Category Archives for Politics

Things are Heating Up! Al’s Got a Gal Pal!

When last Miss wrote about Al Gore, he was hoping to rekindle his college romance with Jenny Cavilleri, having just split with his long-suffering wife Tipper.

Apparently things with Jenny didn’t work out, because the Washington Post is reporting that the former vice president has a new squeeze, California cutie one Elizabeth Keadle.

Wisely, the new couple are taking their romance step-by-step. According to the Post, their first big date was a closely chaperoned affair, combining romance with saving the world. They spent it with an

eclectic group of experts and VIPs (Richard Branson, singer Jason Mraz, actor Tommy Lee Jones) on a trip to Antarctica in January to raise awareness of climate change.

I don’t know about you, but the thought of Al Gore making out on an iceberg with a 50ish divorcee raises my gorge, but not much else.

Native Antarctic seal ROFLIAO at the lovebirds.


Ms. Keadle is reputedly a big, not mega, donor to politics and causes near and dear to Gore’s heart. An environmentalist herself, she lives in earth-friendly Rancho Santa Fe, California, an enclave last in the news when Heaven’s Gate cult members, nattily attired in matching jogging suits and Nikes, were carried off to an alien spaceship. Rancho Santa Fe also distinguishes itself being having a population that’s 90% white, in a state that is overall 40% white. No wonder the loving couple chose Antartica for their dream date. All that whiteness felt just like home!

Eco-friendly living in Rancho Santa Fe; the lights are on but nobody’s home.


Rancho Santa Fe is also a global-warmist’s ideal community. How do I know this? By checking out the homes for sale there. According to Realtor.com 247 are currently on the market. Of that 247, a mere 89% have central air-conditioning and a trivial 70% have hot tubs. Extrapolate from that, and you see how Ms. Keadle must live the spartan life of the dedicated environmentalist she is reported to be.

I wish the couple well. Seems like they were made for each other.

Hey, Elizabeth: pucker up!

Do as I Say, While I Do What I Want: Hypocrisy in the Land of Caps, Gowns, and Headdresses, Part I

This charming portrait of Elizabeth Warren has a place of honor in her Cambridge wigwam.


Faithful readers of CMM know one topic that gives Miss endless delight—and blog fodder—is the double standards college and university faculty use, usually to benchmark their worth against the drones who do staff work on their campuses, but sometimes simply when the Great Spirit moves them. The news brings such a bumper crop of stories that I must share them with you in “Do As I Say, While I Do What I Want,” Parts I and II.

Part I starts with the reigning queen of the academic double standard, Massachusetts’ own Professor-Politician Elizabeth Herring Warren Mann. Professor Warren/Mrs. Mann/Princess Ticklefeather has been much in the public eye lately as the most recent victim of recovered oppression syndrome (ROS) when it was revealed that she is (or maybe not) .03% Cherokee.* Like her noble ancestors the blond, blue-eyed redskin has endured the bows and arrows of prejudice simply because of her complexion. So it is not surprising to learn that she gratefully took a puff from the Affirmative Action peace pipe offered by the Great White Fathers at Harvard Law School, where, surprisingly, she was hired to teach rather than make rain.
Click here for a look at Professor Warren's students responding to her claims of minority status.
We all know that Elizabeth Warren is Heap Big Hypocrite. But what of the GWF’s at the Law School, whose contributions to the defense of affirmative action policies, not to mention the substance of such policies, at colleges and universities across this great albeit stolen land of ours have been instrumental in shaping the landscape of higher education for decades? The magnitude of hypocrisy achieved by these academics is beyond astonishing. While the rest of the academy struggles mightily first to qualify minority students to join the professoriate, then to hire faculty of color, who understandably come at a premium many institutions can ill afford, the good folks at Harvard decide that Princess Paleface qualifies as an “affirmative action” hire. Voila! I can hear them now, “Faculty of color? Elizabeth is kind of pinkish, when she remembers her blusher.” No muss. No fuss. No minorities.

