DERBYSHIRE AWARD

Hereby innovating the natural balance to the Begala award for offensive, excessive, guilt-by-association conservatism: the Derbyshire Award for truly ugly right-wing hyperbole. The run-away favorite so far is John Derbyshire’s breath-taking attack on Chelsea Clinton in the current National Review Online. The sentence, “I hate Chelsea Clinton” appears in it, a statement supported by the fact that she supported her parents during the horrors of the Lewinsky scandal, that she was a few minutes late for a religious service at the National Cathedral, that she offended some Israeli diplomats by talking too much at a social gathering, and that she is studying economics at Oxford, an apparently overly-pecuniary interest for a self-professed liberal. You want to know why President Clinton managed to evade his authentic critics for so long? Because some of his inauthentic critics were as ugly and vile as this. I thought for a while that the piece was a spoof of Clinton-hating, and then, I realized it wasn’t. Here’s a typical passage: “Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past – I’m not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble -recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin’s penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an “enemy of the people”;. The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, “clan liability”. In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished “to the ninth degree”: that is, everyone in the offender’s own generation would be killed, and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed.” He doesn’t actually call for killing Chelsea, but the sentiment is one of the most truly sickening things I have read in a very long time. Attacking nepotism is one thing – although there is no evidence that Chelsea has benefited from it in any inappropriate way. This kind of material is simply beneath contempt. National Review owes its readers and Chelsea some sort of apology. It makes Mary Eberstadt’s neo-McCarthyism look positively enlightened.