THE MEAN-SPIRITED RELIGIOUS LEFT
Scrapbook THEMEAN-SPIRITED RELIGIOUS LEFT The sheer magnitude of the demand for better public schools was revealed last Wednesday when billionaire philanthropist Ted Forstmann and WalMart...
...In one memorable riff, he denounced the pope as a “cracker...
...You can probably guess what lessons the Times was itching to draw: “One is that schools must become more adept at spotting potential troublemakers before they resort to gunfire...
...The charge: failure to warn consumers of the risk that vigorous brushing might cause “toothbrush related injury” to gums...
...So the Washington voice of liberal Baptists equates advocacy of school vouchers to “Hitler’s grand schemes...
...A professional videographer (fee: $7,900) will record highlights of the trip for future viewing...
...AND DON’T FORGET TO FLOSS Lawyers never sleep...
...they also manufactured shrapnel-filled pipe bombs and propane explosives under their parents’ noses...
...Just in case you need something else to worry about...
...The woebegone court officer who released them early from their juvenile diversion program (which included studying “anger management” and ethics) thought the boys to be “bright,” “intelligent,” and “very articulate...
...You may remember Jeffries, a professor who theorized that blacks (“sun people”) are physically and mentally superior to whites (“ice people”), thanks to mysterious qualities found in melanin...
...At press time, Leonard Jeffries was still on his way to Ghana...
...Now, about the gun-control lesson: That phrase “troubled youngsters” is particularly rich...
...Colorado vehicle registration records show that the Klebold family owns at least seven cars, including four BMW’s that date from the 1980’s...
...The boys, according to the story, came “from middle-class, two-parent families...
...At city expense...
...It did have some under-explained details, though...
...Selfish . . . parochial . . . greedy . . . racist...
...Yet, those darker dimensions can be characterized as: Political—appeals to cynicism and hopelessness, the worst aspects of our nature...
...And that’s not all...
...Rather than come to their senses, some of Booker’s fellow council members implied he had become a tool of the Jews...
...LEONARD JEFFRIES’S JUNKET Next month, a delegation of elected officials from Newark, New Jersey, is scheduled to depart on a twoweek, taxpayer financed trip to Ghana...
...Okay, let’s take these lessons in order: The two murderous “troublemakers” had in fact been spotted, in a sense, as the Times and other news organizations would later report...
...One’s heart goes out to all those who have bought the limited vision of voucher propagandists,” writes James M. Dunn, executive director of the committee...
...According to Dunn, “Most voucher advocates . . . have not thought it through or are thinking too anecdotally...
...As far as I can tell, this family was utterly, utterly normal,’” a colleague of Klebold’s father said...
...The plaintiffs are seeking warning labels on toothbrush boxes...
...Four BMW’s...
...Jeffries was dismissed from his position as chairman of the black studies department at City College of New York several years ago, when he began screaming during a public appearance about the pernicious influence of whites generally, and Jews specifically, in American society...
...The Chicago Tribune reported a couple of weeks ago on a class-action suit just filed in Cook County Circuit Court against Colgate-Palmolive, drugstore chain Walgreen Co., the American Dental Association, and assorted other defendants...
...PROVINCIALISM AT THE TIMES Their first-day editorial was the low point of the Times’s coverage of the Colorado massacre...
...Seven cars...
...Under ordinary circumstances, such a trip might have escaped attention in Newark—since 1993, according to the Newark Star-Ledger, the mayor and city council have billed the city for vacations in Portugal, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Florida, Arizona, Boston, Memphis, Atlantic City, Washington, and Chicago...
...This time, however, the city council decided to shell out an extra $7,000 in city funds to bring along an “advisor...
...His name: Leonard Jeffries...
...They were arrested last year for what the Times would term “minor charges of criminal mischief, theft and trespass...
...A lengthy story on Friday about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two killers, was an exceptional bit of reporting...
...Cory Booker, a 29-year-old Rhodes scholar and Yale Law graduate who was elected to the council last year, objected to using public money to pay for Jeffries’s trip...
...Utterly normal...
...Some folks turned a blind eye to Hitler’s grand schemes because the trains ran on time...
...Well, yes, they were obviously articulate enough to con their probation officer...
...Some sort of West 43rd St...
...AND THE PARENTS...
...But for die-hard backers of the public-school establishment, the popularity of such scholarships is not a sign of a deep failure in the education establishment: It’s evidence of an evil plot...
...Billed as part of a “cultural exchange program,” the trip includes $225-anight luxury hotel rooms, jaunts to what the itinerary describes as “splendid beaches lined with coconut palms,” and a week at the “African-African American Summit” in Accra (conference fees: $3,000...
...Another even more obvious lesson . . . is the urgent need for concerted action by Congress, state legislatures and gun manufacturers to keep guns out of the hands of troubled youngsters...
...Indeed, assuming that one should even try to draw lessons from such anomalous crimes, the most obvious lesson of all was conspicuously absent from the Times’s list of action plans—namely, that parents have an obligation to supervise their alienated teenagers...
...Even making allowances for hasty writing on deadline, the initial New York Times editorial on the Columbine High massacre was a revealingly lamebrained piece of work: “It is not too early to begin drawing lessons,” the Times intoned, before proceeding to prove that, yes, it was a bit too early...
...At least one member of Newark’s city council thought so...
...School shootings had been in decline this year, but yesterday’s blasts in Colorado are a grim reminder that guns are still too readily available...
...Yes, they had guns...
...In a city that is among the poorest in the country...
...Yes, that’s the Leonard Jeffries going on the junket...
...Consider the remarkably mean-spirited anti-voucher editorial in the April 6 newsletter of the Baptist Joint Committee—the Washington lobby for many of the nation’s Baptist churches (though many conservative Baptists don’t support it...
...It’s not politically correct, nor is it sweet and gentle, to name the demons that drive the push for vouchers...
...Remember this the next time someone calls religious conservatives haters...
...provincialism is at work in the idea that this is the middle-class suburban norm...
...But THE SCRAPBOOK isn’t sure whether it’s the provincialism of the Times’s Manhattanite reporters without cars—who think everyone else has more wheels than they actually do—or the provincialism of the Times’s haute-suburban editors, living in New Jersey tract mansions with four-car garages...
...Scrapbook THEMEAN-SPIRITED RELIGIOUS LEFT The sheer magnitude of the demand for better public schools was revealed last Wednesday when billionaire philanthropist Ted Forstmann and WalMart heir John Walton revealed that there were 1.2 million applicants for the 40,000 private-school scholarships they are awarding to lowincome kids for the coming school year (see “The Million Student March,” on page 17...
...It may or may not be time for “concerted action by Congress, state legislatures and gun manufacturers” to do the Times’s bidding, but Scrapbook unless the legislative plan envisaged includes downsizing the Bill of Rights and instituting a nationwide ban on private firearms, it’s hard to see how suicidal killers like the two boys in Colorado would be much affected...
...Pretty outrageous...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 31
