Slide from a presentation titled: "Sharia And The Constitution"

Not all of the material in the course, however, was anti-Muslim. Materials from reputable sources such as the Brookings Institution and RAND corporation also appeared among the readings, and only some of the presenters to the class used blatantly Islamophobic material. (The public affairs officer of the Joint Forces Staff College didn’t respond to repeated inquiries by press time.)

But the “Islamophobia network,” discussed in the Center for American Progress’ “Fear, Inc.” report, played a prominent role in many of the 266 documents acquired by ThinkProgress. Islamophobic “misinformation experts” — as they’re defined in “Fear, Inc.” — cited in Army teaching materials included:

Robert Spencer – 34 mentions across 8 documents (his blog, JihadWatch.org, was cited 11 times across 7 documents)

Spencer is the co-founder of Stop Islamization of America and the director of JihadWatch.org. He has argued that “traditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful. Spencer is prominent pseudo-intellectual in the “counter jihad” blogging community who argues that Islam is inherently violent. He says “It is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.”

Steven Emerson – 16 mentions across 4 documents

Emerson is the founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and a former journalist at U.S. News & World Report and CNN. His greatest notoriety came from prematurely declaring that Oklahoma City bombing was committed by Muslims. The actual culprit was right-wing anti-government militant Timothy McVeigh. Emerson tells his followers that “Nearly all of the Islamic organizations in the United States that define themselves as religiously or culturally Muslim in character have, today, been totally captured or dominated by radical fundamentalist elements.”

Center for Security Policy (CSP) – 60 mentions across 3 documents

CSP is led by notorious Islamophobe Frank Gaffney and produced the report, “Shariah: The Threat to America” which has served as the blueprint for “anti-Shariah” legislation across the country.

David Yerushalmi – 9 mentions across 3 documents

Yerushalmi is general counsel for CSP, a co-author of “Shariah: The Threat to America” and the founder of Society of Americans for National Existence. The Anti-Defamation League concluded that he has a “record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry.”

Daniel Pipes – 50 mentions across 10 documents (his organization, Middle East Forum, was cited 39 times across 10 documents)

Pipes, the director of Middle East Forum, is increasingly strident about the supposed threat posed by Islam and Muslims in America. He argues, “All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”

Finally, right-wing news publications were frequently cited in the training materials acquired by ThinkProgress. The Washington Times was cited 76 times across 16 documents; The National Review 130 times across 6 documents and Fox News 130 times across six documents.

Instructors’ reliance on far-right thinktanks and experts adds to the increasingly disturbing portrait of counter-terrorism instruction at the Joint Forces Staff College, potraying the West as at war with Islam and Muslims. The sheer frequency of citations in the course materials raises questions that hopefully will be answered by an investigation launched at the behest of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, who admirably said the questionable course material was “totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn’t academically sound.”

John Derbyshire

Derbyshire, however, appears to have learned nothing from his high-profile firing. In a column for the white nationalist site VDARE.com, Derbyshire offers unqualified praise for white supremacy:

The enemies of conservatism are eager to supply their own nomenclature. “White Supremacist” seems to be their current favorite. It is meant maliciously, of course, to bring up images of fire-hoses, attack dogs, pick handles, and segregated lunch counters—to imply that conservatives, especially non-mainstream conservatives, are cruel people with dark thoughts.

Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think “White Supremacist” is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group.

As a reminder, this man who now openly praises a racial caste system wrote for one of the nation’s top conservative publications for nearly 12 years.

Daniel Pipes

In short, Christie has hugged a terrorist-organization member, abridged free-speech rights, scorned concern over Islamization, and opposed law-enforcement counterterrorism efforts. Whenever an issue touching on Islam arises, Christie takes the Islamist side against those — the DHS, state senators, the NYPD, even the ACLU — who worry about lawful Islamism eroding the fabric of American life.

A perusal of the authors’ case against Christie reveals it as comically weak, full of highly questionable characterizations and buttressed by links that don’t actually demonstrate what they’re supposed to. In a typical example, they criticize Christie for voicing support for Mohammed Qatanani, imam of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, “on the eve of his deportation hearing for not hiding an Israeli conviction for membership in Hamas.” They do not mention that the hearing resulted in Qatanani being cleared of charges.

