“This was not my original instinct. I thought, and continue to believe, that Gay’s accusers and their allies were motivated more by conservative ideology and the desire to score points against the most elite of institutions than by any commitment to academic rigor. This was, and is, accompanied by no small dose of racism, and the conviction that a Black woman couldn’t possibly be qualified to lead Harvard.”
—Washington Post columnist and associate editor Ruth Marcus, a Harvard Law grad, in an opinion piece titled, “Harvard’s Claudine Gay should resign.”
Marcus, who has one of the thickest and damning dossiers of any pundit on Ethics Alarms, usually strikes me as a dim and predictable partisan analyst, but this is disgusting even by her bottom-of-the barrel standards.
You see what she’s doing there? She agrees with the conservatives who have called for Harvard president Claudine Gay to be fired or resign, but while in Marcus’s case, the conclusion is honorable, considered, rational and pure, conservatives who reached the exact same conclusion did so because of bias and bigotry.
The reality is close to the opposite. While it was screamingly apparent, not just in her Congressional testimony but in her entire, weak, feckless reactions to the Hamas terror attack and the anti-Jewish demonstrations that followed, that Gay was overwhelmed by the demands of her job and neither courageous, nor clear-minded nor ethical enough to navigate Harvard through the crisis it seeded with decades of woke indoctrination, the progressive elite of which Marcus is a member closed ranks, and either refused to see what was clear as the ice on old Spy Pond, or were incapable of doing so.
The president of UPenn, whose blathering to Congress about the “context” of “Kill the Jews” chants Gay virtually parroted word for word, was quickly and appropriately fired, as Gay should have been. Since Harvard presidents traditionally have impeccable scholarly credentials, critics searching for problems in her published works to force Harvard’s hand should have encountered nothing—but lo and behold, Gay’s scholarship was weak and her methods violated Harvard academic norms. Quite properly, the sleuths who discovered Gay’s plagiarism blew whistles…and Marcus calls them racists for it! She couldn’t mount the integrity to concede that conservatives were right about Gay. She had to impugn their motives, because the permanent strategy of the Axis of Unethical Conduct is to cry racism every time criticism is justly leveled at a screw-up-of-color.
And, of course, I’m only criticizing Ruth because I’m sexist.
Ethics Alarms 
When one must resort to evidence free attacks on another’s presumed bigoted beliefs it merely showcases the bigotry of the attacker because they lack the intellect to mount a legitimate counterpoint.
In a slightly more perfect world, I would prefer Gay, and other progressives, investigated and held accountable by progressives, just as I would prefer conservatives monitored and held accountable by other conservatives before they ever reach a national spotlight. Then, when opposition does its due diligence (which they should, racist or otherwise bigoted aside), they either find the dirty laundry that was missed, or they find the candidate squeaky clean. When additional dirty laundry is aired, the party putting forth the candidate better have a compelling reason for having missed or dismissed that dirty laundry.
But, to quote Susie from “Calvin and Hobbes”, as long as I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony.
However, in all fairness to progressive thought, it should be kept in mind that Gay’s qualifications, the only ones that mean anything to them, were being black and female. As those are the only reasons for her holding that position, to criticize her performance (merit means nothing to progressives) must be bigoted, because her actual performance is irrelevant. Thus it must be an oblique attack on her being black and female. Worse, to actually admit that she should be fired for plagiarism and her embarrassing handling of the anti-Semitism at Harvard would be a tacit admission that progressive cant is wrong. Or, it would be a coward’s caving in to those evil capitalists who think the measurement of success is actually turning a profit.
I could see progressives turning a particular Catholic argument against conservatives. In the view of the equal dignity before God that all humans share, and how that dignity does not depend on any works of ours, some Catholic circles have said pithily, “We’re human beings, not human doers.” Our intrinsic worth does not stem from anything that we do, but what we are, which is made in the image and likeness of God. Of course, Catholics also then point out passages about sheep and goats, and reaping what you sow, to point out that what we do certainly matters a lot, because we can violate our dignity and thus call down just condemnation on ourselves. But I could see progressives taking up the cant by saying, “why are you so fixated on what President Gay did? The important this is what she is. After all, we’re human beings, not human doers.”
>>>>Gay’s qualifications, the only ones that mean anything to them, were being black and female>>>>
That is an excellent point, and I hadn’t thought about it in those terms.
So, that thinking is that she is qualified for the office, and how could we think anything she’s done would be disqualifying?
Not a wise viewpoint, in my opinion, but I guess I can appreciate it a bit.
But of course employees are not hired to be, but to do work.
It’s become a standard Democratic Party talking point just like Hillary’s “right-wing conspiracy theory”. It’s so predictable that you want to criticize them for lack of originality.
But that’s for another day. I know you aren’t doing the traditional stuff this year, but I wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and a safe and happy New Year.
The plagiarized Dr. Carol Swain weighs in:
A Can Do Attitude IS MORE IMPORTANT Than Race Or Social Class
PWS
Is Dupicative Language a present day horse$#!t iteration of White Hispanic?
PWS