Tag: Gregg Jackson

Citizen Charles Foster Kane has returned to the blog wars after a long absence, and he’s immediately going after Gregg Jackson for an approving reference to “evangelical Christian field hands who bring in the harvest.”

Anyway, I scanned through Jackson’s column and was equally amused at Jackson’s reference to Mitt Romney as “by far the most left wing GOP presidential candidate in American history.”

Obviously Jackson is referring to the moderate, pre- presidential- campaign version of Romney. Even so, it’s not difficult for a sentient being to think of any number of Republican presidential candidates over the years who have been well to Romney’s left — even the Romney of 1994 or 2002. How about — well, gee, Rudy Giuliani? Remember him? Pro-choice, pro-gay rights, nice and soft on illegal immigration; you get the picture. And if I remember correctly, his presidential campaign wasn’t all that long ago.

In 1980, an obscure Republican congressman named John Anderson challenged Ronald Reagan for the nomination. He became such a liberal darling that, when he ran as an independent that fall, he helped Reagan by pulling votes away from the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter.

Are you paying attention, Gregg? Get this: Mitt Romney wasn’t even the most left-wing GOP presidential candidate in American history named Romney. That would have been his father, George, who ran in 1968 and who was a true progressive. Mitt even said his father marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He didn’t, but he could have.

The early front-runner in 1964 was Nelson Rockefeller, so liberal at that stage of his career that many observers thought he should become a Democrat.

Or how about Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and ’56? Alas, the divisive cultural issues of today were not on the table in the 1950s. But Ike stifled the Republican Party’s nascent right wing, consolidated the New Deal, enforced federally ordered school desegregation and warned against the power of the “military-industrial complex.”

Anyway, I come not to bury Gregg Jackson, which is ridiculously easy to do, but to praise Citizen Chuck on his return.

Gregg Jackson of Pundit Review recently posted a ponderous item comparing democracy in the United States to that in ancient Athens. Jackson’s so-called point is that we are deteriorating pretty much the way Athens did, as outlined by some 18th-century Scottish historian.

Well, folks, it doesn’t get much better than this: Charles Swift reports that Jackson’s entire item was based on an urban legend that’s been circulating around the Internet. So credulous was Jackson that he didn’t even bother to notice that he’d made it appear there are only 48 states.