RedState vs. WashPost: Allen's Democratic Opponent Blurbs On The Plight of Whites

August 24th, 2006 12:28 PM

Erick at RedState.org offered a little "Macaca" rebuttal to The Washington Post. What about George Allen's Democratic opponent Jim Webb writing dust-cover blurbs sticking up for the white man in a book that came out...just in January?

When George Allen mocked the little tool with the bad haircut a few weeks ago, the Webb campaign whipped itself into high dudgeons about the racism of George Allen. Perhaps the Webb campaign should not have been so vocal. Mr. Webb, you see, has his own history of quotes, like this one:

Politicians and judges over the past forty years have created the mythology that white America is a monolith whose history is based on social and economic privilege, while anyone who is not white is by definition disadvantaged. No one knows this better than William Perry Pendley and a few have done more to put an end to this outrage.

That's James Webb's quote on the back of William Perry Pendley's book Warriors of the West: Fighting Bureaucrats, Radical Groups, and Liberal Judges on America's Frontier.

It sounds like Webb really is one of those "progressive candidates" the left should be excited about supporting.

Will the Washington Post ever notice? Pendley has also been kind to Webb in an article last year titled REAGAN’S NAVY SECY: “WHITE AMERICA…AN ETHNIC FAIRY TALE.” It looks forward to the day racial quotas crumble in the courts:

If it gets there, it will be met by new scholarship that undermines the factual basis for governmental distinctions between European Americans and select groups of non-European Americans. James Webb, the most highly-decorated Marine officer of the Vietnam War and Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, argues, in his first non-fiction work, Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), that preferences are based on two erroneous assumptions: “[A]nyone who was not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant had grounds for complaint about his or her people’s collective ‘struggle.’ And anyone who was a WASP was by default a privileged, less-than-deserving whipping post.”

Thus, because the history of the Scots-Irish, for example, was “both unknown and irrelevant” to Congress when it adopted racial quotas, the Scots-Irish, lost twice. “First, since the dominant forces in American society were by assumption the WASP hierarchy, to be white, Protestant, and of British heritage immediately lumped one in with the New England Brahmin elites….” (“In this perverted logic,” notes Webb, it is as if all WASPS “had landed together on the same ship at Plymouth Rock and the smart ones had gone to Boston while the dumbest had somehow made their way to West Virginia.”) “Second, [t]o be of Southern descent brought with it an immediate presumption of invidious discrimination and cruelty dating back to the slave system and the unequal, segregated society that followed it.” This disregard for “the vast distinctions among white Americans” helped create “a statistical straw man of ‘white America’” used to justify racial quotas, which “was nothing more than an imaginary façade. Indeed, white America is so variegated that it is an ethnic fairy tale.”

Had Congress sought to give lie to the fairy tale, it could have done so. For example, writes Webb, in 1974, the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) found that, “even prior to the major affirmative action programs, there was a greater variation within ‘white America’ than there was between white America and black America. [I]n terms of education and income, the whites at the bottom were in approximately the same situation as blacks.” NORC’s General Social Survey for 1980-2000 shows that, over the last thirty years, racial preferences have “exacerbated” the situation. Concludes Webb, “these members of our society can hardly be called advantaged in a way that justifies legal discrimination against them as interchangeable members of a supposedly monolithic white majority.”

Pendley concluded: "If the Supreme Court wants a basis for ending racial preferences, in addition to its 1995 Adarand ruling, it could use James Webb’s scholarship." I'd love to see someone read that at the next Washington Post diversity-training session.