The American Spectator

WL| 7.27.10 @ 11:45AM

Now Mr. Antle...ON THIS ONE YOU ARE EXACTLY CORRECT....

I can see it now....in the liberal press....headline...."Conservative Bloggers think beating black man to death is OK...as long as he isn't technically "lynched."

Nitpicking this sort of thing....is wildly dangerous.

Purple Lips| 7.27.10 @ 12:18PM

Au contraire. The word lynch, like many modern, cultural words has lost its potency. To say someone was lynched use to conjure images of a man, a mob, and a noose. Today could mean many things. I think it is far more accurate in this case to use a phrase such as "he was beaten to a bloody pulp for no other reason than his skin color." than to use the active verb to lynch. One carries a vivid, explicit image that is also politically charged (as it should be), while using the verb to lynch elicits nothing more than shrugs from a bystander who has been inudated for decades wwith words that are nothing more than empty, political hyperbole.

Angus Johnston| 7.27.10 @ 12:29PM

Hall, a black man in the custody of three white police officers in the Jim Crow south, was brutally murdered, in the town square, while passers-by looked on.

If you don't consider that a lynching, then with all due respect, you have no idea what a lynching is.

mantis| 7.27.10 @ 12:40PM

Even if you think the word "lynch" has lost its potency over the years, which is arguable, it doesn't change the fact that Lord was arguing that Hall's murder was not a lynching not because that word did not adequately describe the viciousness of the crime, but rather to imply that Hall's murder wasn't so bad as to be called a lynching.

Of course, that is neither here nor there, as Lord's purpose was not to arrive at a greater semantic understanding, but rather to dishonestly attack Sherrod, whom he sees as a political target. He had no intellectual purpose to his argument; it was crafted merely to discredit an "enemy."

That said, I'd like to bolster your argument that the word is less potent than it once was by linking to this list of examples of what the American Spectator defines as lynching:

The Ox-Bow Incident is a strangely appropriate book for our time, just as it was when totalitarianism writ large ruled much of the world. Today, it speaks to a rampant McCarthyism of the Left that routinely practices character assassination on its political adversaries. As I read the story I couldn't help but reflect on the lynch mob mentality present in our contemporary public life, especially in the mainstream media. Its recent Sarah Palin smear campaign tells us who they are.

--Bill Croke, "Hang 'Em High," American Spectator, July 21, 2009

Just last month Senate Democrats prided themselves on signing an anti-lynching resolution. John Kerry even said it was a crying shame the statement didn't have 100 co-sponsors. Liberal coverage of the resolution was universally supportive. So what happened? First opportunity these pure at heart forces had they set off to lynch Karl Rove, all because he supposedly had directed his gaze at one of their women, a hot Vanity Fair-certified blonde bombshell [Valerie Plame].

--Wlady Pleszczynski, "Operation Overrove," American Spectator, July 18, 2005

The media is staging a coup against Mr. Bush. They cannot impeach him because he hasn't done anything illegal. But they can endlessly tell us what a loser he is and how out of touch he is (and I mean ENDLESSLY) and how he's just a vestigial organ on the body politic right now.

... no one elected the media to anything. If we let them lynch the man we elected as President we are throwing out the Constitution with the war in Iraq. In the studios and newsrooms, there is a lynch mob at work.

--Ben Stein, "The Lynching of the President," American Spectator, January 25, 2007

What's behind the shameless demagoguery and character assassination being heaped on climate change "deniers"? ... Why has the green rhetoric escalated to lynch-mob proportions?

--Patrick J. Michaels, "Losing It," American Spectator, December 11, 2006

More at the link.

Alan Brooks| 7.27.10 @ 1:41PM

Lord should work at American Conservative, not AS.
Or is he already a ghostwriter for Buchanan?

Quartermaster| 7.27.10 @ 6:20PM

Antle and his bunch are trying to change the definition of lynching. Lynching certainly is a form of brutal murder, but the mob action that causes people, in their anonymity in the mob, to engage in things they normally would not, is absent in both the Hall and Till murders.

Lord is not saying it's OK to kill people just because it wasn't done by mob action. You characters are putting words in his mouth and are acting in just as poisonous a fashion as any left-wingnut. One must wonder if that's exactly what you are, versus what you claim to be.

TooManyJens| 7.27.10 @ 9:18PM

"Lord is not saying it's OK to kill people just because it wasn't done by mob action."

No, he's just saying it's OK to smear a political opponent by accusing her of lying because he doesn't know what a word means.

Jonathan| 8.2.10 @ 1:11PM

"Anonymity in the mob" has never been a requirement of a lynching. Plenty of lynchings were done completely openly, bragged about, and had prominent instigators. It is the extrajudicial killing that is most important in lynching, and the mob aspect merely shows crowd acceptance.

None of this changes the fact that Lord's whole purpose was not to correct Sherrod's definition of lynching, but to smear her with the claim that she is a bold-faced liar, which is an idiotic position to take.

