Why on earth should I waste time coming up with a point by point refutation of a guy who’s lied continually throughout his life? For what?

I watched the Anita Hill Clarence Thomas hearings in real time, back when I was a Democrat. I thought they were absurd, and an extreme example of a he said/she said tangle, impossible to sort out in terms of who’s telling the truth, and nothing I’ve read since has changed my mind. What’s more, even if Thomas had been guilty as charged (and I have no idea if he is, but I tend to doubt it from what I know of his character—but people have strange sides), the charges themselves seemed trivial to me, and fell short of what I would consider sexual harassment.

But one thing I do know: David Brock is a serial liar of major proportions. I have no interest in attempting to prove or disprove each of the facts in his book (a task I consider impossible) in order to resolve a completely unresolvable he said/she said charge.

I admire Justice Thomas as it is, and consider him more likely than not innocent. Brock I do not admire.

Until you come up with a point by point refutation of what David Brock wrote about Anita Hill, I will stand by my interpretation of a quarter century ago: David Brock made a good case that Anita Hill was not credible.

Richard Nixon was a sleaze about Watergate, but he was correct about Alger Hiss. Bad in A doesn’t necessarily mean Bad in B.

I do not care what David Brock wrote about Anita Hill. I would not believe what he wrote about anything or anybody, and I mean that literally: he is that mendacious. Lying is his normal modus operandi—lying in the service of David Brock.

To paraphrase what Mary McCarthy wrote of Lillian Hellman, “Every word he writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”

Also, read this for a little taste of the Brock reliability.

(And to revisit the notion of “Liberalism-as-Religion”, this is the equivalent of Transubstantiation of the Eucharist, right?)

I just don’t know how they do it; or rather, how they can KEEP ON doing it, since it’s all obviously phony/ ersatz/ false/ pretend/ non-Real/ illogical/ The Emperor Has No Clothes!! despite their desperate proclamations to the contrary…

Incidentally, I put my mouse on the AdBlock button, and it turns out that the third most active filter- meaning that AdBlock filters it out- is for
“vindiciosuite.com” The second most blocked site is an Amazon widget.

Before you discount David Brock’s writings on Anita Hill, just because he has switched sides and not always acted in an honorable way, I would suggest that those skeptics go back and read what he wrote on Anita Hill. At the time it was pretty convincing to me. Granted, it was nearly a quarter century ago.

Sheesh. It’s not *supposed* to be this much work, is it????

Thanks very much.

Yes, we can. Bella Dodd, Freda Utley, to name just a couple.

While I was born and raised in bluest lib-land- how many times during my childhood did I hear about the innocence of Alger Hiss, for example- what helped me from going over the edge was the disproportionate numbers of Iron Curtain refugees in my home town. I lived with them, I worked with them, I attended school with their children. What impressed me was not what they said, but what they didn’t say. They did not want to revisit their memories of life behind the Iron Curtain- which some explicitly stated. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Anyone who intends to join the Left should, at the very least, ask them to point to some of their successes. Point to times when they have created egalitarian societies, economic success, and widespread happiness. It’s a simple question that has no, NO, examples. None!

I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.

Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don’t know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don’t realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don’t know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.

My students do know – because they have been taught this – that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know – because they have been drilled in this – that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.

There is an interesting coincidence of articles, where we find out that Ms. Goska teaches school in Paterson, New Jersey. From a variety of sources, we recently found out that in Paterson, only 19 students who took the SAT, which comprised only 3.2% of Paterson students who took the SAT, had a high enough score to be considered “college ready.” From northjersey.com:

The number of students in Paterson Public Schools deemed “college-ready” fell from 26 in 2013 to 19 this year, according to the benchmark set by the organization that runs the SAT tests.

A report released by the school district last week showed 19 of the 594 Paterson students who took the SATs this year had scores that met the “college-ready” criteria established by the College Board, which conducts the standardized tests.

The 19 students represented just under 3.2 percent of the district students who took the test, which is used by many universities as part of their admissions evaluation….

The district’s mean SAT scores in 2014 stayed the same as in the previous year. They increased by three points to 368 in reading and by three points in math to 392, but fell by six points in writing to 360.
The state averages are 501 in reading, 523 in math and 502 in writing, according to the district’s report.
To be deemed college ready by the College Board, students must get a combined score of 1,550 on the SATs. Paterson’s combined mean score was 1,120

The 1550 SAT score – which includes a relatively new writing test- represents the 57th percentile of test takes. Only 3.2% of Paterson test takers scored at or above the 57th percentile. The 1120 average SAT score for Paterson means that the average Paterson test taker falls into the 11th percentile.

I suspect that a large reason for the low SAT scores is keeping students in bilingual education too long. Recall what our changer wrote:

I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.

A Google hit for “bilingual education” at Paterson Public Schools website got 884 hits. Not a coincidence with “truncated pidgin,” I suspect.

Bilingual education should be a bridge- no more than a year or two. I suspect that students in Paterson are stuck in bilingual education for years and years, which will put them at a disadvantage for the SATs. And more.

The same semester I heard an Education professor inform our class that traditional total immersion methods for teaching ESL students “didn’t work.” I read about baseball great Manny Ramirez, then with the Indians, taking English classes because he didn’t speak English very well. He was 25 or so at the time, and had been in the US for around 13 years. And he didn’t speak English well, courtesy of years of “bilingual”[Spanish monolingual] education. Anyone who comes to the US at age 12 should have a good oral command of English within several years.

http://research.collegeboard.org/content/sat-data-tables

http://www.northjersey.com/news/latest-sat-results-number-of-paterson-college-ready-students-drops-to-19-1.1109193
http://tinyurl.com/mczvfr9 Google hits on “bilingual education” at Paterson Public Schools website

http://www.my9nj.com/story/27515692/only-19-paterson-students-ready-for-college