I am old enough. Yes, the NAACP has been, for most of its existence, been a good, useful, and noble organization.
Liberal, yes. But liberal hasn't always been a synonym for moron. Not even the modern "statist" sort of liberal. It's only in the last twenty-five years or so that they've degenerated into their current state.
People like Jack Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy -- they were neither idiots like Pelosi and Biden or cynical manipulators like Reid and Obama. Heck, even Lyndon Johnson, the ultimate in traditional bare-knuckle dealmaking politician of the era, had a kind of liberal oomph that today's liberals lack. Many of their ideas were in hindsight pretty bad ones (IMO) , but these were thoughtful, reasonable men who simply did not have enough empirical evidence of the failure of welfare statism to realize that their ideas of social democracy were bad ones. They were still in an era where the Beveridge recommendations could be seen as the height of innovation for the common good. And they would have been appalled at the people now holding the liberal torch.
I'm not a liberal, not even of the Kennedy/Humphrey/McCarthy sort. I only voted lib in one fed election. (My first, when I voted for Gene McCarthy as a 3rd party candidate after almost killing him on Minnesota highways after picking him up at the Rochester airport.)
I blame Ted Kennedy, Tip O'Neill, Christopher Dodd, and Jesse Jackson for dumbing down liberal thinking. And partly I blame Reagan, because he reduced principled conservatism to "oh shucks" and "there you go again" and did it so successfully that both parties went with superficial populism and know-nothingism. Without them, idiots such as Pelosi and lightweights like Obama, and bad thinkers like Bernanke would never have made it to the national stage.
And of course the Ted Kennedys and Tip O'Neills and Chris Dodds would not have had that influence had the evil ideas of John Dewey and Andrew Carnegie about mass education taken control of the primary/secondary ed system.
But yes, gbguy20, the NAACP was once a respectable organization.
Originally Posted by: Wade