Pipes and Emerson knock Christie for his concern over revelations of the New York City Police Department’s spying on New Jersey Muslims, suggesting that he should’ve shown “gratitude” for the NYPD operating outside its jurisdiction.

And of course the authors take special offense at Christie’s bold defense of New Jersey state superior court judge Sohail Mohammed against attacks by anti-Islam activists, in which Christie offered the most cogent summation of the anti-sharia movement on record: “It’s crap. It’s just crazy.”

Pipes and Emerson suggest that there is tension between Christie’s friendly relations with Muslims and his “ostentatiously” pro-Israel stance. “This makes him unusual,” the authors write, “for a pro-Israel stance typically goes hand-in-hand with concern about Shari’a.” But in asserting such a zero-sum relationship between support for Muslim constituents and support for Israel, Pipes and Emerson inadvertently demonstrate two things: First, their own ignorance about Israel. Since its founding, Israel has maintained a publicly-funded Sharia court system for the some 19 percent of Israelis who are Muslim. (Israeli society is fraught with numerous challenges, but imminent takeover by sharia law does not appear to be one of them.) And second, that their real agenda involves creating difficulty for Christie among pro-Israel voters. As with all such smear efforts, the goal here isn’t to actually demonstrate that Christie has done anything wrong, merely to create the sense that there are “troubling questions” about Christie’s views and relationships.

While Pipes and Emerson fail to demonstrate that Chris Christie has an “Islam problem,” they succeed in demonstrating that National Review still has an Islamophobia problem. Last month the magazine took important steps to rid itself of two writers who had expressed bigoted views toward African-Americans. It’s long past time that National Review do the same with those of its writers expressing similar views toward Muslim Americans.

Derbyshire got himself in trouble first after he wrote an astonishingly racist column for Taki Magazine (about which more in a moment) about telling his children to avoid black people as if that was some sort of sensible safety guide. He presented the piece as if he was speaking difficult truths that others dare not speak, a common framing tactic of racists who like to believe that their biases are grounded in scientific evidence and want to use that delusion to attach legitimacy and a claim of the moral high ground to their bigotry. After several days of controversy, National Review, which had previously tended to turn a blind eye to or to edit down Derbyshire’s more appalling proclivities, fired him.

Lesley Arfin seems to have been less commonly-understood to be a racist until, in response to charges that the show for which she works, Girls, is strangely white for a story set in Brooklyn, she tweeted “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.” She subsequently added and scrubbed an apology. And evidence has quickly emerged that the tweet was hardly an isolated, insensitive mistake. Arfin is apparently the kind of person who thinks it’s clever to compare President Obama’s skin color to shit, or to say in an interview that the word “nigger” is the one that makes her feel proud to be a writer. Elspeth Reeve, in an elegant piece at The Atlantic Wire, suggested that Arfin’s comments spring from a common well, that this is “where this vein of hipster racism starts. It tests the idea that anything wrapped with enough irony can be transformed into something else. The more uncool the raw materials are—trucker hats, ugly T-shirts, mustaches, smoking crack—the better the trick.”

That’s true to a certain extent. But while there’s no inherent cultural capital in trucker hats or mustaches, there is a strong, if narrow thread of thought that is interested in making sure that racism stays nominally acceptable, and not because it demonstrates the ability of those thinkers to turn something ridiculous into a trend. Much in the same way that John Derbyshire peppered spectacularly illogical racist advice to his children with links to anecdotal stories meant to gloss his nonsense with a scientific veneer, Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice (and Taki Magazine columnist, it’s worth noting), responded to the criticism of Arfin’s behavior by suggesting that the people who were uncomfortable with Girls’ whiteness were deluded race-mongers desperate to turn a buck. “You can’t continue a mythical Cold War forever and it’s likely the days of randomly tarring and feathering people for ‘racism,’ real or imagined, are coming to a close,” he wrote in a post defending Arfin. “Not because it’s morally wrong, but because people are no longer buying it. And when people aren’t buying something, you can’t make money.” These two strains of thinking are complimentary and mutually reinforcing: people who see racism are deluded and have impure motives, while people who seek to assert racial difference are acting out of a disinterested commitment to scientific truth in the face of terrible opposition.

