired for bad editing. She was fired for being a bitch "her management style."

"Did The IRS Really Lose Lois Lerner's Emails? Let a Special Prosecutor Find Them."

That headline — at the National Journal — says exactly what needs to be said.

For decades the received wisdom has been it's not the crime, it's the coverup. And here we see evidence of a coverup. What kind of crime must there be that after all these years of warnings that it's the coverup that will get you, we've got a glaring, egregious coverup?!

Oh? Do they say maybe it's not a coverup? Maybe Lois Lerner's emails really did disappear in a computer crash? We need a neutral prosecutor to find out what happened. There's zero reason to take that on faith.

How could it possibly be that government operates this way, with high-level government officials working with one computer that could crash and take everything with it? Aren't there central computers, backed up multiple times, with a record of everything?

We're talking about the IRS. Doesn't it have multiple, backed up records on all of us taxpayers?

Give us a special prosecutor, because it's not acceptable to tell us we're supposed to believe this story of disappearing evidence....

Look how far the NYT has gone merging editorial and advertising content.

Here's a screen capture from the NYT front page:



See the "paid post"? That goes to a story with the headline "Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work/As the number of women inmates soars, so does the need for policies and programs that meet their needs."

There's a little "Netflix" emblem over the headline, along with the words "Paid Post," and the font is different from the usual editorial content, but it's an article that's like other NYT articles, inviting us to be concerned about the higher number of women in prison these days and to empathize with their distinctively female problems:

At the most basic level, women often must make do with jumpsuits that are made from men’s designs rather than being cut for female bodies. And standard personal-care items often don’t account for different skin tones or hair types.

It’s not just vanity: What drives some prisoners to mix their own makeup or tailor their uniforms is the need to maintain their dignity in a situation that does little to protect it.

If you slog through enough of that, you'll get to the pitch to stream new episodes of the Netflix show "Orange Is the New Black."

Jimmy Scott, had "a rare genetic condition called Kallmann syndrome, which caused his body to stop maturing before he reached puberty."

His "voice never changed, and he remained an eerie, androgynous alto his whole life."

Standing 4-foot-11, with a hairless face to match his boyish voice, he was originally billed as Little Jimmy Scott, and he was presented to audiences as a child until well into his 20s. In his mid-30s he unexpectedly grew eight inches taller and, although he otherwise remained physically unchanged, doctors told him an operation might stimulate his hormonal development. He decided against it.

He said he "was afraid of entering uncharted territory." His "distinctively plaintive delivery and unusually high-pitched voice earned him a loyal following and, late in life, a taste of bona fide stardom."

Here's his 1950 recording of "Everybody's Somebody's Fool."



Jimmy Scott died yesterday at the age of 88.