← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 19229 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2005-07-20
2005-07-20 10:46 | User Profile
Found at - duh! - VDARE:
[QUOTE]From: VDARE.com Reader
I don't know if y'all check in on National Review's blog, the Corner, but over the past few days John Podhoretz has been swinging wildly, desperately, crazily at anyone who brings up serious discussion about immigration and the National Question. What a bore: dismissive, aspersive, crude, can barely restrain ad-hominem attack. Now I understand what you were talking about when you commented on him taking over the New York Post's editorial page.
This cheers me up; if Podhoretz is a typical of the Neocon immigration enthusiast then they will be crushed in open debate and discussion. That is the key, keep pushing so that this becomes an on the table topic for discussion.
[VDARE.COM NOTE: Here, below, what he's talking about, and more here. Oh and check this out.]
MORE -- OR, RATHER, LESS -- ON BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP [John Podhoretz] [I]Boy, some people just can't stand the idea that some other people might become citizens in this country, eh? If the problem of birthright citizenship is not the citizenship itself, as Derb's e-mailer suggests, but the fact that the citizen can petition to get his family members made into citizens, then there's a simple expedient to fix that: You can change the law. Or you can try remembering that without immigration, there would be about 75 million people in the United States, a nation that now comfortably houses 300 million and could easily accommodate many more. Oh, and if any e-mailer e-mails me angrily AND USES CAPITAL LETTERS TO MAKE HIS POINT, that e-mail goes in the garbage can. As will slurs -- both open and subtle -- against Spanish-speakers, claims that "this wasn't the country my father fought for in WWII/Korea/Dominican Republic/Grenada," and the always popular "why should my tax dollars go and pay for." There's plenty of things my tax dollars go and pay for that I don't like. Welcome to democracy. You don't like it? Try to change it. Period.[/I]
Of course, the birthright citizenship/anchor baby issue has never been subject to the least tincture of democracy, because it is
*the result of a legal misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and thus in the first instance under the jurisdiction of the unelected Supreme Court,
*the subject of a elite bipartisan consensus, which means that there's nowhere you can go to vote against it, and
*opposed, like open border policies generally, by a majority of the American people. [/QUOTE]
And the battle is on:
[QUOTE][B]Podhoretz, Junior vs. Steve Sailer[/B] By Steve Sailer
I recently pointed out that even though actress Jodie Foster reportedly had carefully searched out a sperm donor with an IQ of 160 to father her two children, the expected boost in her kids' IQ over what she would have gotten from a typical 100 IQ donor would fall in a range centering around merely 12 points. This is due to a pervasive phenomenon that its discoverer, Sir Francis Galton, called "regression toward mediocrity" and we now call "regression toward the mean."
Interacting with John Podhoretz, the son of long-time Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, inevitably calls to mind Galton's great discovery.
Last week, I noted on my iSteve.com blog some of the younger Podhoretz's bumptious comments on National Review Online's "Corner" free-for-all. In reaction to John Derbyshire's concerns about the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment granting automatic birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, Podhoretz blustered:
[I]"Sorry, pal. You're born here, you're a citizen here. Period. That's how it works, and thank God for it, otherwise a great deal of the advances made in the 20th century by immigrant children to the United States would not have come to pass..."[/I]
I suggested this "birthright pundit" might extend his logic like this:
"Sorry, pal. If you're born a Podhoretz, you get to make a living offering your opinions, no matter how big of a jerk and fool you are. Period. That's how it works, and thank God for it, otherwise a great deal of the money made in the 21st century by Podhoretz relatives would not have come to pass."
Later, out of the blue, I received an email from Podhoretz reading:
[I]"Please keep attacking me. It's how I know I'm not a bigoted, racist scum."[/I]
Peter Brimelow has observed how often a "racist" turns out to be someone who is winning an argument with a liberal. But with a neocon of Podhoretz the Lesser's quality, well, you don't even have to be arguing with him to be "a bigoted, racist scum." I'm not exactly sure what "a … scum" is, but, clearly, Pod No Like. I replied:
"Such wit, such eloquence, such insight!"
