Ta-Nehisi Coates! Did you read it?
Lord Almighty, he Digbied all over the New York Times Op-Ed page.
He Huntered the place.
David Brooks and Thomas Friedman are circulating a petition saying "get that m'f'ing 'guest columnist' out of there, he's making us look AWFUL."
That Obama video talking about how "heh-heh, what would HuffPo say about Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation? Heh-heh." is now reduced to sawdust.
The speechwriter intern who came up with the idea has been reassigned to KP duty.
Oh, dear. Gray Lady, you have to stop inviting in summer guest columnists. First Katha Pollitt, now this. You're making the regulars look like weak tea by comparison.
Ta-Nehisi Coates! THANK YOU!
(OK, you want a taste? Here:)
Keeping up the theme, the administration recently released a video of Mr. Obama waxing scornfully at the expense of his softheaded allies. The audience was an ideological cross-section of college students, no doubt picked to emphasize Mr. Obama’s ever open mind. The president invoked Abraham Lincoln, noting that the Emancipation Proclamation was a compromise that freed only the slaves in rebel territory. “Can you imagine how The Huffington Post would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. Think about it, ‘Lincoln sells out slaves.’ ”
Rendering the hallowed Proclamation as a seminal act of hippy-punching is understandably attractive to the Very Serious People of Washington. But, in Mr. Obama’s case, it also evinces a narrow politicocentric view of democracy that holds that the first duty of a loyal opposition is to stay on message and fall in line.
In fact, many of Lincoln’s most vociferous critics welcomed the Proclamation. Wendell Phillips, who once derided Lincoln as “the slave-hound of Illinois,” claimed the Proclamation as “the people’s triumph.” Frederick Douglass, who helped wage a primary campaign against the president in 1864 and once charged that Lincoln was “a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred,” hailed the Proclamation as “the greatest event of our nation’s history.”
(And then ... it just gets better!)