Paul Krugman explains how the sainted Ronald Reagan didn’t really have a Southern Strategy at all. It was all just a series of Innocent mistakes.
Masson's Blog
Paul Krugman explains how the sainted Ronald Reagan didn’t really have a Southern Strategy at all. It was all just a series of Innocent mistakes.
Krugman’s returning fire on David Brooks for Friday’s column which supposedly violated Op-Ed protocol by attacking a fellow pundit’s work (though, as here, without naming him). Trying to make an argument in spite of all the evidence being against you does not violate the rules, as regular readers of Brooks already know.
Let me help you clarify that headline, Doug.
” Paul Krugman SPECULATES how the sainted Ronald Reagan didn’t really have a Southern Strategy at all.
Thanks for looking out for me, Tim!
Hey, Krugman gets a lot of stuff wrong – especially, but not exclusively, when he strays from economics.
C’mon, Tim, let’s agree to use words according to their generally accepted meanings, huh? Speculate, like Brooks’ calumny, implies an absence of factual foundation, though without the latter’s sense of malicious misstatement (in which Brooks was caught with his pants speculatively around his ankles). But facts there are, including the list Krugman’s column comprises. Reagan’s public life begins with opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his man Barry’s destruction of the existing Deep South Republican party, which was primarily African-American (admittedly, you can’t fault the logic of rejecting voters who weren’t allowed to vote). I understand why this makes some Republicans squirm. It should; in fact, that’s the least it should do. But facts are a lot more difficult to change outside the drum circle than in, as Brooks has unwittingly demonstrated.
Here is some speculation on language.
Language is fascinating because choice of words by a language/syntax expert can make a new truth all its own,to serve any desired purpose. Its no longer scholars who control what truth is but young computer experts who click it up and slant it according to what needs to be proven in a certain way,perhaps by political affiliation.. .I translate French and English, mostly informally, because the peril of missed translations is great if a rendering has to be culturally accurate.In French one of the main translations of ‘speculate’ is ‘donner lieu a des conjectures’ or in baseline English,
‘to validate guessing’. A very famous missed translation was between De Gaule and Churchill just after ww2 when Churchill asked De Gaule if France would join a European union someday.De Gaule answered ‘eventuellement’which by a English speaker would seem to mean ‘eventually’ or ‘yes,in time’and was widely translated that way. But in French the word means ‘should events occur in a certain way then it may happen’.So De Gaule didn’t say ‘yes’ at all.
The Bush administration made a case for war in Iraq by stringing together possible scenarios( with differing possibilities of likelihood) that ‘could’ happen so when the entire case was made the sense was that everything ‘speculated’ was going to happen.No actual lies,just creative reconstruction by desired emphasis,and with computer experts it was probably easy to assemble. So truth has to be situational.That’s why thinking religiously in the temporal world is so very misleading and dangerous.I’m in no way demeaning religion,but we live in a real world of verifiable facts even as we believe in God ,if we choose.And nothing is out of God’s realm.
The great thing about this blog is that everyone ( except me) puts down references for sources of information so everything can be verified .If everyone so diligently sought to be accurate and forthright as the legal field must be just to function normally,then no one could ever be fooled,at least theorectically.But once my neighbor,who was a lawyer once warned me:just make sure your lawyer knows more than the other lawyer.In that case ‘pure truth’ is not what is sought by either side,and that’s always the downfall of truth.
Maybe he was already senile?
There’s really no other explanation for how you could stand in Philadelphia, MS, and say you believe in “states’ rights”–which I believe was the reason the southern states gave for leaving the Union so that they could continue to buy, sell, whip, rape, and murder black people.
Or maybe he’d never heard of one of the two or three biggest civil rights events in history?
Or maybe his history class omitted the Civil War, Reconstruction, etc.
And of course none of his advisors knew any of this shit, either. They just accidentally scratched White Mississippi’s biggest itch without intending to.
At some point, Occam’s Razor kicks in, right?
Shorter Brooks: Reagan had a “wide stance”.
I think it’s quite clear that Dr. Reagan had a zebra in the waiting room.
Can’t we just stick to how he raped that actress, gave weapons to Iran and Iraq, and trained and armed Bin Laden? Those actions alone make me want to name something in every county after him.