Daley doofus

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Helpfully Illustrating my earlier point about there being lots of journalists who aren’t insightful enough to bother to read is Janet Daley, who falls in love with a Abraham Lincoln quote that happens to chime with her political beliefs. It goes a little bit like this.

“You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot get a mickle by muckling a mackle.”

OK, I made that last bit up.

Janet Luurrrrves the quote:

“this wonderful piece of oratory was not required reading when I was at school in the United States - perhaps because its political message is so much more contentious…  …Lincoln was speaking before the Marxist revolutions and the rise of the socialist economic doctrines which have become European political orthodoxy.. ..It is clear that what he describes is a much older paternalistic tendency which simply found a new guise in the left wing policies of the twentieth century. “

Sadly for Janet, the reason it wasn’t on her reading list at school was because Lincoln never said it.

As the first page of a Google search would have informed her, the quote is fake.  In fact it took me all of ten minutes to discover that the quote is originally from a pamphlet by a conservative priest called William Boeckter, who wrote it in 1916, well after the emergence of Marxism, which kind of makes Janet’s whole point well, utterly wrong.

Janet Daley is firmly on the wrong side of the Bell Curve of Journalism.

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