Back in April, 2006 I wrote a piece titled RCOB™. It was a fisking of an op-ed by a writer named Nina Burleigh, who I later discovered was the bint who (in)famously said that she’d orally service Bill Clinton “just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.” Ms. Burleigh is an alumnus of the University of Chicago – aka “Mordor on the Lake,” and is an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University, home of the Frankfurt School. She is also National Politics Correspondent for Newsweek. And, of course, she’s not above making it up as she goes, since a 2019 piece she wrote for the Daily Mail had to be retracted and “substantial damages” paid to the person she slandered – Melania Trump. That was her second retraction. In 2018 a piece she wrote for Newsweek was retracted when the editors belatedly concluded they couldn’t support her allegations that “Russian bots” were responsible for Sen. Al Franken’s downfall.
So we have a woman, given her history, who is anti-theist, ultra-feminist, educated at one college with a reputation for neo-marxism, and teaching at another, yet lives in New York City with a second home in upstate New York. Must be nice.
Let me give you a taste of that older post:
Glenn Reynolds linked to a Salon.com piece by Nina Burleigh:
“I cringed as my young son recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But who was I to question his innocent trust in a nation I long ago lost faith in?”
Who, indeed? Reader Wagner James Au, who sent the link, writes: “My question is, why do anti-war liberals get so offended when people question their patriotism, when they spend so much time questioning it themselves?”
I read her piece, Country Boy, and my response to it was, almost literally, a RCOB.
Ms. Burleigh and I have worldviews so divergent that we might as well be of different species. There is no common ground upon which we could even begin to attempt rapprochement. And what bothers me most of all is that I see the land that we both live in becoming more and more divided between people like her, and people like me.
Let me fisk, for it is about the only thing I can do to purge myself of the emotions her piece inspired in me:
If you’ve got a few minutes, go read it. See if it gives you the same symptoms it gave me. This is the Left today. Fourteen years later there are possibly fewer of them, but they are a lot crazier.