I wonder what the Great White Fathers will think when they get wind of Professor Warren’s plans for casino gambling on Brattle Street. Who knows? Maybe they’ll do the right thing and vote for Scott Brown.

No longer able to live the white man’s lie at Harvard, Princess Paleface makes tracks for the Charles River, where her blood brothers will aid in her escape.


*Professor Warren’s ROS took a turn for the worse when she discovered that she is simultaneously suffering from ROS Type II, Recovered Oppressors Syndrome.

OCR Establishes College Admissions Standards for Fourth Graders

I have resolutely stayed out of the government-is-too-big-for-its-britches debate that is raging during the hot stove run-up to the 2012 election. Public higher education is so overly administered that there is nothing really new to add to this conversation. But a recent ruling by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) concerning the University of Utah’s admissions policies has changed my mind.

From The Salt Lake Times on-line edition:

The University of Utah is revising its admissions policy for some older students in the wake of a civil-rights complaint filed by a learning-disabled applicant who was denied admission because he read and wrote at only a fourth-grade level.

You read that right. That is, if you read at a level above the fourth grade. The OCR found in favor of an applicant to UU whose reading and writing skills had not reached the middle-school level. The Times story continues:

the OCR last year required the U. to revise its admissions policies to “reflect legitimate criteria for student qualifications that do not discriminate on the basis of disability.” The agreement also requires the U. to train its personnel in the policies and submit those training materials for OCR approval.

The university complied by spelling out the courses completed and GPA earned an applicant must achieve in order to gain admission. And by admitting an individual it had determined could not meet the demands of a post-secondary curriculum. The applicant, it turns out, did not enroll. He didn’t even sue, although the OCR said he could. What he lacked in reading and writing ability he made up for in common sense. Forget college–the OCR should hire him.

Applicants boning up for the OCR "Send a Fourth Grader to College" program.


What larger purpose was served here? How was an individual’s rights or the public’s interest protected by forcing the University of Utah to state the obvious: you cannot succeed in college if you do not possess a modicum of literacy.

The consequences, though, are easy to see: 1) more work for school-bus chasing lawyers; 2) more paper for university administrators to push; 3) more employment opportunities at the OCR, where somebody–presumably with a better-than-fourth-grade reading level–is going to pore over those “training materials.”

Higher education is not a “right.” It is an opportunity. One to be cherished, honored even. And the best way to do that is by providing open access to it for men and women whose intellectual capacities can sustain reading and understanding polysyllabic words, compound-complex sentences, and dense paragraphs. In other words, the average collegiate text on the benefits of diversity.

Professor Melissa Harris-Perry Explains How Going from Bad to Worse Equals Racism. Sort of.

There is nothing like a good double-take to get the weekend off to a great start. And so it was on Saturday morning as I clicked from Real Clear Politics to “Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama,” an essay appearing in the October 10, 2011 edition of The Nation. The essay is written by Melissa Harris-Perry, professor of political science at Tulane University, where she is founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. Have a look at her impressive credentials on the Tulane website.

In the classroom of Professor Harris-Perry, it is anything but brief.


Professor Harris-Perry’s essay begins, “Electoral racism in its most naked, egregious and aggressive form is the unwillingness of white Americans to vote for a black candidate regardless of the candidate’s qualifications, ideology or party.” Professor Harris-Perry goes on to explain that such cancerous racism appears to have gone into remission in the body politic. But, she hastens to point out, all is still not well.

Because President Obama’s re-election in 2012 is looking less and less like a shoo-in, Professor Harris-Perry has diagnosed a new and equally terrifying form of racism to explain the president’s dimming prospects:

the tendency of white liberals to hold African-American leaders to a higher standard than their white counterparts. If old-fashioned electoral racism is the absolute unwillingness to vote for a black candidate, then liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.

