Oh. My. God:
Yeah, this is from an old C-SPAN interview with the wingnut apparatchik Sowell -- but if you had even the slightest understanding of how these things are perceived outside of your small circle of rage-junkie extremist friends, wouldn't you want to keep it buried in the archives? Wouldn't you want to spare Sowell the embarrassment that will come with the exposure of this? Would you really want to shout from the housetops that Sowell said this about a law professor, for heaven's sake?
[BRIAN] 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.
And why the hell would you want to put your own name on this?
From Reagan through Rove, the right has been extraordinarily good at taking radical ideas and mashing them down into an easy-to-swallow pabulum that tastes like Mom's apple pie with eagles soaring overhead. At worst, the right has managed to make the center regard its extremism as mildly daring, or no worse than "politically incorrect." But recently the right has lost the skill to keep the low-info rubes and ignorant pundits on their side, or at least to keep them unhorrified. Limbaugh's lost it. The Republicans running for president, experiencing dry heaves at JFK speeches on church and state or expressing contentment at the notion that uninsured people will die untreated at the side of the road, have lost it. Even Breitbart had this skill, at least around the time of the ACORN story, but his heirs and assigns have lost it.
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