The New York Times has now editorialized that Woodrow Wilson had a "toxic legacy" as an "unapologetic racist" that the Left on the Princeton campus was right to repudiate.
James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal had a little fun with the same newspaper's endorsement in 1912, calling Toxic Woodrow "a man of high equipment for the office, worthy of the full confidence of the people.”
a man of high equipment for the office, worthy of the full confidence of the people.”
There was an interesting lead editorial in Wednesday's New York Times, forcefully in favor of demands from a black protest group at Princeton University to erase President Woodrow Wilson's name from the university's public policy institute because of his vile racial views and support for Jim Crow. Yet one could ask once again, where was this editorial concern five years ago, when it was leading conservatives like Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg who were making that very same case against the progressive hero Wilson? A man endorsed twice for president by none other than the New York Times itself?
It's suddenly acceptable in the New York Times to call liberal hero Woodrow Wilson a racist, now that a black campus pressure group is making demands that Princeton University strike the name of Wilson, former president of the university, from the name of its public policy school. Yet for years, prominent conservatives have reminded liberals of the blatant racism and discrimination practiced by the Democrat (an ID the Times failed to note), and the New York Times ignored those embarrassing facts when coming from the right.
During a weekend leading up to President Obama making a more forceful case for war in Syria, CBS’s Sunday Morning was still pretending that Wilsonian internationalism could have prevented World War II.
Undeterred by his train-wreck on Cinco de Mayo, CBS gave comedian Mo Rocca another historical segment, this one on a new book by A. Scott Berg on President Woodrow Wilson. Rocca asked Berg if the League of Nations could have stopped war with Hitler. (After all, he had the potential to be such a reasonable fellow.)
Far be it from me to sow discord in MSNBC ranks, to stir up old animosities between colleagues there. But if Joe Scarborough is going to do a mocking imitation of Keith Olbermann in full Special Comment rant, well then, blogging ethics compel me to report it.
The jumping-off point on Morning Joe today was Eugene Robinson's current WaPo column. After claiming that he didn't want to kick the president on his way out the door, Robinson proceeded to do just that. The columnist described a variety of measures adopted by the president in prosecution of the war against terror as "departures from American values and traditions." Robinson recommended an investigation if not a criminal prosecution. That led Pat Buchanan and Scarborough to cite, chapter and verse, the ways in which Bush's supposed abrogation of "American values and traditions" were small potatoes compared to the actions of predecessors including Lincoln, Wilson and FDR.
Without mentioning the Countdown host by name, Scarborough closed with an unmistakable impression of Keith Olbermann in pompous Special Comment peroration of the sort that can be seen here.