Los Angeles Times and New York Magazine blast conservative values.
Some on the Left continue to believe conservatives want to burn books.
When Congressional Quarterly columnist Craig Crawford, guest-hosting MSNBC’s “Connected Coast to Coast,” June 3, suggested that the May 30 Human Events list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries” might somehow be a first step toward banning books, Don Devine—a professor at Bellevue University and one of the “judges” who voted on creating the Human Events list—pleasantly pointed out that far from trying to ban the listed books, he actually taught many of them in his own classes.
Crawford’s confusion, however, was representative of one liberal stream of “thought” in the flood of commentary on the Human Events list that last week swept across the Internet. A recent Google check of “Ten Most Harmful Books” turned up 301,000 web citations.
Beyond the blogosphere, representatives of both the Los Angeles and New York liberal establishments felt compelled to register their outrage at the list. Vexed that works such as those of sexologist Alfred Kinsey and anti-traditional-family feminist Betty Friedan would be included on a list that also included Marx, Hitler and Mao, New Republic senior editor Jonathan Chait said in a column in the Los Angeles Times that the list “offers a fair window into the dementia of contemporary conservative thinking.”
Kinsey and Friedan, presumably, offer a fair window into the wholesomeness of contemporary liberal thinking.
New York Magazine placed the Human Events list in the “highbrow” but “despicable” quadrant of its “Approval Matrix”—just below a Turkish official’s act of detaining a teenage boy for reading a banned poet (see 'matrix' below).
Liberals beware! The book list was merely a warm up. Next month Human Events will publish our list of the “Ten Most Harmful Government Programs.”
These we really do want to ban.
(Click image below to view larger version.)
Thanks to NYMetro.com for letting us use their image.