Tim*| 7.27.10 @ 7:26PM

Ooooor , You could work at Commentary Magazine and impress your mates.

brooklynite| 7.27.10 @ 3:26PM

Why don't you explain to everyone what your username means, "Purple Lips"?

Robert A. George| 7.27.10 @ 12:59PM

Mr. Antle, thank you for setting your AS colleague straight. You are right, obviously, on the historical merits of the argument -- but also on the broader political/pragmatic assessment that even having this discussion does absolutely no favors to conservatives.

Alan Brooks| 7.27.10 @ 1:36PM

But it is a service to Stormfront, David Duke, and their sort.

Jeffrey Lord| 7.27.10 @ 3:02PM

Robert....

Hellow, again. These are not MY standards. Please acknowledge?

Robert A. George| 7.27.10 @ 3:29PM

Jeff, I acknowledged this in an earlier reply to your response to your critics. You are being profoundly intellectually dishonest. Your initial post was entitled "Sherrod Story False," under the premise that, what she exaggerated the situation because her cousin wasn't lynched when seen through the artful definition of lynching derived by one Supreme Court decision? As I said in my earlier response, with that logic, I expect you to start writing articles admonishing pro-lifers from calling abortion murder since the Supreme Court refuses to call it murder, so how can it be seen as a taking of an innocent life? Shirley Sherrod is, obviously, a liberal Democrat. No duh! She's an appointee of this administration. That doesn't give you as a conservative -- regardless of the problems our side might have with issues like the Arizona lawsuit -- the right to re-write American history and say up-is-down and, uh, black-is-white. Lynching was a real evil in this country: It was about more than just hanging; and it was about more than just "how many people really constitute a mob?" It was an extra-judicial way to keep blacks in control and under perpetual fear of Jim Crow power. For what reason you are trying to minimize the horror of that reality, I just don't understand.

Jeffrey Lord| 7.27.10 @ 4:06PM

Robert...

That is just crazy. I write about race from time to time because I take it very, very seriously. I am trying to maximize the horror - why in the world do you think I included such an explicit description in the column? This business of buzzing talking heads yelling racist....I know something about what this means. Link below.

http://spectator.org/archives/.....an-why-sot

Quartermaster| 7.27.10 @ 6:24PM

Mr. Lord, they are doing you a big favor by demonstrating what lynching really is, in figurative terms. They are engaging in character assassination in a mob action. They are being very dishonest intellectually and are buying in to the very sort of thing the left wants them to buy into.

Too many people that style themselves conservatives have not the slightest idea what it means, and they demonstrate a very low level of intellectual maturity in matters such as this. They desperately need to grow up, or they will find themselves in the same situation they find themselves now. in political exile because the people they support are actually left-wingers masquerading as conservatives.

Nicole| 7.27.10 @ 11:31PM

WSo let me get this straignt: Ms. Sherriod was lying by calling the brutal extra-judicial murder of her relative a lynching because the mob only consisted of 3 people. But OTOH, the word "lynch" is perfectly appropriate to describe criticism of such bizarre hair-splitting?

Please, do yourself and your party a favor, and PUT DOWN THE CRACK PIPE!

Missy| 7.27.10 @ 1:25PM

I think the point that is being lost in this is that Jeff Lord said that Shirley Sherrod was LYING, that the story she told was "completely and totally untrue". Someone who doesn't read the entire article will not realize he is really just hair-splitting over the term "lynch", they will think she made up the story about her MURDERED family member (you won't take issue with the use of the word "murder" will you, Mr. Lord?). This is as bad as Breitbart's selective editing of the speech and it is abysmal "reporting". Disgusting.

Jeffrey Lord| 7.27.10 @ 2:09PM

Jim my friend....

I confess I am continually astonished at the notion that the lynching standards are MY standards. I simply said what the Court said...the color of law business comes straight from the decision, written by William O. Douglas and signed onto by Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, Chief Justice Stone. Wiley Rutledge later made the fifth vote.

What exasperates here is the notion that "my" standards may or may not apply to Till etc etc. They are not MY standards. They are the Court's standard's in a specific case issued in May of 1945.

I specifically published the content of the opinion so readers could see the exact wording of the original decision. I found the decision, and the description included in it revolting. I believed then - and now - that on such a terribly serious issue people needed to see just how bad this was.

The notion that I somehow get tagged with defending this disgraceful piece of jurisprudence - when in fact I am simply stating what it said and how it clashes with Ms. Sherrod's description - is just amazing to me. Strike that. It is bizarre.

Alice through the looking glass.

David in NY| 7.27.10 @ 4:12PM

Christ on a cracker. You are dumb as a rock. Kindly attend first year law school and learn a little about the Screws case, which was about the elements of the crime of violating someone's civil rights, and had nothing to do with the concept of lynching. Nothing to do with it. You read a case worse than a lot of first year law students I've knows. And you still don't have a clue what "color of law" means.

But I mean, if you want to be so obtuse or meanspirited as to invite parody -- “Well, sure, he was beaten to death by cops, but who could be so despicable as to call such a thing lynching?” -- I guess no one can stop you.

