It whitesplains. So. Dang. Much: “As [Glenn] Beck correctly emphasizes, Wilson was a key architect of modern American government. But that fact was missing from last week’s protests, which focused only upon Wilson’s miserable record on race.”  See, it doesn’t matter that Woodrow Wilson was a vicious racist who genuinely believed that black people were inferior to white people. It doesn’t matter that Woodrow Wilson deliberately segregated the civil service, simply to keep black people from getting good, white-collar jobs. It doesn’t matter that Woodrow Wilson thought that the wrong side won the Civil War.  It doesn’t even matter that Woodrow Wilson once had the sheer unmitigated gall to tell a black leader to his face “Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen. If your organization goes out and tells the colored people of the country that it is a humiliation, they will so regard it, but if you do not tell them so, and regard it rather as a benefit, they will regard it the same. The only harm that will come will be if you cause them to think it is a humiliation.”

Nah, none of that matters. What matters is that Politico author [Jonathan – fixed. ML]Zimmerman really, really grooves on the idea of Big Government.  Which, by the way, includes that entire welfare-regulatory-state-in-a-china-shop paradigm that has done more to wreck black family life than anything that Woodrow Wilson could have ever hoped and dreamed to have done. But that apparently doesn’t matter, either. The important thing is that the liberals get to have the feels. Excuse me: that the smug, white liberals get to have the smug, white feels.

Note, by the way, that I am being kind and generous in my assessment here.  A more cynical or mean-spirited man might suggest that the real reason Mr. Zimmerman is so upset about Woodrow Wilson being belatedly – really, it’s long overdue that this happened – being dragged through the mud is because Mr. Zimmerman kind of doesn’t see the problem with what Wilson did in the first place.  But that’s a horrible suggestion to make, which is why I don’t actually suggest it, of course.  Nah, Zimmerman – and by extrapolation, Politico – just doesn’t see the need to call Woodrow Wilson or the Progressive movement on their horrible history.  Which isn’t much better, but I have to work with what they give me.

Moe Lane

PS: If there was one good thing about World War II, it’s that it shoved Woodrow Wilson’s eugenic theories right back into the disease-ridden fever swamps of depravity where such things belong.  Which is cold comfort to the eugenicists’ victims, of course. Again, I don’t get to order the world to suit my personal tastes.