Let’s, shall we, examine the symptoms that have led Dr. Harris-Perry to her diagnosis. “The relevant comparison here,” she says, “is with the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.” Fair enough. According to Harris-Perry, “liberal electoral racism,” as practiced by progressive white voters, gives Clinton a pass while holding Obama “to a higher standard”:

  • “Today many progressives complain that Obama’s healthcare reform was inadequate because it did not include a public option; but Clinton failed to pass any kind of meaningful healthcare reform whatsoever.”
  •   “Others argue that Obama has been slow to push for equal rights for gay Americans; but it was Clinton who established the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy Obama helped repeal.”
  •   “Still others are angry about appalling unemployment rates for black Americans; but while overall unemployment was lower under Clinton, black unemployment was double that of whites during his term, as it is now.”

Please remind yourself, as I have had to do repeatedly while attempting to fathom Harris-Perry’s arguments, that the author of them holds a) a PhD; b) a tenured faculty position at a top-tier university; and c) a directorship of a university institute. So busy was Harris-Perry collecting her academic credentials that somewhere along the way she forgot how to make a lucid argument.

“Progressives” are “complaining” about Obama care. So what? Does that mean they’ll pull the lever come November 2012 for somebody else? Does Harris-Perry really believe that complaining equals racism? Can this possibly be true? Has it possibly not occurred to Professor Harris-Perry that those same whining progressives might’ve griped about Clinton’s healthcare debacle? And what does the fact that Clinton’s scheme for healthcare reform never became law twenty years ago have to do with a flawed plan in the here-and-now, anyway?

“Others” (unnamed, unsourced, uncounted) take the president to task for his supposed failure to advance gay rights, even though Clinton “established the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy Obama helped repeal.” While I understand that political scientists such as Harris-Perry are not historians and therefore not necessarily familiar with the record, I do feel inclined to point out that both Clinton’s and Obama’s polls on the public’s attitude toward gays in the military coincide with their respective decisions—in 1993, 55% of the public, according to a Time-CNN poll, disapproved of gays serving in the military; by 2010, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, 72% of adult Americans were favor of gays serving in the military.

As for her observation that people are rightfully disturbed at the appallingly high unemployment rates among blacks during Obama’s administration, she neglects to mention that unemployment—for blacks, Hispanics and whites—fell steadily during the Clinton administration, but has grown steadily under Obama’s. And what about her suspect implication that it’s OK to be critical of black unemployment numbers under a white president, but not under a black’s? Hmmm…methinks the pot…oh, never mind.

America's first and second black presidents, side by side.

Can YOU tell which one's the pot and which one's the kettle?


Harris-Perry concludes her essay with one last distortion of the truth:

President Obama has experienced a swift and steep decline in support among white Americans—from 61 percent in 2009 to 33 percent now. I believe much of that decline can be attributed to their disappointment that choosing a black man for president did not prove to be salvific for them or the nation. His record is, at the very least, comparable to that of President Clinton, who was enthusiastically re-elected. The 2012 election is a test of whether Obama will be held to standards never before imposed on an incumbent. If he is, it may be possible to read that result as the triumph of a more subtle form of racism.

Rodney's PhD is from the School Of Hard Knocks. Literally

Rodney King speaks to Perry-Harris and racist white progressives everywhere.

Obama’s record—as indeed any president’s sitting or otherwise—is indeed “comparable” to Clinton’s, and, in Obama’s case, suffers from the comparison. Badly. And were I a student in one of Professor Harris-Perry’s classes, I would ask her how it is possible that a president elected with less than a majority, as President Clinton was for his second term, can be said to have retained his office courtesy of an “enthusiastic” electorate.

There is a saying about lies, damn lies, and statistics. There are also good faculty, incompetent faculty, and faculty ideologues for whom the truth is an inconvenience easily set to one side. Do you wonder what kind of faculty member Professor Harris-Perry is?

Note to readers: In addition to Harris-Perry’s essay for The Nation, sources for this essay include the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Presidential Responsiveness and Public Policy-Making by Jeffrey E. Cohen.

Paul Krugman, Jimmy Hoffa, Barack Obama: Paragons of Cultural Decline?

Much ink has been spilled over the last few weeks about Junior (“Take Them Out”) Hoffa’s death threat to those of the Republican persuasion. That it comes as a surprise to anyone that a union goon should talk like a union goon is as baffling to as it is unsurprising that President Obama, with his eloquent silence, condones Hoffa’s lethal orders to the rank-and-file. We live in a time in which man’s political nature, red in tooth and claw, reveals just how debased our culture has become.