But there’s nothing brave or bold about clinging to racist ideas, to your supposed right to wound other people by being nasty and childishness. It’s the reverse, a desperate clinging to modes of thought that protected your own privilege and save you the inconvenience of having to engage with people in a way that might require compromise and growth. The immature and fearful people who huddle around the campfire of racism aren’t keeping a flame of secret knowledge alive. They’re hiding from a world they’re unable to cope with.

But while the National Review has decided to very publicly purge itself of white supremacists and racists, bigotry toward Muslims appears to go unchallenged in the pages of the magazine and on its blog, National Review Online (NRO). NRO contributing editor Andrew McCarthy, who accused President Obama of standing with the Muslim Brotherhood against 9/11 families in his post “The President Stands With Sharia,” told Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) hearing on the radicalization of American Muslims:

What “radicalizes” Muslims is Islam — the mainstream interpretation of it. The “radicals” propagating it do not need the “captive audience” provided by the prison environment. The “radicalization” is happening in plain sight.

The denigration of Islam and Muslim Americans isn’t limited to McCarthy’s screeds. A number of noted Islamophobes are regularly given free rein to guest post on NRO’s site or write in the magazine, including:

Robert Spencer, who just last month concluded that “Islamic supremacists” may have subverted the “U.S. defense against jihad terror,” because the man who heads the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center — and is credited with crippling Al Qaeda and other militant networks in Pakistan — was identified as a Muslim in a Washington Post profile.

David Horowitz, who, in an interview last year, stated, “What has the Arab world contributed except terror?…The theocratic, repressive Arabic states do no significant science, no significant arts and culture.”

Daniel Pipes, who, in the pages of The National Review in 1990, wrote, “All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”

The National Review has been notified of the Islamophobic statements made by a number of their contributors in the past. To date, they appear to have decided to do nothing. Perhaps now is the time for The National Review to take a hard stance against all bigotry, intolerance and racism.

These questions go together, and both have serious implications for how editors, and other purveyors of valuable cultural capital, ought to allocate it. On the question of outspokenness, I have no particular wish to see people I care about harmed by the ugly speech of others. I know first-hand that calling out shockingly blunt speech like Derbyshire’s—or on a much lesser level, Lee Aronsohn’s—can be a terrific traffic driver. But hearing it and feeling that outrage is also mentally exhausting. The argument is, however, that such unadulterated, un-prettified speech gives us an opportunity to see racism, sexism, and homophobia as it truly is, an experience that I imagine is more of an education for straight, white dudes than for women, people of color, or gay folks. But it’s true that there are a lot of straight, white men in positions of cultural authority. I’m not immune to the idea that it’s good for them to be exposed to moments of uncomfortable clarity that require them to draw firm lines in the sand about what ideas they are and aren’t willing to be associated with, and what people they are and aren’t willing to credential.

The problem is that suggesting that such authority figures need those shocking moments absolves them of responsibility to constantly be thinking about these kinds of questions. Sure, the requirement that racists, sexists, and homophobes pretty up their ugly thoughts—whether via Charles Murray-like stabs at scientific legitimation or pretentions of concern—may make those sentiments less immediately obvious in prose. But isn’t that precisely the kind of thing that we hire magazine editors to detect through deep and perceptive readings? You shouldn’t get credit for elucidating the line when the lack of one is causing you discomfort. You should get credit for weeding out noxious ideas precisely when it would be less convenient for you to do so, but because you feel it’s important to make clear the damage that those roots are doing below the soil.

His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.

Lowry and the National Review deserve credit for finally cutting ties with Derbyshire’s long record of hateful rhetoric.

DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I’ll say this – if it were to be, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.

COLMES: We’d be a better country if women didn’t vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don’t you think so?

COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.

DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here [laughing].

COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.

DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.

