Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Of The Wilson Era

Thomas Sowell Hammers the Historians - Brian Domitrovic - Past & Present - Forbes: "You’ve got to love that “of the Wilson era.” Because if Leuchtenburg had written, “of Wilson,” he would have had to contend with that president’s determined efforts in his last two years in office to get rid of the huge progressivity in the tax code.

Heaven’s to Betsey, scholarship can’t be trusted. Elisions and evasions all around. Things will get better in the future, when all books are written with hyperlinks to sources, and the corner-cutting which people like Schlesinger and Leuchtenburg tried to get away with can be exposed immediately. At the end of his column, Sowell aptly observed that the episode he canvassed amounts to yet more evidence that the venerable tradition of scholarly peer review has become hopelessly hidebound."
This one really is a RTWT. And if only hyperlinks were enough to solve this Goebbels' knot that is strangling us. The ability of the populace to read would be the predicate for that to happen. Nothing over 140 characters, thk u.