Paying their union dues.

But Jimmy told me to, and Barry said it was OK.


In the sub-basement of our decline resides the New York Times‘s Paul Krugman, who has chosen the tenth anniversary of September 11 to add his voice to the many who have spoken out in memory and reflection of that terrible day:

The Years of Shame
Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?
Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.
What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te [sic] atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.
A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

Paul Krugman speaks out.


Where I come from, week-long NPR special reports on a single topic, week-long programming on myriad broadcast and cable channels, and 21 (i.e., every single one) of the Huffington Post’s “Featured Blog Posts” hardly add up to a “subdued” recognition of September 11. Perhaps, however, in the dark reaches of societal decay where Krugman hangs his hat, news of these commemorations has yet to penetrate.

When Mayor Giuliani raced to Ground Zero and gave New Yorkers a glimmer of hope that their city would not be torn asunder, I sincerely doubt he was thinking about cash. When George Bush assured the recovery workers that he—and the world—heard them he was not working the crowd at a political fundraiser.

Whatever poison has tainted the memory of September 11 leaks from the pustules bubbling up from the caldera Krugman calls home. Safely ensconced in his cesspool, Krugman spews his bile, insulting his readers by claiming they “know” he speaks the truth—then with the courage of one who hides in the cover in darkness takes his final shot: “I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.”

And this is where we live today. In a country that tolerates a president who thinks it’s OK to make death threats to US citizens. In a country that gives a platform to a writer who tells one lie after another then taunts readers for their lack of recourse.

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

Entrance to Krugman's condo.

Home, sweet home

Standard & Poor’s Recalculates Obama’s Grade Point Average

Way to go, Barack! An "A" for Attendance!


So Standard & Poor’s has downgraded our bond rating from AAA to AA+. In the language of academics this means that the US’s GPA has dropped from 4.0 to 3.98, still worthy of summa cum laude but no longer the best of the best—and a bitter pill to swallow for the smartest kid in the room who heretofore had never gotten a grade lower than 100%. Yes, Mr. President, I am talking about you.

Few faculty would see a difference between the student whose grade point average was 4.0 and the one who achieved a 3.98. Many faculty, in truth, scoff at the whole idea of grades, dismissing them as impediments to learning, inaccurate indicators of a student’s performance because they measure achievement as opposed to effort. And so it will likely be with President Obama: the history-making decline in America’s credit-worthiness merely an assessment of his achievement in office, but no indication at all of how hard he has been working on our behalf. Not to worry, Mr. President, you still get AAA for effort.

You’ve been working so very hard, how can you not deserve top honors? True, your most herculean effort has been to talk out of both sides of your mouth about rich folks who pay no taxes so that they have plenty of dough to fill your campaign coffers. Or maybe it’s your relentless attempts to shave a point or two off your handicap. What matters is that you have been trying.

Learning is complicated. By its very nature it destroys as much as it creates. If you don’t believe me, just look at the economy our president has destroyed and the mess he has created.

Two years into office, President Obama is in his sophomore slump, impatient for Commencement two years hence and dreaming all the while about getting admitted to graduate school in 2012. If he is, just think about what he’ll try then.

Laurie Essig: I’m a Professor and a Prevaricator

Call the EPA! There’s something polluting the water of Otter Creek, and it’s affecting the behavior of Middlebury College’s faculty. The evidence is indisputable: first ethics expert Kateri Carmola is busted for embezzlement; next professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies Laurie Essig boldly ventures into the realm of political commentary, a field she amply demonstrates is well outside her area of scholarly expertise.

Or maybe merely demonstrates lack of scholarly expertise in general. The author of American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and the Quest for Perfection lards her June 14 Chronicle of Higher Education “Brainstorm” essay, “I’m a Husband and a Mother,” with inaccuracies and distortions so profound one can only conclude she’s imbibed of a substance that has destroyed her ability to adhere to the most basic principles of scholarly practice.