Listen here:

In an Oct. 2009 interview with Thom Hartmann, he clarified his stance, arguing that women should have the right to vote but simply shouldn’t exercise it. As he stated, “the proposition that women voting is bad for conservatism, and as a conservative, of course, I think that’s bad for society.” Listen here:

But remember, anyone who tells you there’s a conservative “war on women” is spouting pure “fiction,” according to RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.

I am not very careful about what I say, having grown up in the era before Political Correctness, and never having internalized the necessary restraints. I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one, and those things are going to be illegal pretty soon, the way we are going.

The National Review has tried to distance itself from Derbyshire’s views, but the magazine has gone silent on whether it will take any action. As Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to National Review: “‘Derb’ told you what he was in 2003. And National Review continued to employ him. That’s who they are.”

RedState’s Wolf states, “[Derbyshire] is not, as his defenders at the execrable Taki mag say, confronting the world with uncomfortable truths, he is proudly declaring himself to be a racist and arguing that it is correct to be racist.” Thus, says Wolf, “The longer this drags on without a definitive severing of the relationship, the more damage will be done to National Review. I cannot imagine what sort of deliberation is required to make this decision, but I hope, for National Review’s sake, that it can be completed before the weekend is over.”

On the National Review’s website, editor Rich Lowry called Derbyshire’s column “appalling” and asserted that “no one at National Review” shares his views. But Lowry did not indicate whether Derbyshire would continue to be employed. Does the National Review have a no tolerance policy for racism?

For the National Review, which has frequently complained about unfair accusations of racism, this ugly moment provides an opportunity to demonstrate leadership. As National Review contributor Josh Barro writes in Forbes:

[T]his is the problem for Lowry and other conservatives who want to be taken seriously by broad audiences when they write about racial issues. Lowry wrote a column containing advice for black Americans. Why should black Americans take him seriously while he’s employing Derbyshire? If Lowry wants NR to be credible on race, he should start by firing John Derbyshire.

National Review staff have been taking turns trying to distance themselves from Derbyshire. Here’s senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru:

I know I don’t. RT @ObsoleteDogma Does @NRO want to be associated with someone who publishes racist trash like this? bit.ly/Ht4hmz

— Ramesh Ponnuru (@RameshPonnuru) April 6, 2012

And National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg said a similar thing (National Review contributor Robert George retweeted this):

For the record, I find my colleague John Derbyshire’s piece fundamentally indefensible and offensive. I wish he hadn’t written it.

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) April 6, 2012

The New York Daily News’ Alexander Nazaryan writes, “An editor at the supposedly esteemed National Review, [Derbyshire] is a perfect poster boy for what conservatism has degenerated into.” The National Review can begin to change this perception if it takes action.

Derbyshire wrote the column in the second person, as a list of lessons to his kids about race. The lessons are his response to “the talk” that black parents have with their children — conversations they are forced to have because of real, persistent racism. After spending a few minutes bemoaning that he can’t say a racist slur (“What you must call ‘the ‘N’ word’ is used freely among blacks but is taboo to nonblacks”) and opining on the hostility he believes all black people feel toward white people like himself (though he says he isn’t white before calling himself white several times), he cuts to the heart of his lessons for his children:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

While they are not included in the quote above, Derbyshire peppers the post with links to news stories of crimes, a few random videos, and his own columns. The only “fact” included in the entire piece (and just a small image, at that) is from the offensive book The Bell Curve. Every other hateful, racist claim is based on a one-off story or his own foregone conclusions.

This morning in the National Review, Stanley Kurtz suggests that President Obama privately supports the violent protesters. Here’s how Kurtz makes his case:

The London riots have already kicked off the latest version of the seemingly never-ending debate over whether such events should be seen primarily as political protests by the powerless, or as out-and-out lawbreaking and vandalism. Back in 1992, Obama clearly leaned toward the former.

I found the press release Obama issued to get Project Vote rolling, in the ACORN archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society… Said Obama in 1992: “The Los Angeles riots reflect a deep distrust and disaffection with the existing power pattern in our society.” That’s Alinsky-speak for “We’ve got to use the power of the angry underclass to put capitalism in check.” [...]

