Spin: Newsweek Writer Claims That The Media Successfully Vetted Obama Before 2008 By Covering His Derrick Bell Love In... A Book Published In 2010

They're not even making any sense.

The writer claims, at the end, that this episode is proof of the media's vigilance in vetting Obama in 2008.

He ignores the fact that the book he relies on for this proposition was published two years after that.

Meanwhile, Obama's favorite theorist to assign students when he was serving as a fake professor of law was, of course, Derrick Bell.

Open your hearts.

Is Derrick Bell really a racialist radical? Thomas Sowell thinks so. Video at the link, but here's what he says:

LAMB: [Derrick Bell] Threatened the law school if they didn't hire a black woman, he's going, he's leaving?

SOWELL: Well, if I understand it correctly, he's taking unpaid leave until such time as they hire a woman of color, as he says. Well, he's also said that by black, he does not mean skin color, he means those who are really black, not those who think white and look black. And so what he is really saying is he wants ideological conformity in the people that are hired to fill this position. That's not uncommon either. I know a black woman, for example, who had a Ph.D. -- she's had a book published, she has another contract on another book, she's taught at a couple of very nice places, she has a devil of a time getting a job -- not a job in a prestigious institution, a job teaching at a college. And the reason is that she gets shot down, blackballed, whatever, by people who don't like her ideology. That's happening not only racially, it's also happening where race is not an issue. In a law school, I learned recently, there's a woman who was being considered for a tenured position, and all the men voted for her and all the woman voted against her, because she does not follow radical feminism, and so you're getting these ideological tests, so that at the very time that there's all this mouthing of the word diversity, there is this extremely narrow ideological conformity that is being enforced wherever people have the power to enforce it.

LAMB: What did you think of Derrick Bell's whole plan?

SOWELL: Well, his chances of success will depend on whether or not he has overestimated his importance to the Harvard Law School. I think it would be a tragedy if they caved in, and I was very pleased to see that they seemed to show some backbone, which is quite rare among academics.

LAMB: Now, what do you think of the press treatment of him?

SOWELL: It's been quite gentle.

LAMB: You mean, is he a hero?

SOWELL: To me?

LAMB: No. Basically, I mean, from the press coverage, you've seen, is he a hero to the ...?

SOWELL: Well, he's looked at as an idealist who is self-sacrificing and so on. I suppose one could, if one wanted to look at it that way, have seen Hitler that way in his early days. It's just a question of where that kind of idealism leads. He has launched a despicable attack on a young black professor at the law school who doesn't go along with this. A young man named Randall Kennedy, who has written a very thoughtful, intelligent article last June in the Harvard Law Review, questioning some of the assumptions that people are making, people like Derrick Bell and doing it in a very gentlemanly as well as very logical way, empirical way, and that's not what they want. They want the conclusion to be that -- they want him to march in lock step and he won't do it, and they're doing their best to make life impossible for him.

posted by Ace at 04:49 PM

| Access Comments