Tuesday’s posting of James Kirchick’s New Republic screed on Ron Paul, titled “Angry White Man,” a detailed examination of the contents of years of back issues of the Ron Paul Political Report, is the culmination of “detective” work that we now know involved the use of the Wilcox Collection at the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society (extensive repositories of literature from the political fringes of the far right and radical left). The TNR posting, perhaps fact-checked by Stephen Glass, required no fewer than four corrections.

What does this tell us about the Fourth Estate? Basically, any candidate who seeks public office must get the seal of approval of the media elite. And in their estimation, scratch the surface of a genuine maverick and you’ll discover a racist, homophobic, anti-Semite.

Predictably, in the past few days, several news organizations have focused on TNR’s reportage. CNN, National Public Radio, UPI, and the Washington Post, have weighed in. The media elite’s threshold of acceptability: not doubting that Martin Luther King, Jr. was an upstanding public figure, or questioning racial egalitarianism, or remaining skeptical about Lincoln’s greatness, or failing to embrace homosexuality, or insufficiently denouncing The Bell Curve.

When Pat Buchanan was running as a presidential candidate, I recall a similar scorched-earth treatment at Newsweek , where I then worked. The director of Library Services in New York , Madeline Cohen, put together an extensive dossier (2 or 3 large three-ring binders) of Buchanan’s writings and public commentary for Newsweek’s Washington Bureau research staff. If Buchanan ever broke wind in public, she documented it. I remember my boss William Rafferty, who once was Ted Koppel’s principal researcher, talking about how Cohen went into overdrive compiling every little anecdote about Buchanan from trolling Nexis.

Recently, when Howard Fineman interviewed Paul for Newsweek - see video posted on the magazine’s website, it wasn’t long into the interview before Fineman popped the grand enchilada: Do you think the Jewish people are entitled to a homeland of their own in Palestine? When Fineman thought Paul’s answer insufficiently explained his position, he pressed him again.

On Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show, Kirchick described the exquisite paranoia with which the media elites operate:

“What he does, Tucker, is he speaks in code. He is a transmitter. He will say certain things that, you know, at first may not appear to be overtly racist, but to certain audiences they know what he is talking about. So when he talks about secession, he says it in a way that’s not exactly neo-Confederate or isn’t exactly explicitly neo-Confederate. But to people who are in the know and people who are a part of this [sic] neo-Confederate communities, they know exactly what he is talking about.”[Transcript, January 7, 2008]

Sure, we know who isn’t going to win the Republican nomination or the 2008 Presidential election. We also know why.

Where’s Dan Rather when you need him?

This is from a government think tank in Britain called Policy Hub:

British Muslims and multiculturalism
On 29 January 2007, the think tank Policy Exchange published a report (Living apart together: British Muslims and the paradox of multiculturalism) [PDF]which finds that there is a growing religiosity amongst the younger generation of Muslims and that they feel they have less in common with non-Muslims than do their parents. They also exhibit a much stronger preference for Islamic schools and sharia law and place a greater stress on publicly asserting their identity.

The report concludes that the growth of Islamism must be understood in relation to political and social trends that have emerged in British society and suggests that the way the Government is responding to Islamism is making things worse, not better. By treating Muslims as a homogenous group, the Government fails to see the diversity of opinions amongst Muslims, so that they feel more ignored and excluded. The Government should stop emphasising difference and engage with Muslims as citizens, not through their religious identity.

The report also found that the authorities and some Muslim groups have exaggerated the problem of Islamophobia, which has fueled a sense of victimhood amongst some Muslims. However, 84% of Muslims believe they have been treated fairly in this society.

The authors call for an end to institutional attacks on national identity - the counterproductive cancellation of Christmas festivities, the neurotic bans on displays of national symbols, and the sometimes crude anti-Western bias of history lessons - which can create feelings of defensiveness and resentment.

Derek Turner, who ran the now defunct Right Now! magazine in the UK, has refounded the Quarterly Review. The Quarterly Review was founded in 1809, and has taken part in some famous literary controversies over the years–Lord Byron blamed it for killing John Keats with a savagely bad review by a man named Croker, who is otherwise forgotten. (Although the latest issue includes a reprint of another hilariously vicious review by him.) Anyway, Keats would be dead by now even if he hadn’t written that review, and Croker may have had a point about Endymion.

You can read Derek Turner’s speech on the launch of the 21st century quarterly here, and subscribe here.

The latest issue includes a review of Sam Francis’s Shots Fired, and an article by John Courthorpe “dissects a strangely revealing government report on the effects in urban areas of immigration and multiculturalism.”
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That’s Sir Edmund Hillary of Everest, age 88, not the candidate.

The NYT misleadingly headlines:

Edmund Hillary, First on Everest, Dies at 88

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Sir Edmund Hillary was the mountaineer who, with Tenzing Norgay, his Sherpa guide, was the first to scale the 29,035-foot summit of Mount Everest.

This common notion that Norgay was Hillary’s “guide,” as if Hillary was some tourist being dragged to the top by the experienced climber Norgay, is an old chestnut. The whole concept of a “guide” makes no sense when you think about it: It’s not like Mt. Everest was some secret that only local guides knew the path to. It was the biggest mountain in the whole world and nobody had ever climbed it before.