I certainly don’t think President Obama would openly speak about events in London the way he spoke about the L.A. riots nineteen years ago. What he thinks to himself is another matter.

What better way to figure out what Obama thinks about the riots in London than sifting through 20-year-old press releases in the ACORN archive?

Kurtz didn’t let the fact that nothing in the ACORN archive even begins to support the conclusion that Obama supports people who are burning down buildings and smashing store windows in London. He simply translates the press release into “Alinsky-speak” and the logic of his conspiracy theory is complete. The National Review antipathy toward Obama apparently runs so deep that no leap of logic is too great to support their contention that he is a secret “radical.”

The National Review reacted to last Friday’s New York legislation granting gay couples the right to marry in a manner that can charitably be described as petulant. The Review’s output over the last few days has been overwhelmingly cruel, hateful, and, in light of its history, surprising.

To put it mildly, it’s rather unwise for the National Review — with its long paper trail of bigotry famously aimed at African-Americans (William Buckley, the magazine’s founder, pondered the “cultural superiority of white over Negro”) and less famously at gays (he wrote that how one feels about AIDS sufferers is “only uncomplicated…if one accepts the moral injunction that all sinners should be forgiven”) — to so eagerly claim that the adoption of gay marriage is a slippery slope that ends with a United States transformed into a totalitarian Stalinist dictatorship. And yet that’s exactly what they’ve done, with a few courageous exceptions.

Given that the National Review is still the flagship publication of the conservative movement — e.g., the Republican front-runner for president, Mitt Romney, has more than a half-dozen bylines this year alone — the magazine’s behavior is all the more disturbing.

When the New York Senate passed a marriage equality bill on June 24 at roughly 10:48 p.m., this is how the National Review handled the news:

● At 11:49, Maggie Gallagher, whose organization the National Organization for Marriage tried and failed to derail the vote, warned that the Republican Party will “pay a grave price” for allowing four of its members to vote for the bill.

● Two days later, editor Kathryn Lopez, in response to criticism of Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s contention that by allowing gay marriage the United States was no better than the Hermit Kingdom, told her colleague, “Do not be so quick to dismiss the North Korea comparison.”

● On Monday, George Weigel compared gay rights activists to Bull Connor, the Klan-sympathizing segregationist public saftey commissioner famous for turning a fire hose on blacks in Birmingham, Alabama.

● That same day, Rick Santorum was given space to accuse New York of “wreaking havoc not only with the definitions of the federal law and the majority of states, but…with the single most important and time-tested institution of every successful society.”

● A few hours later, Glenn Stanton, the director of Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family, complained that a woman he saw on the subway — presumed to be a lesbian — was “playing make-believe daddy” with her child.

● Maggie Gallagher, in a separate piece, wrote that the vote is indicative of a civil rights movement that simply wants to “redefin[e] the Book of Genesis as bigotry.”

● Yesterday, David French, senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, wrote that gay marriage is a “blow for self-indulgence and for adult-focused self-actualization.”

● Shortly thereafter, in an interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez, Princeton University’s Robert George said the equality vote promotes “forms of sexual conduct that were traditionally regarded in the West and many other places as beneath the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures.”

It’s worth noting two exceptions. The first is longtime Deputy Managing Editor Michael Potemra; in the early morning of June 25, he wrote, “[T]onight, I see neither the face of anarchy, nor that of a nascent ‘North Korea.’ I see smiles on young people — and also, on some quiet senior citizens who are actually old enough to remember Stonewall 1969.” The second is editor Jason Lee Steorts, who wrote, “I would like to see the reaction of a North Korean refugee to your claim. […] It would also be nice if you troubled yourself to make an argument.”

A National Review staffer who hasn’t commented on the vote itself or the backlash by his employer is Jonah Goldberg, the magazine’s editor-at-large. As it happens, it was Goldberg who in 2002 wrote:

Conservatives should feel some embarrassment and shame that we are outraged at instances of racism now that it is easy to be. Conservatives…were often at best MIA on the issue of civil rights in the 1960s. Liberals were on the right side of history on the issue of race.