David in NY| 7.27.10 @ 5:09PM

Sorry, I was so gobsmacked by this silly argument that I did not fully reply to it here. My comment lower down at 4:55 p.m. explains the fallacies in Lord's "I blame it on the Supreme Court" position. Suffice to say, it is at least doubly fallacious.

jeff| 7.27.10 @ 11:12PM

Ok, I think I'm an idiot. Wasn't the point of J. Lord accusing Mrs. Charade of using the term "lynching" that she was trying to make it a black/white issue? That's how I took it. Seems simple. Seems accurate. Why all the #$%! posts about all this other bs? Free J. Lord!!

Festus| 7.27.10 @ 11:40PM

Yes, just imagine: trying to turn the fatal beating of a black man by police in the Jim Crow South into a black/white issue. I mean just because the state refused to charge them with a crime should tell you that it was no big deal, and certainly doesn't rise to the level of lynching.

As we all know, "lynching" refers only to the sharp questioning of conservative candidates for the supreme court.

Seamus| 7.30.10 @ 7:47PM

This is arrant nonsense. First of all, "the Court" didn't articulate any standards at all, because there was no opinion of the Court in the Screws case. There was only a judgment, and a plurality opinion by Justice Douglas, in which three of his colleagues joined. A fifth justice, Justice Rutledge, wrote an opinion concurring in the result. Those two opinions found different grounds for arriving at a judgment of reversal of Screws's conviction. Douglas's plurality opinion (which you mistake for an opinion of the Court) didn't consider the facts of the killing of Bobby Hall and determine that they didn't measure up to the standards governing lynching. Instead, it determined that the conviction of Screws could not stand because the jury had not been instructed that specific intent to violate a federal right was an essential element of the crime of which the defendant was accused--a crime, by the way, which was not "lynching," but rather deprivation of rights guaranteed by the constitution or laws of the United States. (The law under which Screws was convicted is still on the statute books, and is now found at 18 U.S.C. § 242.) The plurality opinion nowhere discussed what "standards" would govern "lynching," if lynching were a federal offense, much less hold that killing by a group larger than three people, using hanging as the means of death, was necessary for a particular killing to constitute a "lynching." That simply wasn't the issue before the Court; what the Court said is simply irrelevant to the question of whether what happened to Mr. Hall was in fact a lynching.

Angus Johnston| 7.27.10 @ 2:15PM

It's not at all clear which of the Court's standards you're referring to here, Mr. Lord. The opinion to which you refer never uses the word "lynching," so how can it be cited as an authority for the definition of that word?

The court's decision in the case was indeed racist and reprehensible, but their description of Hall's murder makes it clear that it was a lynching as the term was defined in Dyer's bill.

Jeffrey Lord| 7.27.10 @ 2:29PM

Angus...

"The opinion to which you refer never uses the word "lynching,"

Bingo!!!! You win the prize. The point, exactly. A decision that never uses the word lynching cannot be about lynching!

The only thing that counts is what the Court says the definition is. Not anything else.

Progress.

Angus Johnston| 7.27.10 @ 2:34PM

Wait ... what?

Seriously, what?

Because the Supreme Court didn't call Hall's murder a lynching, it couldn't have been a lynching? What kind of logic is that?

There was no crime of lynching under federal law in 1945. The question of whether Hall was lynched wasn't before the Court. They had no reason to consider it, and so they didn't. They didn't say he was lynched, and they didn't say he wasn't lynched. Their decision gives us no guidance whatsoever as to whether he was lynched, because it doesn't address that question.

I seriously don't understand what point you think you're making here, and I'm frankly beginning to suspect that I'm being gaslighted.

Jeffrey Lord| 7.27.10 @ 2:59PM

"There was no crime of lynching under federal law in 1945."

So how could Ms. Sherrod have said with such assurance her relative was lynched?

Angus Johnston| 7.27.10 @ 3:04PM

So now it's your contention that there were NO lynchings in America during the Jim Crow era? That's what you're going with? That because lynching wasn't a crime, it didn't exist?

Ouch.

TooManyJens| 7.27.10 @ 3:08PM

Oh my god.

Do you think that a woman whose husband forced her to have sex in 1968 is lying if she says she was raped?

southpaw| 7.27.10 @ 3:43PM

Jeff,

Because even though lynching wasn't a crime, there was still lynching.

M. Mori| 7.27.10 @ 4:09PM

That may be the most idiotic argument I've ever seen in print.
Mr. Lord, you should never again in this life be paid to write opinion, analysis or a freaking restaurant review.
She could say he was lynched because white men murdered him in public, in broad daylight, with no risk of legal consequence. That is exactly what "lynching" was.
Your increasingly bizarre obsession with semantics as a way of minimizing or dismissing her story is an insult to every thinking person unfortunate enough to drag their eyeballs over it. Every day AS lets you breathe their virtual air is a stain on their reputation (note: I understand there is no "air" in the virtual world of cyberspace. The obsessively nitpicky should understand that's what's called a "metaphor". Sorry if I confused you).