Take, for example, how Professor Essig characterizes Michelle Bachman’s autobiographical statement at the beginning of the June 13 Republican candidate’s NH debate: the congresswoman, Essig writes, “introduced herself as a mother and a foster parent,” and compare it to what Bachman actually said:

Hi, my name is Michelle Bachmann. I’m a former federal tax litigation attorney. I’m a businesswoman. We started our own successful company. I’m also a member of the United States Congress. I’m a wife of 33 years. I’ve had five children, and we are the proud foster parents of 23 great children.

What Essig has written, some may argue, is perfectly true; Bachman, after all, did mention her kids in the final sentence of her seven-sentence statement. But it is scarily reminiscent of the bad old days before the second wave of feminism:

Essig's dismissive description of Michelle Bachmann is a reminder that women still have a long way to go.

Some may also argue that what Essig has written is defensible, since she is extracting from Bachman’s entire statement the information that supports the thesis of “I’m a Husband and a Mother”:

In case you haven’t been paying attention to the past few decades of American Presidential politics, being a “good” husband qualifies you to be the Executive in Chief.

If what Essig contends is true, then she must be hard-pressed to explain the presidencies of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. These former chief executives were men of many parts, but one role they emphatically did not excel at was that of “‘good’ husband.” But, like the first few sentences of Bachman’s introduction, the fact of the lack of marital fidelity by one-third of the “past few decade[s]” of American presidents does not support Essig’s thesis, so the good professor simply ignores it. Instead, she lambasts the public, the media and President Obama:

whether it is the Dems or Republicans, the mainstream media or the blogs, all that really matters is whether you are a good husband or a mother, not whether you’re wrong, stupid, and even downright dangerous. That’s why Obama has asked Representative Weiner to resign, despite the fact that Weiner’s leadership on progressive issues is untainted.

It is interesting to note that Essig apparently does not consider former congressman Weiner’s behavior neither wrong, stupid, nor dangerous. Actually, Laurie, according to your own thesis, it was all three. It cost Weiner his job and deprived him of the base from which to pursue progressive issues. Whether sending fulsome pictures of one’s sexual apparatus is inherently wrong, stupid or dangerous, however, I leave my readers to decide for themselves.

Her hagiography of Weiner knows no bounds:

As the Weiner case reminded us, the personal is political when it comes to sexual practices (and somehow only sex—we never ask about a candidate’s food politics, how he or she treats their aging parents or yapping dog, or even whether they are kind to their spouses).

Hey, Laurie: Call the ASPCA! Millions of American did back in the '60's. Or didn't you know that?

We never ask about a candidate’s “food politics”? Two words, Laurie: farm subsidies. We never criticize a politician’s treatment of animals? Too bad LBJ can’t testify from the grave about the pummeling he suffered from press and public when he lifted his beagle up by its ears in front of the cameras. We never notice whether politicians are “kind to their spouses”? Edwards and Clinton might beg to differ. Gary Hart and Richard Nixon, too.

Yo, Laurie: Read up on the issues before you open your yap.


Professor Essig concludes her lightly reasoned, historically inaccurate essay with a hat trick of egregious scholarly transgressions:

Muslim and homo-hating GOP candidates get taken seriously by the media because of their normative sex and gender roles, as huband [sic], as mother, and possibly as the next president of the United States.

Ad hominem? Check. Hyperbole? Check. Spelling error? Check.

I implore the good administrators at Middlebury College to test the water in Otter Creek. If not for the faculty, then at least for the students.

Professor Ellen Lewin’s Civil Discourse SNAFU

Memo to the University of Iowa Class of 2015: don’t get Professor Ellen Lewin angry.  You wouldn’t like Professor Lewin when she’s angry.  Members of the current classes at Iowa recently learned this the hard way, when Lewin, Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies in the Department of Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, let her opinion of them be known in a recent email.

As professorial emails go, Lewin’s was refreshing in its brevity.  No fancy academic jargon from Professor L.  She got straight to her point: “FUCK YOU REPUBLICANS” she wrote.  Needless to say, her use of such surprisingly gendered language raised more than a few eyebrows, and in the case of the student organization to whom she directed her suggestion, no little ire.

