Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? New York Times Edition

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? New York Times Edition: "

We really, really need better quality control here.

TBogg:

One Bad Bigot Don’t Spoil The Whole Bigot Barrel, Baby: Shorter Ross Douthat:

With notably rare exceptions, like the massacre of innocent children, people like that Norwegian guy have some valid concerns about the browns.

Alternate Ross Douthat:

Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism extremist genocidal tendencies, Dude, but at least it’s an ethos.

Indeed. Ross Douthat:

Ross Douthat: “Al Gore or the Unabomber?”… juxtaposed passages from the former vice president’s eco-manifesto “Earth in the Balance” with quotes from Theodore Kaczynski’s critiques of industrial civilization and asked the reader to guess which writer was which. Was it the bearded hermit who hailed “isolated pockets of resistance fighters” for struggling against modern society’s “assault on the earth”? No, that would be the former vice president. Was it Kaczynski, the mathematics Ph.D. turned mad bomber, who complained about the “destructive” impact of bringing a child into “the hugely consumptionist way of life so common in the industrial world”? No, Gore again….

Anders Behring Breivik… has roughly the same relationship to the cultural right that Kaczynski had to certain strains of environmentalism. The darkest aspects of his ideology belong strictly to the neo-fascist fringe. But many of his beliefs and arguments echo the rhetoric of mainstream cultural conservatives, in Europe and America alike…. [H]is critiques of multiculturalism and immigration resemble arguments that have been advanced, not just by Europe’s far-right parties, but by mainstream conservative leaders….

How should European conservatives react?… [His crimes should be denounced and disowned…. But this doesn’t mean that conservatives need to surrender their convictions…. Europe’s cultural conservatives are right: Mass immigration really has left the Continent more divided than enriched, Islam and liberal democracy have not yet proven natural bedfellows…. For decades, Europe’s governing classes insisted that only racists worried about immigration, only bigots doubted the success of multiculturalism and only fascists cared about national identity…. Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have an obligation to acknowledge that Anders Behring Breivik is a distinctively right-wing kind of monster. But they also have an obligation to the realities that this monster’s terrible atrocity threatens to obscure.

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