Re: Spinning NCLB "accountability" as civil rights: neocon girly manh...

[Bussardre@aol.com]

Wonderful articles. Thanks for sharing, Quan.
 
 I just wonder how long it will take before the nation wakes up and  realizes 
how it has been manipulated all lthese years by these evil souls. I  used to 
see these people as ignorant but I decided they are just plain  EVIL.  Let's 
hope there is a hereafter where they will be held  "accountable."
 
Billee Bussard
 
 
 
In a message dated 8/6/2007 8:44:28 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
QCao009@aol.com writes:

_Black  is white_ (http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/black_white) 
Submitted by  _Rick Perlstein_  
(http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/user/rick_perlstein)  on August 6,  2007 - 
8:55am.  

When I wrote about  the Supreme Court's  monstrously mendacious decision to 
ban local school  districts from  seeking racial fairness, I was especially 
offended by Chief  Justice  Roberts' formulation, “the way to stop 
discrimination on 
the basis  of  race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."   
Historian Nancy McClean has now published an amazing little essay in  which  
she reveals the workshops that churned out this Orwellian  notion. "Roberts’s 
 
decision," she writes, "is replete with quotable  phrases from the lexicon  
conservative strategists honed in their  think tanks in the 1970s and then  
carried 
into the nation’s  courtrooms through their various legal societies." 
Here's the story:  
[H]ow did National Review greet the Brown decision? Frank Meyer, its   
founding co-editor and the leading conservative movement builder in  the  
formative 
years, called the high court’s decision a “rape of  the  Constitution.”

To fight the implementation of Brown, Buckley  and Meyer forged an  alliance 
with the intellectual architect of  “massive resistance,” James  Jackson 
Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick’s  agitation against school desegregation as  editor 
of the 
Richmond  News Leader earned him praise as “one of the South’s  most 
talented  
leaders” from the Mississippi-based white Citizens’ Councils  then  working 
to 
crush the civil rights movement.

Buckley traded mailing  lists with this avid white supremacist  organization 
in 1958,  assuring its leader that “Our position on states’ rights  is the 
same  
as your own.” Indeed, it was. What made “the White community” in  the  South 
“
entitled” to use any means necessary to keep blacks from  voting,  Buckley 
had 
editorialized the year before, was that “it is  the advanced race”  so its “
claims of civilization supersede those of  universal  suffrage.”
But calling the emancipation of black  schoolchildren a "rape," and calling  
blacks civilizationally  inferior, wasn't flying with the public. So they did 
 
what  conservative do: borrowed from the black arts of corporation public   
relations. 
They were tutored by northern neo-conservatives like Irving  Kristol, who  in 
1964 warned Buckley of the “political folly” of  arguing against school  
desegregation “in terms of racial  differences.” Buckley and his allies 
wisely  
dropped the racial  rationales and most now say that they regret their 
earlier   
arguments.

But their core commitments stayed the same. To fight  social justice,  
conservative spokesmen simply mastered the art of  rhetorical jujitsu. They  
seized 
the civil rights movement’s greatest  strength--its moral power–to  defeat 
its 
goals. They complained less  and less that civil rights measures  violated 
property rights, aided  communists or elevated racial inferiors.  Instead, 
conservatives  claimed that civil rights measures themselves  discriminated.

“I  am getting to be like the Catholic convert who became more Catholic  than 
 
the Pope,” Kilpatrick marveled in 1978 about his own altered  phraseology.  “
If it is wrong to discriminate by reason of race or  sex,” intoned the  
outspoken enemy of civil rights, “well, then, it  is wrong to discriminate by 
 reason 
of race or sex.”

The  former segregationists now portrayed themselves as the true  advocates 
of  
fairness. They framed “the egalitarians,” in Kilpatrick’s words,  as  “
worse 
racists--much worse racists--than the old Southern   bigots.”...
Yes: quite literally, they argued that black was white. Read  the whole essay 
 
_here_ (http://hnn.us/articles/41501.html) , then  groove to Nancy's _book _  
(http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Not-Enough-Workplace-Foundation/dp/0674019091/r
ef
=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0698794-2006438?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186404043&sr=8-1)  
Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of  the American  Workplace.


Quan







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