David in NY| 7.27.10 @ 5:54PM

"may be the most idiotic argument I've ever seen in print"

Certainly the most idiotic I've seen.

A. Marx| 7.28.10 @ 12:21AM

The only possible competitors are other arguments he's made in this thread.

David in NY| 7.27.10 @ 4:21PM

What? All the killings of Blacks before 1945 weren't lynchings???? Because there was no crime called lynching???? Jesus.

You are even dumber than a rock! People knew what a lynching was before 1945 -- it's not a legal concept, it's a fucking word in the English language. Which goes back long before that.

I give you the OED --"The practice of inflicting summary punishment upon an offender, by a self-constituted court armed with no legal authority; it is now limited to the summary execution of one charged with some flagrant offence." The usage goes back to the 1800's: 1836 D. CROCKETT Exploits & Adventures Texas vii. 103 This is what we call Lynching in Natchez. 1837 Southern Lit. Messenger III. 648 The outrages of the borderers, the frontier law of ‘regulation’ or ‘lynching’, which is common to new countries all over the world, are ascribed to slavery. 1839 Niles' Reg. 14 Dec. 256/1 Horrible lynching. 1901 N. Amer. Rev. Feb. 281 Lynchings in the South are mainly caused by the peculiar nature of the crimes for which lynching is a penalty.
attrib. 1879 SIR G. CAMPBELL White & Black 171 Several lynching cases of atrocity occured before I had been many weeks in the States. 1884 SIR L. H. GRIFFIN Gt. Repub. 148 He was taken to the scene of the crime by a lynching party. 1900 Congress Rec. 31 Jan. 1369/1 They have sometimes had ‘lynching bees’,..they have sometimes lynched men for murder, for arson, for rape. 1903 C. T. BRADY Bishop ix. 172, I don't join no more lynchin'-bees. 1943 Christian Cent. 1 Dec. 1/2 Evidently there is a widespread and growing fear lest the United Nations..let loose in Europe what might turn out to be little less than a gigantic lynching bee.

Lynching isn't just a legal term, dope, it's an act, the act of inflicting the summary punishment of death. Get it?

Slim Tyranny| 7.28.10 @ 4:30PM

Wow. FTW. Jeffrey Lord, you're a stupid, stupid man.

Seamus| 7.30.10 @ 7:48PM

Because a lynching doesn't have to be a federal offense to be a lynching.

Seamus| 7.30.10 @ 7:56PM

This makes as much sense as to claim that, before Congress enacted the law (18 U.S.C. §§2341-2346) making torture a federal offense, if a case had arisen (let's say in the District of Columbia, where Congress unquestionably has the authority to legislate) where a perp had kidnapped a victim and tormented him with blowtorches, and later been prosecuted under federal laws regarding assault (18 U.S.C. § 113), and an appeal went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court's opinion didn't use the word "torture," but found that the defendant's conviction had to be reversed because of a defect in the instructions to the jury, that would establish that the victim had not, in fact been tortured. In fact, it would establish no such thing. It wouldn't even establish that the Court thought he hadn't been tortured. Because the question of whether or not he had been tortured wasn't before the court. What would have been before the Court was whether there was legal error in the process by which the defendant was convicted of assault.

brooklynite| 7.27.10 @ 3:29PM

Pathetic.

mantis| 7.27.10 @ 2:38PM

I seriously don't understand what point you think you're making here, and I'm frankly beginning to suspect that I'm being gaslighted.

He's a bit confused as the dirt he's shoveling out of the hole keeps falling back into his eyes.

TTT| 7.27.10 @ 3:02PM

Mr. Lord,

It was a lynching. You KNOW it was a lynching. You just can't admit you were wrong.

I am not calling you racist and I honestly don't think you are, per se. But I do think you, and a great deal of the conservative commentariat, are utterly clueless and tone-deaf and naive about racial issues and don't have the self-awareness necessary to educate yourself. I am reminded of NR's Byron York saying that if you ignore black people, Obama was never really popular. If you tried to explain to York why what he said was really dumb and clueless and borderline offensive, I imagine the result would be the same sort of gaping incredulity and additional hole-digging that Mr. Lord has employed here.

TooManyJens| 7.27.10 @ 3:19PM

That pretty much was the result, yeah.

Jeffrey Lord| 7.27.10 @ 3:05PM

"You KNOW it was a lynching."

We are talking a Supreme Court case here. It is irrelevant what I or anyone outside of the Court thinks! Hello?

TooManyJens| 7.27.10 @ 3:12PM

No, we're talking about why you called Shirley Sherrod a liar. You're just hanging your slander on the narrow thread of a Supreme Court case.

Angus Johnston| 7.27.10 @ 3:15PM

Okay, clearly you're playing some sort of absurdist game here. (Assuming that this "Jeffrey Lord" is really the author of the original piece, and not some sort of imposter.)

But I'd like to remind you what we're talking about here. We're talking about a man being beaten to death by three police officers in a public square, police officers who were confident that they would face no legal consequences for their actions.