Professor Lewin keepin' it classy.

What prompted the professor’s outrage was a campus-wide email from the College Republican Club, exhorting

Conservatives in Iowa City it is now time to come out of the closet!

I know at times it feels like you are the only person that disagrees with this liberal town, but you are not alone! We are asking all Republicans, Independents leaning right, or just anyone slightly frustrated with the current one party controlling every level of Johnson County, and some levels of Iowa and U.S. government to STAND UP!

The club’s email was approved by the office of student affairs at the university, as required by school policy. It goes on to list a number of activities the club had planned for the coming week, and closes with an invitation to an “Animal Rights BBQ.” Undergraduate humor at its best–turning the cliches of campus life on their head, and using parody to make a deadly serious point.

Professor Lewin, however, didn’t see the humor. She saw red. When the president of the Republican Club complained to Lewin’s chair, the chair knew a losing battle when he saw one, and pretty much ordered the outraged professor to apologize for her lack of civility. So she did. Sort of:

This is a time when political passions are inflamed, and when I received your unsolicited email, I had just finished reading some newspaper accounts of fresh outrages committed by Republicans in government. I admit the language was inappropriate, and apologize for any affront to anyone’s delicate sensibilities. I would really appreciate your not sending blanket emails to everyone on campus, especially in these difficult times.”

Uh-oh! Take cover! It's Professor Lewin's "difficult time" of the month.

Pay attention, class! Note the sarcasm in the Lewin’s apology. We will return to it shortly. Note that her emotions eroded her capacity to grasp the most basic of rhetorical no-no’s when she warps into overdrive to hector the students who were “sending blanket emails to everyone.” Care for a tautology, anyone? Note her willingness to curtail the rights of a student group that had followed university policy in order to get its message out, to use the campus’s email system. And, finally, note her reference to “these difficult times.” I might apprehend this an allusion to A Tale of Two Cities. I suppose Lewin would accuse me of sexism if I did.

One of the characteristics of deep-thinking faculty such as Professor Lewin is the fanaticism with which they defend their work. This is generally a good thing for scholarship and research, but in rare instances it leads to unintended consequences. Such is the case with Lewin. Incapable of letting anyone else have the last word, profane or otherwise, and unable to keep her own yap shut, Lewin took to her computer once again, firing off a second email, to “clarify” her apology. Not being much of a deep thinker myself, I, on the other hand, always thought the words “I’m sorry” pretty much covered all the bases. But deep-thinking Lewin had to footnote her apology, just like the good scholar of Anthropology and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies that she is:

I should note that several things in the original message were extremely offensive, nearly rising to the level of obscenity. Despite the Republicans’ general disdain for LGBT rights you called your upcoming event “conservative coming out day,” appropriating the language of the LGBT right movement. Your reference to the Wisconsin protests suggested that they were frivolous attempts to avoid work. And the “Animal Rights BBQ” is extremely insensitive to those who consider animal rights an important cause. Then, in the email that Ms. Ginty sent complaining about my language, she referred to me as Ellen, not Professor Lewin, which is the correct way for a student to address a faculty member, or indeed, for anyone to refer to an adult with whom they are not acquainted. I do apologize for my intemperate language, but the message you all sent out was extremely disturbing and offensive.

In other words, Professor Lewin is free to question the “delicate sensibilities” of anyone who might have been offended by her language, but herself has an attack of the vapors when a student has the temerity to refer to the Professor by her first name. Oh, the incivility! Oh, the obscenity! And if that alone was insufficient to justify Professor Lewin’s retracting her apology, then surely the “appropriation” of “coming out” a term to which, according Ellen Lewin, Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies in the Department of Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered students have exclusive rights (let’s pass over lightly the appropriation of the word “gay,” lest the top of Lewin’s head blow off) is enough for Lewin to affirm that her apology is indeed the joke she intended it to be. So afraid was she that the Republican students would be too stupid to figure out her apology was just another FU, Lewin felt compelled to spell it out for them.