Nearly a decade later, it appears that conservatives — certainly Mr. Goldberg’s own publication — have once again come down on the wrong side of history. I hope it doesn’t take 40 years for the next apology.

But what about another paid Fox contributor, former Bush administration ambassador to the U.N., AEI fellow, and über-hawk John Bolton? Bolton has indeed been flirting with a run since last September, and seems to be taking serious steps toward it that closely resemble those taken by Santorum and Gingrich.

Bolton, who said on Tuesday — on Fox’s air — that he will decide “by Labor Day,” gave a lengthy interview to National Review online, where he revealed some of the initial steps he has taken to explore a run at the nation’s highest office:

As George W. Bush’s U.N. ambassador, he gleefully tangled with fussy Europeans, Third World despots, and international bureaucrats. That experience, he reckons, is more than enough to make GOP primary voters, at the very least, curious.

It is also why, even in mid-June, Bolton continues to make calls to close friends, pollsters, and political consultants, mulling his options.

Bolton — in the article, titled “Bolton 2012? The former U.N. ambassador weighs a presidential run” — goes on to explain that, if he does enter the race late, he’s already worked out a strategy of which states he needs to hit the hardest:

He will decide by Labor Day, a self-imposed deadline. Until then, Bolton is drafting a multifaceted strategy, one that would enable him to enter late. [...]

“I would focus first on New Hampshire, followed by South Carolina, Florida, and Nevada,” he says. “I think that is a very understandable path to the nomination.” Iowa, however, is probably out of the equation. He is against ethanol subsidies, for one, and it may be a bit too late to build a base there, “where the 99 counties are like the 99 names of God.”

Fox News did not reply to ThinkProgress’s inquiries to its media relations department, but compare Bolton’s activities to those portrayed in an LA Times description of what Gingrich was up to in March when his $1 million-a-year contract with Fox was suspended:

While Gingrich is not expected to announce that he is forming a federal exploratory committee this week, he is expected to say in Georgia on Thursday that he is meeting with advisors to explore seeking the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, a Gingrich aide said.

It’s pretty tough to see a distinction between these meetings and discussions with advisers and campaign experts Bolton is holding. The trigger for suspension, a Fox lawyer told the Times, was “serious intention to form an exploratory committee.” That’s pretty vague, but Bolton’s phone calls would seem to fit into nearly any understanding of the phrase.

The situation leaves one wondering how long Bolton can keep up his gig on Fox, raising his profile (he’s appeared twice in the last two days) and cashing his paychecks while taking serious steps — right down to speaking to advisers and devising a state-by-state strategy — toward running for the presidency.

It’s worth noting that not everyone who writes for National Review is as dumb as Jonah Goldberg. For example, today Ross Douthat links to a pretty good NR article by Kevin Williamson dedicated to debunking some supply-side myths. It’s a good piece, and I hope conservatives read it.

What I hope doesn’t happen—but fear will—is that conservatives generally won’t read it, conservatives generally will keep peddling the same nonsense they’ve been selling for 30 years, and then when some liberal complains that American conservatism is dominated by cranks and morons someone from the smart set will point to Williamson’s article as an example of how that’s not true. So it’s worth noting that supply side mythology didn’t just come from nowhere. Here’s Larry Kudlow pimping it in NRO. And here’s Thomas Nugent in NRO. And Donald Luskin. One could go on.

At any rate, Williamson deserves credit for his piece. But the piece downplays the extent to which the myths he debunks are utterly central to conservative politics. He argues, for example, that there’s a real sense in which the Reagan tax cuts “didn’t happen” since there were no spending reductions. There’s something to be said for that point of view, but it makes utterly nonsense of the mainstream conservative story about the past 30 years’ worth of US domestic policy. Maybe Williamson is downplaying the bite of his argument on a “you catch more flies with honey” but realistically I think it’s just a sign that intelligent conservatives have little intention of doing battle with the charlatans who dominate their movement.

Whenever liberals point out that the entire conservative case against climate change legislation consists of the ravings of cranks, liars, and know-nothings someone eventually trots out Jim Manzi. Indeed, National Review tapped Manzi to write its big feature-length denunciation of the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Manzi, you see, isn’t a crank, a liar, or a know-nothing—he’s cooked up some wonky reason for agreeing with the cranks, liars, and know-nothings on the question of climate legislation.

