photo credit: Wikipedia
Here’s my question: Wh-a-a-a-t?!
You’re going to have to stick with me here as I try to parse this whole “Hillary is really a Satan worshipper” hoo-ha. Here’s the point I’m trying to make: We conservatives (please note the “we”) just make ourselves look foolish and waste a lot of time on these completely, absolutely, totally ridiculous rabbit trails that have nothing to do with the issues at hand. Just like the birther movement. (In my darkest moments of cynicism I think that whole theory was dreamed up by a brilliant Obama staffer. “Hey guys! I just thought of a way to make the conservatives look naive and gullible!” But alas no. We all know who the most prominent Birther of them all is.)
Okay. So Tuesday night Dr. Ben Carson, who by all accounts is a brilliant neurosurgeon, who had some good things to say about the amazing complexity of the human brain, then launched into a rant about Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis, which she wrote about the author of Rules for Radicals, community activist Saul Alinsky. Now, interestingly, this very same book has been used by the Tea Party as a handbook of strategies for getting out their ideas and combating the left using their own weapons, as they’d put it, but no one (so far) has accused them of worshipping Satan.
Let me first answer two questions just to clear the underbrush before I get back to my main point:
1. Did Saul Alinsky really dedicate his book to Lucifer?
No. On the “Personal Acknowledgements” page he dedicates the book to three people who seem to have been editors, one who was clearly his secretary, and “Irene,” who was his wife. Then there is a separate page with three quotations:
“Where there are no men, be thou a man.” Rabbi Hillel
“Let them call me a rebel and welcome. I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul. . . ” Thomas Paine
“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer. ” Saul Alinsky
So is Alinsky advocating that we all follow Lucifer? Well . . . it’s hard to make that case. I’m not in the business of trying to be an Alinsky booster, Heaven knows, but let’s at least be clear on what the man actually said. I would doubt very much that Alinsky even thought of himself as referring to a real character, which is not to say that we should take light and literary references to the Devil lightly. But to hear Carson and others tell it, Alinsky’s book should then be a handbook for Satan worship–and it’s nothing of the kind. (You can read the entire book in this online archive if you don’t believe me. Or you can check it out of the library, as I’ve done.)
2. Was Hillary Clinton (then Rodham) a starry-eyed acolyte of Alinsky’s?
No. Her thesis is actually quite critical of his ideas, and she felt that they were ultimately ineffective. She had interviewed Alinsky and written to him, and he offered her a job at an “activist training institute” after she graduated. But she ended her thesis with this statement:
“His offer of a place in the new Institute was tempting, but after spending a year trying to make sense out of his inconsistency, I need three years of legal rigor.”
Hardly a ringing endorsement, is it? By the way, the Clintons made a tactical error when they persuaded Wellesley College, Hillary’s alma mater, to deny public access to her thesis, thus feeding the conspiracy frenzy. It’s now in the public record, and never let it be said that I miss out on any opportunity to go diving into the internet. So, if you want to read all 92 pages of an earnest undergraduate thesis, by all means be my guest: “‘There Is Only the Fight’: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.“
On to the larger point: Why are the Republicans wasting prime-time TV on this nonsense? Certainly Dr. Carson was not the only, or even the main, speaker Tuesday night. But here’s the problem: when you make outrageous, easily-refuted claims in one area, you destroy your credibility in others. So when there are genuine concerns (and I would rate the whole e-mail controversy as being in this column), discerning people have to say, “Yes, but these people will say anything, so why should I believe them?”
I’ll end with a little shout-out to Ted Cruz, who got booed on the floor for his speech last night in which he refused to endorse Trump. What a great honor! Of course one must say that he’s probably being purely pragmatic. As I keep saying and saying, the only conservatives who will be left standing after this disastrous election will be the Trump holdouts. (I said that I’d hold my nose and vote for Cruz if he was nominated, even with his shenanigans on the Senate floor during that absurd all-hat-and-no-cattle 2013 government shutdown over Obamacare and even with his statement that there should be extra police patrols in “Muslin neighborhoods,” whatever those might be, and even though . . . he was born in a foreign country to an American mother and a foreign national father. Just a-sayin’!)