By: Carl Wicklander
Catching up on some editorials I came across an interesting one in the Telegraph by Timothy Stanley entitled Obama is Batman and Romney is The Thing. But what America really needs is Darth Vader. Admittedly Stanley's comparisons of 2012's presidential candidates with fictional superheroes interested me less than this line:
"It was a popular theory [in 2008] that the rebooted Batman franchise was an endorsement of Bush's war on terror, and a writer for the American Spectator naively predicted that his fellow countrymen would pick Batman over Spider-man [Obama] in the November vote. They did not."
Reading this line I thought to myself, "Self, what are the chances that the American Spectator writer he links to is Jeffrey Lord?"
For people in our circle Lord's name is something of a cuss word. Most of us, including myself, had probably never heard of him until he wrote a long, ignorant article in August of last year entitled Ron Paul and the Neoliberal Reeducation Campaign. The article was silly and easily refuted by historian Tom Woods in a memorable YouTube.
I've written about Lord a few times and linked to him unfavorably. He's one of my go-to-guys when I need a good example of dumb Republican thinking. But it turns out I had actually linked to Lord two months earlier when Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann was the toast of the town after winning the Iowa Straw Poll and was subsequently embarrassing herself with a string of gaffes. Writing a piece for this site entitled Bachmann's Gaffes Matter, I linked to Lord when I wanted to use an example of a dumb Republican defending Bachmann's assertion that actor John Wayne was born in Waterloo, Iowa. Of course, John Wayne never lived in Waterloo although serial killer John Wayne Gacy did. Although that didn't stop Lord from using the Spectacle blog to point out that John Wayne's parents got married in Waterloo and that that should be good enough.
Go ahead and read any of Lord's writing at the American Spectator. Most of them read at comic book levels and more often than not he seems to use his space to suck up to talkers Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin as if they were the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
I may be making the mistake of treating him as a serious writer or thinker, and even though Tim Stanley's Telegraph article isn't about Lord per se, it is a little vindicating to see someone else view him as fundamentally silly.
Carl Wicklander,
Regular Columnist, THL
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