He fired back:
[I]"If you think I lack them, I imagine you think I have too much melanin in my skin."[/I]
Hoo-boy! You got me there!
Thoroughly enjoying shooting fish in a barrel, I answered:
"How do you come up with such devastating comebacks? Do you keep a half-dozen Nobel Laureates on staff, or do you, somehow, just make these up all by yourself?"
While Podhoretz Minor might be an extreme example, he reflects the intellectual decline of neoconservatism from the first generation to the second. While the formidable father has often provoked fury, the son has mostly elicited laughter. Hanna Rosin reported in 1998:
[I]... around the Washington Times offices, the [Podhoretz] column was often read out loud in Podhoretz’s absence, for comic value, in a ritual famously called Podenfreude ....[/I]
Norman Podhoretz was somewhat anomalous among the first generation of neoconservatives, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and James Q. Wilson, because he was trained as a literary critic rather than a social scientist. But like them, and like later neoconservatives such as Charles Murray, he had some audacious things to say about race.
In his 1963 essay in Commentary, "My Negro Problem—And Ours," the elder Podhoretz wrote:
[COLOR=Navy]"[F]or a long time I was puzzled to think that Jews were supposed to be rich when the only Jews I knew were poor, and that Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about—and doing it, moreover, to me… [It] was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around."[/COLOR]
Thirty years later, the elder Podhoretz reflected on the controversy his article about "black thuggery" had caused:
[COLOR=Navy]"In 1963 those descriptions were very shocking to most white liberals. In their eyes Negroes were all long-suffering and noble victims of the kind who had become familiar through the struggles of the civil rights movement in the South, the "heroic period" of the movement, as one if its most heroic leaders, Bayard Rustin, called it. While none of my white critics went so far as to deny the truthfulness of the stories I told, they themselves could hardly imagine being afraid of Negroes (how could they when the only Negroes most of them knew personally were maids and cleaning women?). In any case they very much disliked the emphasis I placed on black thuggery and aggression.
"Today, when black-on-white violence is much more common than it was then, many white readers could easily top those stories with worse. And yet even today few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime. Telling the truth about blacks remains dangerous to one's reputation: to use that now famous phrase I once appropriated from D.H. Lawrence in talking about ambition, the fear of blacks has become the dirty little secret of our political culture. And since a dirty little secret breeds hypocrisy and cant in those who harbor it, I suppose it can still be said that most whites are sick and twisted in their feelings about blacks, albeit in a very different sense that they were in 1963. "[/COLOR]
Time for John Podhoretz to email to his father accusing him of being "a bigoted, racist scum."! [/QUOTE]
No mystery here, Steve! Call it Sanhedrin Headache # 1: [B]one rule for Jews, another for the rest of us. [/B]
2005-07-20 10:56 | User Profile
Are John Podwhoretz's views on Israeli citizenship a matter of public record? I have a sneaking suspicion that he feels the standards for acquiring Israeli citizenship should remain different for Jews and non-Jews -- noble anti-racist that he is.
:dung:
2005-07-20 13:26 | User Profile
Pod 2.0 is Pathetic. I could barely stomach looking at his column mugshot, much less reading the daily Israel Rah-Rah in the NYPost.
2005-07-20 15:47 | User Profile
Keep in mind that is adopted but half-Jewish by blood, so he won't go too far on this topic. But he does say many important things.
2005-07-21 07:53 | User Profile
A bit of what is now, sadly, nostalgia - sure to bring a wistful smile to any tradcon or paleo's face.
January 12, 2004
[QUOTE][B]Attack Of The Pod Person II: Amnesty To Remake America[/B] [I]By Sam Francis[/I]
Nothing President Bush has done in his entire administration has more deeply alienated the conservatives who have supported him since his days as governor of Texas than the amnesty plan for illegal aliens he released last week—not the Iraq war, not his internal security policies, not even his Medicare reforms.
