Tag Archives: Kathleen Parker

Inexplicable, Kathleen Parker

Comes around

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Kathleen Parker, famous here for her frequent and crappy arguments, gripes that she got some hate email–the worst ever–after she wrote a column suggesting Sarah Palin should step down from the Republican ticket.  She writes:

WASHINGTON — Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a Dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.

Those are just a few nuggets randomly selected from thousands of e-mails written in response to my column suggesting that Sarah Palin is out of her league and should step down.

Who says public discourse hasn't deteriorated?

Firedoglake, a liberal website, points to a column of Parker's in the non too distant past (2003).  She wrote [read the entertaining commentary at the link as well]:

[Zell] Miller is not alone, though some are more sanguine when it comes to evaluating the roster of contenders. Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot.

When did public discourse start to deteriorate Kathleen?

Kathleen Parker, Specious allegations of fallacy, Things that are false

Ad matrem et filium

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Is this charge from Kathleen Parker just a lie, a reverse ad hominem tu quoque, or nutpicking?

Politicizing Bristol Palin's pregnancy, though predictable, is nonetheless repugnant and has often been absurd. It may be darkly ironic that a governor-mother who opposes explicit sex ed has a pregnant daughter, but experienced parents know that what one instructs isn't always practiced by one's little darlings.

We try; we sometimes fail. There are no perfect families and most of us get a turn on the wheel of misfortune.

Were it not for the pain of a teenager who didn't deserve to be exposed and exploited, the left's hypocrisy in questioning Palin's qualifications to be vice president against the backdrop of her family's choices would be delicious. Instead, it leaves a bad taste.

Would anyone ever ask whether a male candidate was qualified for office because his daughter was pregnant?

Some also have questioned whether Palin, whose son Trig has Down syndrome, can be both a mother and a vice president. These questions aren't coming from the right—so often accused of wanting to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen—but from the left.

Did someone switch the Kool-Aid?

I wonder this because Parker doesn't name anyone who makes those charges–no, saying "the left" doesn't count as naming anyone.  She might even be able to find someone, perhaps some anonymous diarist at the Daily Kos, but that would be nutpicking: trolling the comment threads of blogs looking for the person who says just what you need them to say, claiming all the while such a person represents "the left" or ("the right" for that matter).  But doesn't even bother to do this minimally sophistical thing.  That would at least give some cover to the false assertion.

It's clear that she wants to make the charge of hypocrisy.  But in order to do this she ought to have some minimum of purported hypocritical behavior.  So rather than speciously misrepresenting some particular charge against Palin, Parker has just made something up. 

Where I come from (Michigan), that's called "lying."

And it's still lying even if it's on the opinion page.

Kathleen Parker, Unclassifiable

Judgment at C-Span

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I saw an interesting film last night–Judgment at Nuremberg–In case you haven't seen it, you should.  As the title suggests, the film deals with the war crimes of the Nazis–but in particular the criminal complicity of lower level Nazi judges who participated in the legal machinations of the Nazi regime.

On a related theme, Kathleen Parker has found a new way to pass out moral responsibility in such situations.  If you think you're involved in a criminal regime (but are not yourself criminally responsible), then your saying nothing is worse, yes, worse, than the crimes you have witnessed being committed.  Speaking on C-Span, courtesy of Crooks and Liars, she says:

Parker: Oh wow that’s, you know I’ve met Scott and he is, comes across as just the sweetest, nicest fellow. I took great umbrage at this primarily because, whether the… you know, if… if he were… if he sat in those meetings where evidence was being trumped up and people are actually dying and never so much as cleared his throat or raised an eyebrow–which is what I’m told by everyone in the White House– then I think that he is guilty of something much greater than whatever he presents to the public in this book. You don’t sit there and listen to what you now consider lies and know… you walk out the door. An honorable man walks out the door. And you can go and call a press conference if you are the Press Secretary of the President of the United States. You can call a press conference. You can walk out and get a book contract that day, but you don’t sit through it for years and years and then say ‘well, I think I’ll go get a book contract and you know, present basically my notes that I’ve taken all these years knowing that these people were doing wrong.’ So I simply don’t trust a person like that.

That's novel.  The usual claim is that the person is complicit in the crimes, a silent accomplice perhaps.  Perhaps in an extreme case one might consider the person guilty of a serious crime, but no one could sustain the claim that his or her crime is worse than the original crime.  This would, after all, make the actual criminal less bad than the silent witness.

Ad Hominem, Kathleen Parker

Racial interpretations

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Kathleen Parker–yes, the one of blut und boden–wonders:

Can we critique the issues—and the man—without resorting to racial interpretations and recriminations? If McCain wins, can his victory simply be a loss for Democrats—and not a loss specifically for African-Americans?