We're talking about an America in which a man could murder another man on a whim, in broad daylight, and walk away free. We're talking about a country where this was allowed to continue for decade after decade.

And when a woman told the story -- the TRUE story -- of this happening to a member of her family, you called her a liar. And now that your false claim has been rejected by your own colleagues, you're turning the whole discussion into a bizarre, macabre joke.

A man was beaten to death by police in a public square. In the United States of America. His family had no legal recourse.

And you think it's funny. You're making jokes.

Jeffrey Lord| 7.28.10 @ 8:17AM

Angus...

Bluntly put? That's disgusting.

Edward| 7.28.10 @ 8:47AM

Yes. You are.

Angus Johnston| 7.28.10 @ 3:54PM

What's disgusting is your cavalier attitude toward this subject. That's what's disgusting.

http://studentactivism.net/201.....g-matters/

A. Marx| 7.28.10 @ 9:17AM

Now play fair. Just because he IS a joke doesn't mean he's MAKING jokes.

Crusty Dem| 7.27.10 @ 3:56PM

Absurd. If the Supreme Court specifically said it was not a lynching, that wouldn't mean anything because, as you acknowledge, the Court at the time was racist. But since the Supreme Court had nothing to say on the matter, that means it wasn't a lynching?

Is that your reasoning?

Because that may be the dumbest argument I've ever heard.

David in NY| 7.27.10 @ 4:26PM

You, you idiot, are talking about a supreme court case. Shirley Sherrod was talking about a despicable act, the act of lynching someone -- that is of inflicting summary execution upon them. She was speaking the English language in a proper way, which you seem incapable of doing. If you want to defend your pathetic position, you've got to explain why that wasn't a reasonable English usage -- the Screws case wasn't defining the reach of the English language, which was what Ms. Sherrod was using. I can't believe you got a college degree!

Jim| 7.27.10 @ 3:53PM

"Shirley Sherrod said her fair share of crazy things in her full, unedited speech"

To what is Antle referring? In defending her, are you also obligated to throw her under the bus for the sake of appearing "fair and balanced"? It is irresponsible to make the accusation and offer not even a shred of substance to support the accusation.

Tina Trent| 7.27.10 @ 4:27PM

Lynching refers to extralegal action, but not merely "extralegal" in the sense that all crime is contrary to law -- it was action condoned in varying ways by authorities and taken on behalf of a group or a (more or less approving) community, or excused by the community after to act. This is the definition used by anti-lynching activists like Ida B. Wells, who set out to document these crimes (and Wells did not flinch from acknowledging that many who were lynched were violent criminals, black and white -- it was lynching in lieu of legal process that she protested, to great effect). James Byrd was not lynched. He was the victim of a crime, one of 17,000 people killed in the U.S. in 1998. His murderers were punished, not condoned or excused. Hate crime activists like Eric Holder, who wish to value some lives over others to achieve certain political goals, insist his death was worse than those other 17,000 because he was "lynched". But it was not; he was not lynched; he was not even the only murder victim dragged behind a truck, or strung from a fence, or a tree around that time (as, ironically, was the mother of one of Matthew Shepard's killers, whose body was found not far from where Shepard was killed -- her murder was extremely similar to Shepard's, but hate crime activists abhor equating the two, especially because it would open the door to "counting" the many hundreds of thousands of women victims of random murder and rape as hate crime victims). To call any of these contemporary crimes lynching is as wrong as saying that only certain methods of extralegal killing counted as a lynching in 1905. The closest thing we've had to a lynching in recent years is the murders committed by O.J. Simpson -- because they were virtually celebrated by his jurors, who helped him escape justice. And that's not particularly close.

Nate| 7.27.10 @ 4:51PM

I'm heartened to see conservatives trying to catch up to the rest of the country (to the rest of the century, I almost said).

Welcome!

This is post-60s United States of America.

You'll recall that last time your heads were outside of your asses, black people in many southern states could not so much as vote.

Black activists -- including preachers, including women -- were intimidated, beaten, raped, and murdered.

Such extrajudicial violence -- as you all are now establishing among yourselves -- was and is called "lynching."

It was ugly.

Unlike the "racism" many of you are eager to find in the black community, this racism was endorsed and enforced at nearly every level of society -- the police, the judges, the legislators, the business community, and so on.

And while I'm sure the New Black Panther party, having succeeded in "intimidating" millions of white voters, voters who still to this day tremble in fear of black militants banging down their doors and hauling them off to prisons, if you study some history you'll be surprised to learn that as harrowing as that ordeal was for you and your fellow white victims, the system of apartheid, the oppression and exploitation of blacks that followed 300 years of chattel slavery, was actually worse.

I know it's hard to imagine that black suffering could be as real and as painful as the suffering you felt, for instance, when Sonya Sotomayor said a "wise Latina" judge might be wiser than a white male judge, but it was.

So first, let me say, You're doing some fine work here! Keep it up!

