Occasionally, an article is published that is so spectacularly stupid, you have to assume the writer was kidding. That, or someone wrote the piece under someone else’s name, as a way of trying to make them appear foolish.
Jeffrey Lord, a former Reagan White House political director, has written just such a piece for The American Spectator. TNR’s Isaac Chotiner received it from a friend, whom Isaac assumed had fallen for a gag. Alas, it’s real and Lord isn’t kidding.
What do ex-New York Times editor Howell Raines, ex-Duke rape case prosecutor Mike Nifong, former Edwards for President blogger Amanda Marcotte, Delaware Senator Joe Biden and the call by Democrats to get out of Iraq have in common? … In a word, a sad word: race. (emphasis added) […]
Are critics of the Democrats insistence that Iraq is another Vietnam-style quagmire missing an all too obvious sign of the party traumatized by race? What, after all, do Vietnamese and Iraqi’s have in common? They are people of…color. It is striking that Democratic Party history shows a repeated pattern of wanting to declare failure and come home in the Civil War, Vietnam and Iraq or opposed involvement in Grenada, the first Gulf War over Kuwait or stopping the genocide in Rwanda — all wars that involved liberating non-whites.
How in the world does a political party that once had white Southerners voting for it as a block (the so-called “solid South”) reach the point where they continually get 90% of the vote opposite race? Is it not a learned ability that is at once insidious, skillful and persistent to play out the politics of race, the very heart of the trauma that has been at its cumulative center from the beginning of its history?
Lord’s psycho-babble explanation for all of this is especially entertaining.
As he sees it, children suffer emotional trauma that blocks development later in life. Lord believes — really, he’s not kidding — that Democrats suffer from “cumulative trauma” that exists as a result of the political party “maturing” after having dealt with slavery as a young party two centuries ago.
While it is understandably pushed under the rug at all those Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners, not to mention seemingly ignored altogether at party gatherings, the hard, inescapable fact of life for Democrats is that the Party’s “childhood” or formative years was brutally traumatized by the support of slavery. Just as an individual child could be traumatized for life by growing up in a home where a pattern of alcoholism or drug addiction later created an adult incapable of maintaining healthy relationships, one looks at the seemingly instinctive if not unconscious reactions by Democrats — almost any Democrat — to any issue involving race and sees a very distinctive pattern.
They are stuck on race.
I’ve never seen a dumber political idea put in print. Ever.