The Difference Between Politically Incorrect and Historically Wrong

[mcscajun]

About a book we should be aware of; and did everyone but me know that little tidbit in there about Clarence Thomas?

January 26, 2005
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
The Difference Between Politically Incorrect and Historically Wrong
By ADAM COHEN

If you're going to call a book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History," readers will expect some serious carrying on about race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint. He fulminates against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, best known for forcing restaurants and bus stations in the Jim Crow South to integrate, and against Brown v. Board of Education. And he offers up some curious views on the Civil War - or "the War of Northern Aggression," a name he calls "much more accurate."

(snip)

It is tempting to dismiss the book as fringe scholarship, not worth worrying about, but the numbers say otherwise. It is being snapped up on college campuses and, helped along by plugs from Fox News and other conservative media, it recently soared to No. 8 on the New York Times paperback best-seller list. It is part of a boomlet in far-right attacks on mainstream history that includes books like Jim Powell's "FDR's Folly," which argues that Franklin Roosevelt made the Depression worse, and Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment," a warm look back on the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

(snip)

The book reads less like history than a call to action, since so many of its historical arguments track the current political agenda of the far right. It contends that federal courts were never given the power to strike down state laws, a pet cause of states' rights supporters today. And it maintains that the First Amendment applies only to the federal government, and therefore does not prohibit the states from imposing religion on their citizens, a view that Clarence Thomas has suggested in his church-state opinions.

Most ominously, it makes an elaborate argument that the 14th Amendment was "never constitutionally ratified" because of irregularities in how it was adopted. This, too, is a pet cause of the fringe right, one the Supreme Court has rejected. If it prevailed, it would undo Brown v. Board of Education and many other rulings barring discrimination based on race, religion and sex. But Mr. Woods does not carry his argument to its logical conclusion. If the 14th Amendment was not properly ratified, neither, it would seem, was the 13th, which was adopted under similar circumstances, and slavery should be legal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/opinion/26wed4.html?pagewanted=print&position=

[GetTheRightVote]

1. These right wings neocons far plain nut balls, I wish they lived somewhere

else rather then in American, they would give any country a bad name.

:kick:

[tom_paine]

2. They have always been with us, burning witches, lynching blacks

or turning their heads and ignoring reality to suit their aristocratic Masters.

Things don't change much, do they? neither do people. The only things that really change are the restrictions civilization has placed on them.

And those restrictions are falling by the wayside along with the Constitution and the Old Republic's System of Checks and Balances.