If you have any questions about the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in the south, go to your nearest tax payer funded, big-government LIBRARY and check out some BOOKS on the subject. Your LIBRARIAN will be happy to help you, and remember: that's what her big liberal tax payer financed salary pays her to do. So take advantage!

VOCABULARY WORDS:

Lynching
Library
Book
Librarian

Angus Johnston| 7.27.10 @ 4:53PM

I've just been reading the Court decision Lord has been going on about, and it bears no relationship to his characterizations. Rather than being a 5-4 endorsement of racism, it is in fact a 6-3 embrace of the federal government's power to act against lynchings like Hall's.

More on my own blog tonight.

Jeffrey Lord| 7.27.10 @ 7:11PM

I can't wait.

Please: Who are the six? Who are the three?
Cites please.

southpaw| 7.27.10 @ 7:38PM

Jeff, let me give you a tip.

You need to spend some time working with dictionaries, really getting familiar with the ins and outs of American English.

Then, you should read some history. This one is good, and I also recommend this one.

Supreme court cases and, more generally, reasoning are clearly out of your league.

Angus Johnston| 7.27.10 @ 7:54PM

I've been out and around all afternoon, but I'll have the post up at http://studentactivism.net tonight.

Angus Johnston| 7.27.10 @ 10:52PM

Here you go, Jeff. All is revealed:

http://studentactivism.net/2010/07/27/screws-v-us/

Jeffrey Lord| 7.28.10 @ 8:25AM

Angus...

Good morning.

I must have missed it. Again, please, the names of the six justices and the three justices in the 6-3 decision you found. Bear in mind I have the decision in front of me, as I did when I wrote the column.

" fact a 6-3 embrace of the federal " is the snippedt from above. So, a 6-3 "embrace according to you. I'm not familiar with the term. I thought the Court issued decisions, not embraces. But I'm wrong on these thins, you know. Again, the names and cites. I read your blog. It's not there. Why not? You've spent days sayingI'm an ignoramus. So please put up.

You said it was 6-3. I said it was a 5-4 decision. You seem to be shy all of a sudden.

Angus Johnston| 7.28.10 @ 8:50AM

Did you really read the post all the way through? Seems unlikely, but okay.

Here's the deal. As I wrote in the post, "the decision in Screws wasn’t 5-4. It was 5-1-3. More specifically, it was a 4-2-3 decision that turned into a 5-1-3 decision by a tactical vote by one of the dissenters."

And again: "There were two issues facing the Court in Screws: whether the law that had been used to convict the three men was constitutional, and whether the defendants had received a fair trial. The court fractured into three camps over these two questions."

And again: "Two justices, Wiley Rutledge and Frank Murphy, answered “yes” to both. The use of Section 20 in the case was constitutionally valid, the two said, and the defendants had been properly convicted."

And again: "On the other end of the bench, three justices – Owen Roberts, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert Jackson – argued that Section 20 was unconstitutional and that its use had deprived the defendants of a fair trial."

And again: "That left four justices in the middle. Those four — including Hugo Black, who Lord identifies as the villain of the story — contended that the law in question was constitutional, and could be constitutionally applied to cases such as this one, in which 'those who take the law into their own hands … deprive a prisoner of the trial which due process of law guarantees him.' They flatly rejected the claim that federal prosecution 'encroach[ed] upon state authority or relieve[d] the state from its responsibility for punishing state offenses.' They did, however, find a significant technical flaw in the prosecution of this particular case."

Angus Johnston| 7.28.10 @ 8:54AM

In short: Six justices held that federal law could be used to prosecute mobs such as the one that murdered Robert Hall for civil rights violations, and three held that they could not. Hugo Black was among the six.

Angus Johnston| 7.28.10 @ 9:22AM

And of course these are just brief snippets of the post. I really do encourage you to read the whole thing:

http://studentactivism.net/2010/07/27/screws-v-us/

David in NY| 7.28.10 @ 10:35AM

Jeff, the Screws case is just one of those red herrings that conservatives so often drag across the trail when they've seriously fucked up. The real truth is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with your mean and slanderous allegation that Shirley Sherrod lied in saying that Hall was lynched. You have now crept away from your insupportable view that she was incorrect in using the word "lynch" to apply to a vicious beating by law officers to a supposed crime -- since, as a matter of English usage, "lynch" does apply to that situation. What you are doing now is so senseless I can hardly believe it -- claiming that the Supreme Court's failure to use the word "lynch" in a case that had nothing to do with the concept of lyching somehow makes Sherrod a liar. This entire line of argument is, quite simply, irrelevant. As others have mentioned, moreover, that argument is the stupidest, not to mention most mean-spirited, claim ever made in a publication with pretensions to seriousness. You have long since left the bounds of reason behind.

TooManyJens| 7.28.10 @ 12:17PM

Mr. Lord, you would serve yourself well by letting down the defenses, admitting that you may have gotten this wrong, and reading Mr. Johnston's excellent post with a clear and open mind.

David in NY| 7.27.10 @ 4:55PM

I can't believe this. Lord apparently thinks that if the Supreme Court hasn't defined a word, it doesn't really exist.