The correct term for Hillary and Norgay is “partners,” but that word is being taken over by the gays, so we’re back to “mountaineer” and “guide.”

There were no tourists and no guides anywhere near Everest back then The Sherpas, due to their genetic knack for high altitude living, were employed as specialist high altitude porters, but they did not have a culture of climbing mountains until the British had arrived and led them up onto the peaks.

By 1953, the best Sherpa porters had learned technical climbing skills from the British Commonwealth mountaineers. So, there wasn’t much of a distinction between Anglo climbers and the very best Sherpas. Moreover, portering equipment up the mountain is about 95% of multi-stage expedition climbing, which consists of planting camps in relays higher and higher up the mountain, with the more expendable members of the party doing the heavy lifting, while the leader tries to arrange the workload so his best climbers just have to get themselves up the mountain, in order to be rested for the summit dash.

Of the 400 people in the expedition, Hillary and Norgay were designated early as one of the two possible summit teams.

Hillary, a big man, had greater upper body strength than Norgay, so he generally took the lead to carve out steps with his ice-ax. Although Indian and Nepalese politicians promoted the story that Norgay made it to the top first, it was always most plausible that Hillary reached the top a few seconds before Norgay. The two men were admirably vague about the exact order, rightly insisting that they made it as a team. Finally, in 1999, after Norgay’s death, Hillary confirmed the he had led, hacking footsteps in the ridge until it stopped going up and he found himself standing on top of the world.

The New York Times reports about a Tutsi general who operates his own army in the chaotic Congo:

Fighting in Congo Rekindles Ethnic Hatreds

… It began with the Rwandan genocide, in which Hutu extremists killed 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu in 1994. Many of the genocide’s perpetrators fled into Congo, igniting regional conflicts that were fueled by the plunder of Congo’s minerals, lasted for nearly a decade and killed, by some estimates, as many as four million people through violence, disease and hunger.

Now a new wave of anti-Tutsi sentiment is sweeping Congo, driven by deep anger over the renegade Tutsi general. Many see his rebellion as a proxy for Rwanda, to the east, whose army occupied vast parts of Congo during the most devastating chapter of the regional war and plundered millions of dollars’ worth of minerals from the country, according to many analysts, diplomats and human rights workers.

The current battle is in many ways a throwback to the earliest and most difficult questions at the heart of the Congo war, and also a reflection of longstanding hostilities toward Tutsi, who are widely viewed here as being more Rwandan than Congolese.

Many Congolese Tutsi see themselves as members of an especially vulnerable minority, one that has already suffered through genocide and whose position in Congo has always been precarious. But many other Congolese see Tutsi, many of whom have been in Congo for generations, as foreign interlopers with outsize economic and political influence.

At the center of this latest rebellion is the renegade general, Laurent Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi with longstanding ties to the Tutsi-led Rwandan government.

Yet, the Rwandans themselves are deeply linked to the government of Uganda.

Indeed, Rwanda’s Tutsi President Paul Kagame was the Intelligence chief for Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni when the latter overthrew Ugandan President Milton Obote (Idi Amin’s successor, if you are keeping score at home) in 1986. Museveni then helped finance his friend Kagame’s Tutsi invasion of Hutu-ruled majority-Hutu Rwanda in 1990. As Kagame came closer to winning the war in 1994, the Hutu leadership went nuts, like Revolutionary France fighting refugee invaders in 1793, and launched the genocide, which was shut down when Kagame’s Tutsis won.

In Burundi, the Tutsi minority has managed to stay in power over the Hutu majority for all these years of independence.

So, what’s going on? Underneath it all, there’s a vague, intermittent struggle in East Africa that keeps popping in different forms up between the tall, thin, black Nilotics (like the Tutsis, Luo, and the shorter, dark brown Bantus.

For example, in Nairobi in 1987, Barack Obama noticed the physical difference between the “… tall, ink-black Luos and short, brown Kikuyus …” Currently, the Luos are rebelling against the domination of Kenya’s government by the Kikuyus, with hundreds dead in ethnic clashes. Indeed, the Luo leader Raila Odinga told the BBC after a recent phone call from Obama that he is the American Senator’s first cousin (which I doubt). (more…)

A couple years ago I, along with plenty of other folks, got pretty excited when Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced that he had had it with illegal aliens in his state and, by God, was going to do something about it.

Critics jumped all over what I, and plenty of other folks, thought was a true rule-of-law champion, calling his planned crackdown on illegals an election year stunt. Not so! I hissed at these charges. And then reality began to creep into my stupid, naive world where everybody is supposed to play by the rules.

Seeking to placate “immigrant rights” activists, Gov. Timmy went out of his way to tell the world that the Land of 10,000 Lakes actually was an “immigrant friendly” place and said he wanted an increase in the number of H-1B visas so foreigners could compete with his constituents’ children for high-tech jobs.

Now we hear that Gov. Timmy plans to resume his stumping for Sen. John McCain after the latter’s primary win in New Hampshire. And this announcement raises an interesting question:

Just how will Gov. Timmy’s recent bombshell about renewing his battle against illegal immigration going to fly with “Amnesty John” McCain if the latter ends up sitting in the Oval Office?

Memo to Gov. Timmy: What’s it going to be, your political career–or your country?