The answers to those questions will be the measure of whether we have really progressed to the point we claim.

This is not directed at herself of course.  For the other day she wondered whether Obama had enough generational equity to be truly American.  His family had not poured enough into the soil.  She wrote:

It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.

Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of Fry's political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically—and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century—there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity.

We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.

Contributing to the growing unease among yesterday's Americans is the failure of the federal government to deal with illegal Immigration. It isn't necessarily racist or nativist to worry about what these new demographics mean to the larger American story. 

I can't really see the "issue" in that.

This is because this remark is directed at Democrats.  Can, in other words, Kathleen Parker and her friends say racist things without fear of being called racists. 

This, she thinks, is progress. 

Kathleen Parker, specious comparisons

Full blooded, check it and see

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The other day we talked about the New York Times public editor's discussion of the factually challenged work of Edward Luttwak.  Courtesy of Eric Alterman's column on Media Matters, we were alerted to the Chicago Tribune public editor's response to the Kathleen Parker column of a couple of weeks ago (which we discussed here).  In brief, the column argued that Obama was not a "full-blooded American."  Many, according to McNulty, wondered why such a column could be published in a major newspaper–rather than say, the Klanly Times.  This is McNulty's response:

Responding first to Nielsen, I wrote that as ridiculous and repugnant as that full-blooded sentiment is to many, if not most, Americans, I would rather see it on the op-ed page so that people can hold it to the light and repudiate the notion rather than deal with it as a whispering campaign.

Remember McCain was the target of whispering in his 2000 primary race against George W. Bush in South Carolina. While McCain traveled with the daughter he and his wife had adopted from Bangladesh, an anonymous telephone smear campaign asked voters whether they would vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child.

Anyone who believes that the race issue will be dormant in the general election—presuming that Obama is the Democratic candidate—is hiding from reality. It remains a divisive issue and, as Parker noted, some fear that "their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative."

I think it is the news media's responsibility to highlight not just the political stratagems but the attitudes that help create them.

The aim of the Tribune's Commentary page is to display a wide range of subjective opinions, even those some may consider offensive. Printing a column is not the same as sanctioning it.

The same need to speak plainly but objectively is true in the news pages. An article Tuesday by Tribune reporter Rex W. Huppke examined how residents in the rural Kentucky town of Munfordville felt about Obama versus Clinton.

"They won't vote for a black man," Huppke quoted one white Obama supporter talking about his neighbors, "That's all there is to it. They just can't bring themselves to do it."

Another resident explained bluntly why he wouldn't support Obama: "It's his color."

Those statements reflect racist views, but does that mean the news media shouldn't report them?

McNulty draws an analogy between the "news" part of the paper and the "opinion" part–that somehow they have the same goal of "reporting."  He also makes the accompanying claim that the opinions are "subjective" and may be "offensive."  Fair enough.  But the analogy, I think, does not hold. 

The reporting part of the newspaper ought to inform readers of claims of fact–verifiable, one would hope, by the newspaper's fact checkers.  There will of course be editorial decisions to be made–which news stories to report?  What questions will our reporters ask of politicians?  Do we run the R. Kelly story on the front page every day for the next several months?  And so forth. 

There are editorial considerations to be made on the op-ed page as well.  Which opinions form part of the "wide range" of public opinion?  Shall bin Laden be allowed to write a "his turn" column about the Great Satan?  Shall we allow obvious factual distortions and groundless hyperbole just because it falls into a "wide range" of public "opinion"?  Which opinions in the wide spectrum deserve a column of their own?  Many don't.  The editorial judgment, one would presume, determines which opinions fall within the spectrum of reasonable civil discourse.  

Besides, it's obvious that some opinions are better informed than others.   Some opinions are more well grounded in fact and in reason than others.  Parker's was one of those that wasn't.  And it's up to the Tribune editors to know the difference.

One final point.  The alternative to publishing Parker's column is not "a whispering campaign" somehow abetted by the media's silence.  The alternative rather is that Parker's argument is not claimed to represent part of range of reasonable civil discourse.

Inexplicable, Kathleen Parker

Blut und Boden

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Others' jaws have already dropped at the reading of this from Kathleen Parker.  Here's a sample:

It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.

Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of Fry's political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically—and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century—there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity.

We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.

Contributing to the growing unease among yesterday's Americans is the failure of the federal government to deal with illegal Immigration. It isn't necessarily racist or nativist to worry about what these new demographics mean to the larger American story.

Read the whole thing.  These, apparently, are reasons to vote for McCain over Obama.  But just out of curiosity, which of those two candidates was born in America?  The answer may surprise you.  

In light of all of this ein Volk, ein Blut, ein Boden business, you might also contemplate the "true" origins of fascism.  

h/t Blogosphere and Ed Burmila.