New in PJ Media:
Monday being Independence Day, the Leftist media is full of the expectedly ridiculous hot takes, but none are more overheated or ridiculous than that of Salon’s Matthew Rozsa, who on Sunday published an article with the headline “How Joe Biden is like America’s founding fathers,” and, as if aware of how hair-pullingly absurd this is, added: “— and no, I’m not kidding.” Rosza, who is not just a Salon staff wonk but actually has an MA in History from Rutgers and is working on his Ph.D. in History at Lehigh University, should have been kidding, for if sanity ever returns to American academia (a big if, I know), his spin on Old Joe and the Founding Fathers could make Salon’s house historian an object of derision and ridicule for decades to come.
To be sure, there are similarities between Biden and the Founders, and we had some fun in the PJM lounge thinking about what they are. Matt Margolis said, “He’s as old as they would be…,” and Jeff Reynolds offered: “He’s like Mt. Rushmore, in that his head is filled with rock.” Now, come on, fellas, young Rosza is deadly serious. He even leads off his article by fantasizing about his eventual vindication, long in the future, when people have forgotten just how much of a galloping disaster Joe Biden’s presidency really was. Rosza tells the story of a young academic who “wrote a dissertation arguing that founding fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had taken economic positions that, by modern standards, were highly progressive.” Dismissed at first, this historian “retroactively vindicated” in his dotage, although Rosza doesn’t say how, which is a shame, as it would have been nice to know how someone pulled off portraying these Founders as big-government socialists.
Even in sketching out the analogy of his eventual vindication, Rosza slips on a banana peel, writing: “Far be it from me to imply that academics are just as inclined to stifle radical voices as everyone else in America with actual power.” Ah yes, as everyone knows, American academia is loaded with reactionaries who stifle “progressives” any way they can! But Rosza is clearly given to fantasy, as when he finally gets to his point, he states it in all its bald and unapologetic ludicrousness. It turns out his analogy of the eventually vindicated academic was not about himself, but about Old Joe: “If Joe Biden’s presidency continues on its current track, he’ll be remembered…as a visionary, at least on certain domestic policy issues, who was largely ignored by his peers.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
