Don’t Know Much About History Another fake Rubio scandal: James Taranto
http://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-know-much-about-history-1443029159
“He’s rarely been in the headlines, but Marco Rubio has had a fantastic couple of months,” David Leonhardt of the New York Times observed Monday afternoon on Twitter. “Partly because of the headlines,” we rejoined, with a link to our June 9 column, which discussed the Times’s feeble efforts to find scandal in Rubio’s wife’s traffic tickets and in the Rubio family’s past financial struggles.
The Times can’t be blamed for the latest, even feebler effort to gin up a Rubio scandal—an effort so ridiculous that Leonhardt and his colleagues should be proud of getting scooped. It concerns a Rubio fund-raising event held yesterday at the Highland Park, Texas, home of Harlan Crow.
Who is Harlan Crow? The Times archives help provide context. “Donald Trump he is not,” the paper reported in 1996, meaning that Crow is publicity-shy: “He agreed to discuss his operations in detail only after two years of requests.” The gist of that piece was that in the late 1980s, Crow salvaged the real-estate empire built by his father, Trammell Crow, which was “imperiled by perhaps the worst real estate crash of modern times.” Crow père, who died in 2009 at 94, had “spent four decades becoming the nation’s leading real estate developer,” according to the Times.
Harlan Crow’s interests are not limited to real estate. He also collects art and historic memorabilia, as the Dallas Morning News reported last year:
The library wing added to the 1917 house nine years ago is jaw-dropping. Floor-to-ceiling stacks of books—two levels of gleaming, dark cabinetry filled with rare titles—surround a visitor. . . .
Protected in cabinets, documents’ signatures read Ponce de Leon, Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, George Washington, Robert E. Lee and all the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Paintings on the walls bear the surnames of some of art history’s masters, including Peale, Renoir and Monet, as well as the likes of Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler and Dwight Eisenhower. All told, 8,500 books and manuscripts are housed here.
And there is much, much more to peer at—wonder at—inside the 2005 addition. Crow knows his holdings well; they are not decorative accessories but valuable objects that ooze with history.
The occasion of that article was Crow and his wife’s decision “to open their Highland Park home and grounds to ticket holders for the April 12 Park Cities Historic and Preservation Society tour.”
Then there’s the sculpture garden:
Near the house are several works that Crow considers monuments to human achievement. Lady Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s only female prime minister, stands larger than life outside a window. Across from her is a large, square sculpture of Churchill, peering over a bank of azaleas. His likeness bears a hint of a smile, as if he were playing hide-and-seek.
These are two people Crow immensely admires. They, therefore, have special spots near the house. The others, the evildoers, are below the house’s sight lines, standing in wait to impart their raft of grim history lessons.
“Most of the statues are Communists,” Crow says. The Dallas native acquired the relics one by one as politics in Europe and Asia changed. When a dictator and his henchmen fell out of favor, the next ruler—or the people—symbolically toppled their likenesses in city squares and outside government buildings.
Among them are likenesses of Lenin, Stalin, Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu, Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito and East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht, who ordered the erection of the Berlin Wall. A 2003 Times profile added that “there is the bronze bust of Fidel Castro made by Lev Kerbel, a leading Socialist Realist sculptor.”
“I’m a child of the Cold War,” Crow, now 65, told the Morning News last year. “You know who Tito is, but the next generation won’t. I don’t think Lenin will ever be forgotten, but I am trying to preserve that as a part of our history.” The paper notes that Crow’s collection includes an unspecified “piece honoring Che Guevara” and quotes Crow: “You see all these kids wearing Che T-shirts. I don’t think they know who he is. He is a killer, a murderer.”
So what’s the scandal? Here’s yesterday’s Politico report:
Debbie Wasserman Schultz wants Marco Rubio to cancel his presidential fundraiser Tuesday evening at the home of a real estate investor who has collected art from Adolf Hitler and who also owns a signed copy of “Mein Kampf.” There is “really no excuse,” she said in a statement released through the Democratic National Committee, calling the event “tasteless.”
The Florida lawmaker and DNC chairwoman remarked that Rubio is “adding insult to injury” by holding the event at the home of Harlan Crow and his wife Kathy in the tony Dallas suburb of Highland Park, Texas, on the eve of Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day.
“Holding an event in a house featuring the artwork and signed autobiography of a man who dedicated his life to extinguishing the Jewish people is the height of insensitivity and indifference. There’s really no excuse for such a gross act of disrespect. Mr. Rubio, who by the way, represents a sizable Jewish population in our home state of Florida, should cancel this tasteless fundraiser,” she continued.
If you’re just learning of Crow from Politico, you have to read to paragraph 6 before you learn that his collection includes a vast amount of non-Nazi memorabilia and that he has “said the intent of his collection was not to celebrate repressive regimes but rather to preserve history.”
In attempting to score points against Rubio, then, Wasserman Schultz perpetrates an outrageous smear against a private citizen. She falsely implies that Crow is some sort of Nazi sympathizer, when in fact Nazi material doesn’t even constitute the bulk of his collection.
Further, while there are certainly people who acquire Nazi memorabilia for invidious reasons, there are also plenty of collections that focus on the Nazi period with a clear-eyed sense of right and wrong and a purpose identical to Crow’s—to ensure that history is not forgotten. Hasn’t Wasserman Schultz ever visited a Holocaust museum?
The Democratic attack was too much even for BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski who tweeted that “the DNC thinks you’re stupid.” Then again, this all reminded us of the incident in July in which, as the Washington Free Beacon put it, Wasserman Schultz “was left momentarily speechless”:
“What is the difference between a Democrat and a socialist?” MSNBC host Chris Matthews asked Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D., Fla.).
“Uh,” Wasserman-Schultz responded.
“I used to think there was a big difference,” Matthews said. “What do you think?”
“The difference between—the real question is what’s the difference between being a Democrat and being a Republican,” Wasserman-Schultz said, attempting to dodge the question.
Matthews didn’t let her off easily.
“Yeah but what’s the big difference between being a Democrat and being a socialist?” Matthews said. “You’re the chairwoman of the Democratic Party. Tell me the difference between you and a socialist.”
“The relevant debate that we’ll be having over the course of this campaign is what’s the difference between being a Democrat and being a Republican,” Wasserman-Schultz repeated.
A few days later, as Mediaite noted, she couldn’t or wouldn’t answer the same question when NBC’s Chuck Todd put it to her on “Meet the Press.” The natural assumption is that she is cynically playing dumb. But we wouldn’t rule out the possibility that she isn’t so cynical.
Comments are closed.
