December 9, 2008

Up to a point, Lady Copper

Former Vanity Fair editrix Tina Brown has started a website modeled on the Huffington Post, which she calls The Daily Beast, after Lord Copper's newspaper in Evelyn Waugh's great Scoop. (I guess that makes the Huffington Post the equivalent of The Daily Brute and Ariana would be Lady Zinc.) Personally, I think it would be droll if instead of being on the Internet, The Daily Brute was on paper and distributed via messengers carrying cleft sticks, but Lady Copper doesn't seem to get the joke.

In today's Daily Beast, Max Blumenthal, the son of former Clinton White House consigliere Sidney Blumenthal, gets upset about a VDARE.com column I wrote in December 2005 praising the large Jewish contribution to the great American Christmas songbook. I pointed out:
Pop songwise, most of the 20th century Christmas hits we hear this time of year were written between 1934 and 1958. They keep alive the higher standards of songwriting that prevailed before rock music made youth, self-expression, and authenticity more important than craftsmanship. Tin Pan Alley was the commercial heir to the great Continental musical tradition, with its incomparable mastery of technique....
And, strange as it may seem during today's War Against Christmas, a very large fraction of the best Christmas songs were written by Jews.
For example, looking at a fairly recent ASCAP list of the most played Christmas pop tunes, it appears to me that of the top ten songs, Jews wrote five and co-wrote two more. ... But this long, amiable tradition of Jews helping to enliven a Christian feast day seems, sadly, to be drawing to an end.

One paragraph in Blumenthal's carefully researched piece caught my eye:
VDare’s 2005 War on Christmas winner, Steve Sailer [I won? Where's my prize?], a Eugenics enthusiast [my consistent lack of enthusiasm for eugenics notwithstanding] and author of the new biography of Barack Obama, America’s Half-Blood Prince [which, by the way, makes the perfect Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, or Winter Solstice gift], picked up where Piatak left off. “American Jews,” Sailer wrote, “those exemplars of successful assimilation now seem to be de-assimilating emotionally, becoming increasingly resentful, at this late date, of their fellow Americans for celebrating Christmas.” Sailer went on to quote at length from a column by the purportedly Jewish writer, Bert Prelutsky, called “The Jewish Grinch Who Stole Christmas.”

I love Max Blumenthal's description of veteran TV writer Burt Prelutsky as "purportedly Jewish." I guess that makes Max "Sidney Blumenthal's purported son."

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

Max Blumenthal looks like he should be poisoning spies under orders from Putin.

Anonymous said...

"Oh, it's gauche for a goy to point out that Jews are Jewish."

Nevertheless, some of us 'goyim' have been at this for a long while; check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_Jews -- along with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jews_by_country

As America's wealthiest and most mass-media savvy ethnic group, some of us think it's important to find out who is Jewish in America, and to investigate the related percentages and statistics. What you find is often quite startling to say the least when it comes to representation in the media, business/banking, academia, government, etc.

Anonymous said...

Max is the butt ugly creature who goes around harassing Ann Coulter. In response, Miss Ann usually points out what a joke of an example Max is of a man, but I might extend that to human being.


I would go further and say that Max looks like an inbreed hillbilly, but that kind of thing isn’t permitted unless the object of that observation is actually a hillbilly or some other variant of so-called “white trash.”

Anonymous said...

Sue him for libel. He can't back up his words, so either he, or the org that published him will have to pay you. Sue him. Force is the only thing these people grok.

Dennis Dale said...

I see from the "more from this author" sidebar that young Blumenthal previously informed us "Malcom X's Daughter Rebukes Al Qaeda Leader"!
A la Jon Lovitz' Master Thespian character:
"Relevance!"

Anonymous said...

David Gregory was recently named the new moderator of Meet the Press on NBC.

Speaking of Jews in the media business, it was reported that the candidates to take over Meet the Press on NBC included David Gregory (Jewish); Chuck Todd (Jewish); Ted Koppel (Jewish); Andrea Mitchell (Jewish and aka Mrs. Alan Greenspan);Katie Couric (half-Jewish Episcopalian) and Gwen Ifill (not Jewish black female).

So, the only fully non-Jewish person rumored to be even considered for the MTP moderator job was the African-American female Gwen Ifill. That’s diversity for you.

Anonymous said...