Look, think about Jeff Skilling's case. He had a case in the Supreme Court. Now, suppose I say that Skilling was a "ratfucker," which he was. I gather that Lord's position would be that he's not a ratfucker, and I was lying, because the Supreme Court didn't use that word in its decision. But Lord would be wrong for at least two reasons: 1) the word ratfucker is an English word which applies to Skilling, so I was not lying and 2) the Supreme Court had no reason to consider whether Skilling was a ratfucker, so it's opinion is entirely irrelevant on that question.

I can't believe that someone who does not understand this ever graduated from high school, much less college.

Quartermaster| 7.27.10 @ 6:32PM

Give up Jeff. This bunch is too much a bunch of children to see they are dishonest and wrong. They accuse you of not being willing to admit you are wrong, then turn around and pile on anyway, all the time being not just wrong, but dishonestly so.

Sherrod, has no way of being able to say her ancestor was murdered or lynched. She told something as fact she has no idea if it is true or not. She told it to gain influence, sympathy, and praise. She is a liar. Period. End of story. grow up all of you. and this includes Antle as well, who should know better, as all of you should.

Crusty Dem| 7.27.10 @ 7:21PM

And it is so because you said so? I imagine Mr. Lord (if you are not he) will take great comfort from your words of thoughtless, ignorant, blind support.

Dixie Pixie| 7.27.10 @ 11:23PM

I will say it again.

Bravo – QuarterMaster – Bravo

End Of Line.........

ex| 7.28.10 @ 12:20AM

Sherrod has no way of saying if her ancestor was murdered or lynched? You have got to be kidding. Do you think the Supreme Court documents are a fairy tale? Supreme court Justice Murphy was one of the justices who decided the case and he refers to it as a lynching.
I guess when you are trying to defend the indefensible you have to clutch at straws.

ax41| 7.27.10 @ 7:16PM

" Sherrod has no way of being able to say her ancestor was murdered or lynched ".
Ms. Sherrod was not an eyewitness to the event ; her relative died before she was born . Does that preclude her being able to know anything about the event ?
Are you contending , Sir , that Mr. Hall was not killed in the way described in the Supreme Court decision ?Or are you challenging Ms. Sherrod's characterization of the event ?

Tim*| 7.27.10 @ 7:42PM

The Obama Administration has even failed as a Post Racial Presidency .

Apparently , David Axelrod's expertise at Playing The Race Card isn't gonna helping much to turn the conversation away from The "It's The Economy Stupid " Midterm Elections .

The Tea Party Rebellion Escalates .

We Can See November From Our Houses .

Dixie Pixie| 7.27.10 @ 8:55PM

Bravo – QuarterMaster – Bravo

On a earlier thread, I tried using facts and logic to prove the argument between conservatives on whether Sherrod lied was a absurd controversy as Democrats always lie about such situations for political effect. To my regret, I got snookered into argument about the exact definition of the term “Lynching” and whether the term applied to the – Screws vs United States – case. Most regrettable.

Who knew such a simple matter of a definition of a term would cause such a hullabaloo.
But I forgot Liberals do not use language as a description of reality.

Conservatives as a rule are trained to use words as a exact as possible description of reality.
After all when one expects to be held to the terms of a contract the exact meanings of the words of a contract are important. After all if a business contract was written in the ancient Greek poetic format a expensive lawsuit will result. In the conservative world it is critical that all party's agree on the exact meanings of words.

Liberals as a general rule treat the words of a language as brushstrokes in a artwork created to generate an emotional response. In the liberal world, the exact meanings of a word are not relevant as it is the capability of words for emotional manipulation that is important. That is why the definition of a word can drastically differ according to the situation.

A prime example is the average politician contention “ words only mean what I say they mean and for only as long is I say them”. A Liberal words always have a limited lifespan.

The capability for emotional manipulation is the critical factor in liberal arguments not the words themselves. That is why liberals hate to be held accountable for their words.

In short to a conservative, words are stone and to a liberal, words are emotive air.

The whole Jeffery Lord controversy is a ridiculous confusion of the different viewpoints of Liberals and Conservatives use of the English Language. A subject that is worth a future article.

gil mann| 7.27.10 @ 9:35PM

the different viewpoints of Liberals and Conservatives use of the English Language

Yeah, like how liberals tend not to adopt race-baiting pseuds like "Dixie Pixie" and whatnot

Dixie Pixie| 7.27.10 @ 9:55PM

At the risk of throwing more fuel on the fire, consider the following.

Jeffery Lord won the argument on a narrow technical point,
but it is Shirley Sherrod who wins the choice of senior governmental jobs.

Gil Mann – The handle “Yankee Pixie” is free for you to use at your convenience.

