Mercury Rising

While Atrios was busy looking up one thing, he found another. And while that thing was indeed interesting, I found the epistle two posts down to be even more interesting:

David Brock wrote a letter to Creators Syndicate asking them about their decision to syndicate Samuel Francis's column. Here's their answer:

"Did I disagree with the column? Yes," responded Anthony Zurcher, a Creators editor who saw the Francis piece before it was syndicated. "Did I feel it was so reprehensible that it shouldn't have been sent out? No." In his Nov. 26 column, Francis decried the MNF spot not only for its implied nudity and implied sex, but for racial reasons. (Sheridan is white and Owens is black.) Francis wrote, among other things: "Breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon of cultural destruction because it means the dissolution of the cultural boundaries that define breeding and the family and, ultimately, the transmission and survival of the culture itself." The column prompted yesterday's letter from David Brock, president and CEO of Media Matters for America, an organization dedicated to "monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Brock, a former conservative, wrote Creators President Rick Newcombe to say "Creators' willingness to distribute such abhorrent views calls into question the syndicate's ethical and editorial standards. ... [W]e are looking forward to hearing your explanation as to why your syndicate judges Sam Francis to be an appropriate columnist for your roster." Zurcher said Creators distributes columnists from across the political spectrum, and "we don't tell them what to say." He noted that other Creators columnists, including Roland Martin, have discussed the MNF spot from a different perspective than Francis took. The syndicate editor acknowledged that Francis addressed "a very sensitive topic." But, "he's entitled to his opinion and David Brock is entitled to his opinion," said Zurcher. "I have a lot of respect for David Brock and what he does, and for media watchdog groups on both sides. They have an important role to play."

Yes, Francis is entitled to his opinion that "Breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon of cultural destruction." Creators is entitled to syndicate it. Newspapers are entitled to publish. But, expressing concerns about breaking "down the sexual barriers between the races" is not a broaching a "senstive topic," it's f---ing racism.

And yes, when Francis died not long afterward (barely three months after penning this piece for the openly racist VDARE website), nearly the whole of the "respectable" side (and much of the blatantly non-respectable, openly racist side) of the right-wing noise machine did not merely ignore the death of an embarrassing man, but stepped forth to send him off with the tenderest eulogies , eulogies that outdid even those they gave arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. Here's Joseph Sobran:

Along the way Sam wrote a few books, including a small study of his intellectual hero James Burnham. I don’t think Sam actually met Burnham, but I worked with Jim at National Review during his last years there and shared Sam’s admiration for him. The key to Sam’s thinking was Burnham’s book The Machiavellians, a study of power I also regard as seminal. Long before it became fashionable to mock the “politically correct,” Sam was attracted by Burnham’s pessimistic logic and total scorn for liberal optimism, especially in matters of race and ethnicity. Like Burnham, he had no desire to be accepted by liberals and stoically endured their ostracism. He was devoid of self-pity. It never crossed his mind to complain about the neglect he received, though it was a sort of organized neglect; his enemies were well aware of him, and they feared his pen. Sam was a familiar figure at conservative gatherings. He was an uncompromising Southern paleoconservative, with an abiding contempt for Lincoln and the liberal tradition. ...

"Southern conservative" = racist as hell, of course. Oh, and here's another good friend of Francis', just for grins. Just in case it hasn't been made utterly clear how bigoted the man was, do note that in 1995, he actually managed to get fired from the Washington Times -- not exactly a bastion of liberal or anti-bigoted thought -- for a column that attacked the Southern Baptist Convention for finally getting around to condemning slavery, 150 years after splitting from the main Baptist Convention rather than renounce slavery. Check this out:

Not until the Enlightenment of the 18th century did a bastardized version of Christian ethics condemn slavery. Today we know that version under the label of 'liberalism,' or its more extreme cousin communism.

Remember, this wasn't some obscure low-hit-count blogger or college professor. This was a darling of the movement.