Then Jim Manzi read Mark Levin’s book, focused his attention on its climate section, and discovered that Levin is a crank, liar, and/or know-nothing. The result? Manzi is savagely and hypocritically attacked by the staff of National Review. Because, after all, the crankery and the know-nothingness is the essence of conservative politics. The wonks are useful just insofar as they can be used to support the crank agenda—when they take the cranks on, they get trashed, even by publications that were happy to cite them as experts on the very issue at hand just a few months ago.

Beware? (cc photo by jondoeforty1)

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates and Radley Balko, National Review offers us the appalling views of one LAPD officer:

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

The fact that African-American men are disproportionately likely to be put in this position, and that some police officers have this mentality, does a lot to explain the generalized distrust of cops by many people in that demographic.

Meanwhile: This is insane. Most people like and respect cops, and honor the work they do. But it’s a profession that’s honored precisely because the people doing the job correctly don’t do the job this way. Police officers, in the course of duty, subject themselves to extra-normal risk of harm for the sake of the welfare of others. This is the mentality of a foreign occupying army, not a well-functioning police force.

Victor Davis Hanson argues that Sonia Sotomayor is “race obsessed”:

In her now much quoted 2001 UC Berkeley speech she invoked “Latina/Latino” no less than 38 times, in addition to a variety of other racial-identifying synonyms. When one reads the speech over, the obsession with race become almost overwhelming, and I think the public has legitimate worries (more than the Obama threshold of 5% of cases) over whether a judge so cognizant of race could be race-blind in her decision making.

Jason Zengerle observes that the speech probably used the terms in question a lot because she was attending a symposium on “”=Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation.”

In the real world, the only “race obsessed” people in this debate are the Victor Davis Hanson’s of the world who’ve consistently refused to see the Sotomayor nomination through anything other than the lens of her ethnicity. Zengerle alludes to the fact that nobody on the right seems to be upset about Justice Alito’s speech “Reflections on growing up as an Italian-American in New Jersey”. It’s just a broad fact of American life that the majority of people define themselves, in part, as members of an ethnic community of some sort (those who don’t appear to be predominantly of Scotch-Irish ancestry). The fact that Sotomayor has referenced this on some occasions is not an “obsession.” What would be truly bizarre would be a Latina judge who for some reason went around refusing to ever speak on this topic.

Meanwhile, in the Sotomayor debate it’s the opposition who are unequivocally presenting themselves as the defenders of racial (white) interests and the voices of racial (white) grievance. Which makes sense. After all, whites are a numerical majority in this country, so it stands to reason that white identity politics is and always has been a more viable political strategy than black or Latino identity politics. But we should all be clear on who’s doing what here.

And ’twas ever thus. Here’s Victory Davis Hanson’s National Review on the Civil Rights Act of 1957:

The central question that emerges–and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by meerely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal–is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced ace. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own.

Same as it ever was.

Neil Sinhababu has a smart take on the NR Sotomayor cover:

[T]he way I see the joke actually depends on incongruities between the stereotypes of the nonwhite ethnicities involved. The Buddha-like pose and Asian features are tied to lofty pretensions of sagelike wisdom. And what sort of person is it who’s pretending to be some kind of sage? A Hispanic woman! As if.

The in-joke in this cover is for people who have already internalized a stereotype of Hispanic women as hotheaded and not that bright. Put one of them in the Buddha suit, and if you’ve absorbed the right racist stereotypes, the incongruity is hilarious.

I think that definitely captures some of what’s happening here. It should also be said that some of the ugliness of this whole thing clearly stems from the whole dysfunctional relationship our political system has to Supreme Court appointments. I remember from the Alito nomination that it’s somehow very difficult to articulate the view that “the president is someone whose ideas I think are wrong so I’m convinced that his SCOTUS pick also has bad ideas, but those who like the president are bound to see this differently.” Instead, there’s incredible pressure to “unearth” the “truth” about the nominee and how deep down he or she is history’s greatest monster.