My handle was suggested by another post writer when I pointed out that all Southerners are born convected of the charge of “Racism” in the eyes of most Liberals. I also pointed out a person or group can not be excommunicated twice for the same charge. So fire away at will as I don’t have to prove anything to you, or you to me.

ex| 7.28.10 @ 12:14AM

Jeffery Lord did not win the argument at all. Even other columnists on this site are denouncing him. I don't see any other columnist coming to his defense. His arguments are not logical and his conclusion are strained. Mr Lord even has trouble defending his own argument he is unable to cite a single source for his definition of lynching. The definition he cites in fact contradicts his argument and if he bothered to do a little more research he would have found out that in his notes one of the deciding justices, Justice Murphy, referred to Halls death as a lynching. http://mediamatters.org/blog/201007270028

What a silly argument to make that liberal use words differently from conservatives. You give no evidence just conjecture and supposition. You might as well say that conservatives walk with more confidence than liberal do.
No wonder you think that Mr. Lord won the argument on a technical point.

Dixie Pixie| 7.28.10 @ 2:27AM

Greetings EL and Crusty Dem

I have no further desire to pour more more fuel on the fire other than to state I stand by my logic.
But do not cry for Shirley Sherrod as she walked away with a 6 figure income.

As for my observation that Conservatives and Liberals use the English language differently you can either accept or reject my observations at your pleasure.

Crusty Dem| 7.28.10 @ 12:41AM

Jeffrey Lord won the argument? Wow, you definitely don't have anything else to prove, that little bit of idiocy proves it all...

Bob K.| 7.28.10 @ 9:12AM

I blame the degraded commentary herein on Mr. Regnery, Wlady and RETJr. for allowing this comment section to be debased in this manner.

The next time they are on a cruise with their peers lamenting the perilous state of the Conservative Movement and how to reverse it I humbly suggest that they take some time out to discuss how this forum can be monitored to encourage more civil, if not more intelligent, discussion.

TooManyJens| 7.28.10 @ 9:58AM

If they're going to continue to feature profoundly intellectually dishonest arguments on the front page, I wouldn't hold out much hope for the comments.

Crust| 7.28.10 @ 10:02AM

Lynch is tripling down.

In this interview with TPM, he claims:
[Sherrod] used a phrase -- the lynching phrase, however she phrased it there -- that's just designed to inflame people.Let's say you buy Lord's hair splitting claim that it's technically wrong to say that Hall was lynched (a stretch, but let's go with it). How is that less inflammatory that describing the horrific details of what happened?

Lord goes on to say -- without apparent irony -- "[t]here's no reason in the world that we can't be getting the black vote." Way to lead by example.

Crust| 7.28.10 @ 10:19AM

I meant Lord is tripling down of course. (Also the blockquote tags didn't work for me.)

A. Marx| 7.28.10 @ 11:20AM

Honestly I think he's just happy people are paying attention to him. I'm happy too; his continued spiraling defenses of his original indefensible argument are the most hilarious reading I've had in months. Win-win.

DRed| 7.28.10 @ 12:21PM

His arguments are really delightfully stupid. The 'Jeffrey Lord' commenting here can't actually be the Jeffrey Lord employed by the American Spectator, can it? Is he actually so stupid as to argue that a man could not have been lynched in 1945 because it wasn't a federal crime?

A. Marx| 7.28.10 @ 1:24PM

Sure he is. As incredibly stupid as that argument is it isn't significantly stupider than the original column.

mantis| 7.28.10 @ 12:22PM

[t]here's no reason in the world that we can't be getting the black vote."

I can name one reason (of many): Jeffrey Lord.

Eric Damon| 7.28.10 @ 11:25AM

For anyone who wants to see just how badly Jeffrey Lord misrepresented this case, take a look at the blog post by Angus Johnston. I like Jeff Lord's work generally, but he really flubbed it this time in order to make his points about the current administration. Even that noted bigot Hugo Black ruled that the Screws prosecution was constitutional, just that the judge issued flawed instructions and remanded it for a new trial based on that.

james wilson| 7.28.10 @ 12:13PM

A lynching is an illegal and wrongful hanging by exited perverts. It is not a beating, a burning, or a beheading. Daniel Pearl was not lynched. He was beheaded.
This does not define lynching down. It defines lynching.

TooManyJens| 7.28.10 @ 12:40PM

"A lynching is an illegal and wrongful hanging by exited perverts."

As delightful as that bit of mental imagery ("exited perverts") is, you are incorrect.

DRed| 7.28.10 @ 12:16PM

"And to me, what she did here was that equivalent. She used a phrase -- the lynching phrase, however she phrased it there -- that's just designed to inflame people."

This is unbelievable. How, then, should one refer to a lynching?

A. Marx| 7.28.10 @ 2:28PM

We certainly wouldn't want anybody to be inflamed by three white police officers beating the life out of a handcuffed black man on the steps of a courthouse.

DRed| 7.28.10 @ 12:30PM

Lord says he doesn't want Sherrod to lose her job, and urges his fellow conservatives to work toward winning over black voters. "Get out there and engage on race," Lord said. "There's no reason in the world that we can't be getting the black vote."

hahahahahahahahaha

Sparky Satori| 7.28.10 @ 7:01PM

Mommy, why does the dumb man keep opening his mouth?

It's not working.