Salon essay delayed in order to search for 'Buckley-as-Nazi' photo

Photo of Bill Buckley accompanying Walsh's Salon essay. 

Coming in a bit late to the racial-animosity commentariat is Salon contributor Joan Walsh, who types a nasty fact-free essay accusing the National Review of racism. The title is appropriately Racism and the National Review. One presumes that Walsh's original title: 'Racism is the National Review' was deemed a touch too inflammatory by the Salon editors.

Walsh, who hails from the Party of Racism, can be excused for her late entry. Finding a photo of Bill Buckley that makes the staunch opponent of (national) socialism and defender of the party of Lincoln look like he was at a Nuremberg rally and just saw the Fuhrer pass by is a bit time-consuming, since Buckley only infrequently gave the Nazi salute and assiduously avoided doing it in front of cameras.

Walsh's google search for "buckley giving nazi salute" apparently took several days.

Excerpts, with my commentary:

... Rich Lowry himself, though he has now distanced himself and his magazine from “Derb’s” crude racism, continued Buckley’s tradition last week, with a tendentious column accusing black leaders of “politicizing” Martin’s death while “ignoring” the problem of black teens murdered by other black teens. (This has become a big fake issue on the right.)

Sharpton and Jackson and Farakhan are like moths to a flame, but the flame is almost invariably white-on-black crime. And their intervention invariably inflames racial tension, rather than calming it.

In the conservative world, that's reason to admonish. In the liberal world, that's politics.

Lowry ignores years of hard work to combat “black on black crime” by national and local black leaders.

Imagine the murder rates in Chicago and Washington and New Orleans if libs hadn't been trying so hard...

The murders Lowry writes about indeed deserve more attention and more outrage than they inspire, but it’s preposterous to claim black leaders haven’t demanded society pay attention.

There are few things that Democrat machine politicians in crime-infested cities fear more than public accountability of leadership for crime. If anyone even insinuates that Democratic city officials have any responsibility for crime in their cities, they accuse Republicans of racism.

They have, and sadly, they will again; it’s the larger society that refuses to listen.

We pay a lot of attention. When we point out the carnage in our cities, libs post pictures that make us look like Nazis and accuse us of being racists.

And in the end, the fact that some black teens are murdered by black teens has no bearing on the Trayvon Martin case.

True. Yet is has a great deal of bearing on the jaw-dropping duplicity of race-mongers who exploit interracial white-on-black crime and ignore the massive epidemic of black-on-black crime. Conservatives are arguing that all black victims count, not just the ones whose murders can be used for political gain.

Black leaders and journalists took up the cause because local authorities were ignoring it;

The succinct rationale of lynch mobs.

without their “rabble-rousing,” we would never have known what really happened.

We still don't know what happened. Dishonestly editing 911 tapes to inflame race hate doesn't help gather the facts.

An unarmed black teenager was shot dead and his killer went free.

The investigation continues. Wait for the facts, Ms. Walsh.

Local police conducted a subpar investigation that nonetheless convinced the lead investigator that Zimmerman should be charged with manslaughter, but he wasn’t.

Wait for the facts. Put away the rope.

Meanwhile, the right-wing outrage machine is more concerned that Zimmerman may be being wrongly accused of racism than that a boy died largely because he’s black.

We're very concerned that Martin was killed. That's why we want the truth, and are willing to wait for an investigative process to find it.

And how exactly does fraudulent editing of a 911 tape broadcast nationwide help with the just prosecution of Zimmerman? How does stoking race-hate and fear bring us justice? It biases millions of potential jurors, and could easily be used by Zimmerman's attorneys to overturn any verdict against him based on a tainted jury pool.

A meticulously documented climate of fraudulently ginned-up hate is a defense attorney's dream. The appellate ruling to overturn the conviction virtually writes itself.

The only reason to fraudulently stir up racial hate is if this were a lynching.

William F. Buckley’s magazine played a key role in building that outrage machine, and it continues to keep it going, whether or not John Derbyshire works there anymore.

Well, what do you expect from a conservative publication whose founder gave Nazi salutes?

I hope Salon doesn't dig up any of Buckley's old 911 tapes...