"De-assimilation" doesn't seem quite right, but clearly there is something going on with elite Ashkenazi secular Jews in the US, something that we don't see here in the UK. There is a definite hostility to WASP traditional culture, both elite and popular.

It seems particularly strange because, while there are a few anti-semites in the US (judging by the comments section of Taki's magazine), the US is overall much more philo-Semitic than any other nation outside Israel. I guess maybe that has something to do with it.

Anonymous said...

One thing about elite Jews in the UK is that they are generally much more religious in the US, as well as being much more assimilated. I think this may be a factor - in the absence of religion people often cling to tribal identity more fiercely; that goes for (post)Christians too.

Anonymous said...

The Jewish liberal intelligentsia in the US is certainly not "de-assimilating" -- i.e.: retreating into its ghettos. Rather it is attempting to de-assemble the cultural underpinnings of Christian European American culture.

Anonymous said...

As one of the Jews around here who sometimes sticks up for the Chosen, I have to say that Blumenthal is an embarrassment. I saw a video of him harrassing David Irving some time ago in a way that actually made me sympathetic to Irving.

Btw, my father was a high school teacher of Max's father Sydney and has told me that Blumenthal senior was a decidedly mediocre student.

Seamus said...

Nevertheless, some of us 'goyim' have been at this for a long while

It's not just the goyim. Consider, for example, Adam Sandler's "Hannukah Song".

Anonymous said...

I understand that Max is purportedly a human, but don't quote me...

Anonymous said...

For some reason I am reminded of the controversy surrounding Errol Morris' movie "Mr. Death," the story of Fred Leuchter. Mr. Morris says that when he screened the first version of the movie, the audience he showed it to -- college students -- was sympathetic to Leuchter. They concluded that he was mistaken, but sincere in his beliefs -- and that the people who set out to ruin him were vindictive assholes.

Morris had to go back to work and add an hour of material to the film which beat the viewer over the head with the message "Leuchter is a bastard."

Anonymous said...

Freely available information in a free society

If you are a good racial realist, you have no problem with the cream rising to the top.

Dennis Dale said...

They concluded that he was mistaken, but sincere in his beliefs -- and that the people who set out to ruin him were vindictive assholes.

This is precisely the impression I took away from this feature-length potshot--including Morris in that colorfully described group. Not that there wasn't an appalling element to Leuchter's moral oblivion.

But the unforgiving severity of his preening tormentors, not content to prove the man wrong or tragic but beyond all bounds of decency, looks disturbingly like whatever murderous tyranny awaits to enthrall us next, in its latent stage. People forget these things always start with the conspicuous outrage of pretenders to the moral high ground. Scratch a revolutionary (or any of these self-assigned arbiters of thought), find a tyrant.

Anonymous said...

"Lloyd said...

For some reason I am reminded of the controversy surrounding Errol Morris' movie "Mr. Death," the story of Fred Leuchter. Mr. Morris says that when he screened the first version of the movie, the audience he showed it to -- college students -- was sympathetic to Leuchter. They concluded that he was mistaken, but sincere in his beliefs -- and that the people who set out to ruin him were vindictive assholes."

Perhaps the college students were sympathetic to Leuchtner because they - as many young people nowadays seem to - have no fixed moral compass, and respect anyone who's "genuine", no matter how evil their works may be.

From what I read about Leuchtner, he comes across mostly as a dipsh*t. For example, concluding that the lack of cyanide residue on bricks from Auschwitz was conclusive proof that there had been no gas chambers there (mind you, these were bricks that had been lying loose, in a heap, and exposed to the elements for forty years). His "research" notes include numerous detailed descriptions of where he dined, what he ate, and how good it tasted.

And remember, this is a guy who's vocational specialty - who's calling in life, is designing devices for executing human beings. He's a crackpot.

Anonymous said...

chic Noir:
"If you are a good racial realist, you have no problem with the cream rising to the top."

No, you can accept that group X are cognitively superior, without wishing to be ruled by group X. For instance, if you're black, you can accept that whites have a higher median IQ, but may not want a white-run society because you prefer your leaders to be of the same race. That's a very common outlook in my experience, and is the reason why there is such hostility to high-IQ minorities in most countries.

Vain Saints said...

Furthermore, as per Sid Blumenthal's H.S. teacher, you can also suspect that Jewish intelectual superiority isn't all it's cracked up to be, and that what we are witnessing is far more the result of tribalism and nepotism brought about by one ethnic group reaching critical mass in a given sector.