The Washington Times, Human Events, the American Conservative Union and even some at National Review have all rejected the immigration proposal.
So who supports it? The neo-conservatives, of course, who are usually preoccupied with pushing the country into wars all over the world and fabricating reports about weapons of mass destruction.
Linda Chavez, the neocons' professional Republican Hispanic Woman, virtually endorsed the plan or at least its fallacious premise that illegal alien labor is needed to keep the price of lettuce down.
That claim has been refuted repeatedly by real economists, but Miss Chavez seems not to have heard. Even if she had, her job is to provide support for the Republican Party, and she knows what she’s is paid for.
But she's not the only neocon to embrace the amnesty. New York Post columnist John Podhoretz, son of neocon guru Norman Podhoretz, not only embraced it at once but is virtually in love with it—not just because he thinks it will draw Hispanic voters to the Republican Party but also because the whole pro-immigration concept promises to destroy the party's conservative base that the neocons hate.
The president's plan, Mr. Podhoretz writes, seeks to "transform not only the political debate in the United States but the Republican Party as well." It does so because by attracting Third World immigrants into the party, the native white base that has sustained the GOP since the days of Lincoln will be overwhelmed.
"In the 20th century," he writes, "the Republican Party was not, to put it mildly, the party of immigrants. The key pieces of legislation limiting immigration and the rights of foreign-born peoples were designed and championed by Republicans.”. [W's Immigration Plan: A New GOP, January 8, 2004, by John Podhoretz]
He cites the 1924 law that enforced ethnic quotas for immigration, the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli bill and California's Proposition 187 in 1994, as well as the conservative critics of mass immigration, who range, he writes, "from the respectable precincts of National Review to the hatemongering nativism growing like fetid algae in the Pat Buchanan fever swamps."
You can sort of tell where Mr. Podhoretz is coming from, can't you?
In general, he's right that Republicans have almost always favored immigration controls. [VDARE.COM note: And they were not alone—see Paul Gottfried]. Many of the Northern abolitionists who founded the party were Protestant clergymen who feared and opposed the arrival of hordes of Irish Catholics.
The basic reason the GOP has supported immigration restrictions is that, whatever else it is, it is a nationalist party.
It was political nationalism that Lincoln supported in his resistance to Southern secession and economic nationalism that Teddy Roosevelt and most other Republicans supported in their protectionism.
And the understanding that American nationality was rooted in the European stock that settled and developed the political institutions, economy, language and culture of the nation was the underlying reason for the party's support for strenuous immigration control.
Those who wished to conserve that identity agreed with and supported the Republicans in this.
That is why they were called "conservatives."
And that is why gentlemen like Mr. Podhoretz and ladies like Miss Chavez and their tribe cannot be called conservatives in any meaningful sense.
Mr. Podhoretz argues that the party's opposition to immigration "became a major political problem for it in the 1990s." Not really. The party's base remains overwhelmingly grounded in the country's white native majority, and Prop 187 helped Republicans win a congressional majority in 1994.
But it's more than political tactics that Mr. Podhoretz is trying to sell. As he writes, the amnesty plan will "transform" the Republican Party. Not only will it supposedly bring into the party all the Third World immigrants who now vote Democratic but also, by doing so and simply by putting the party on record as supporting mass immigration, it will make Republican support for serious immigration control measures in the future almost impossible.
The "hatemongering nativism" of "the Pat Buchanan fever swamps" will die because it will become politically impossible—and so will most of the rest of the conservatism those "fever swamps" breed.
That's why phony conservatives like the neocons are on board for open borders.
Of course, opposition to immigration, whether from Pat Buchanan populist conservatives or conventional Republicans, is not the "hatemongering" or "fever swamp" Mr. Podhoretz rants about, and that kind of opposition will probably be immensely helped by the president's flawed plan.
As noted, conservatives are already mobilizing to stop the amnesty.
Hopefully, this time, they'll leave the phony-cons like Miss Chavez and Mr. Podhoretz behind.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC. [/QUOTE]