Do you really wonder why Republican students at the University of Iowa are in the closet?

Oh, For God’s Sake Nicholas Kristof, Shut Up!

The other day New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about a recent Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life report concerning the level of knowledge Americans possess about the world’s great religions. As you might guess, we’re not, as a people, terribly well-schooled in the Talmud, or well-versed in the Bible, or able to recite the Koran.

Pew's thank-you gift to volunteers who completed the questionnaire.

That this should come as a surprise to anyone is, well, surprising. We are not a nation of readers and our schools are not big on acknowledging the central role religion has played in world, national and local histories. The Pew study, moreover, tested for possession of facts, not profession of faith, a distinction strangely at odds with the academy’s on-going love affair with “critical thinking.”

Get one more answer wrong and I'll smite you!

Unshakable though, is Kristof’s own hypocrisy. The writer excerpts portions of the Pew questionnaire to give his readers an opportunity to test not only their knowledge but also their biases. Kristof kindly provides a handicap to his faithful by introducing his version of the quiz with “given the uproar about Islam, I’ll focus on extremism and fundamentalism,” so straight off we know by not choosing “a,” we’ll have a fifty-fifty shot at the right answer to question three:

3. The terrorists who pioneered the suicide vest in modern times, and the use of women in terror attacks, were affiliated with which major religion?
a. Islam
b. Christianity
c. Hinduism

Kristof answers: “3. c. Most early suicide bombings were by Tamil Hindus (some secular) in Sri Lanka and India.” The answer to question 3 is actually d. None.

Mr. Kristof and his interns ready the facts to make Americans look bad and feel guilty. Click me!

True, in the late 1980′s the Tamil Tigers were the first to sport suicide vests; also true is the FBI (Kristof’s own link above) description of the Tigers as

among the most dangerous and deadly extremists in the world. For more than three decades, the group has launched a campaign of violence and bloodshed in Sri Lanka, the island republic off the southern coast of India. Its ultimate goal: to seize control of the country from the Sinhalese ethnic majority and create an independent Tamil state.

Although Kristof grudging concedes that the Tamil movement has “some secular” elements, he fails to note that it is a political movement animated by geographic and ethnic concerns—not by religion: At the nub of the war is the question of political rights of the Tamil minority.

And is true that although the Tamil Tigers originally weaponized patsies, Islamists perfected them as killing machines:

Suicide terrorism is rising around the world. From the onset of the Palestinian intifada in September 2000 through August 2005, 151 Palestinian suicide bombing attacks have been launched against Israeli targets, killing 515 people and injuring almost 3,500 more. From 1987 to 2001, the Tamil Tigers launched 76 suicide bombing attacks in Sri Lanka and India, killing a total of 901 people, including two prominent national leaders: India’s former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lanka’s President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993 (Pape, 2005). In Iraq, suicide bombers have killed thousands of people, mostly Iraqi civilians, since 2003. [Efraim Benmelech and Claude Berrebi, "Human Capital and the Productivity of Suicide Bombers," Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 21, Number 3—Summer 2007—Pages 223–238.]

So what point is Kristof trying to make here? That Americans don’t follow late-breaking developments in Sri Lanka closely enough? I guess he’s forgotten the $400+ million Americans donated to private charities for 2004 tsunami relief. That Americans worry more about the victims of suicide bombers whose pyrotechnics are more likely to take out friends, family and soldiers in Israel and Iraq than they do about casualties however tragic they may be in a Sri Lankan civil war? I didn’t need to flunk a quiz to figure this out.

Nor do I need a report from Pew to tell me that Kristof’s smug, fatuous conclusion to his essay

the point of this little quiz is that religion is more complicated than it sometimes seems, and that we should be wary of rushing to inflammatory conclusions about any faith, especially based on cherry-picking texts

speaks volumes about Kristof’s inability to recognize the cherry-picking taking place in columns that bear his name.

A young Nicholas wonders where his next fact will come from.

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Profiles in Academic Courage and Class: Robert Paul Wolff

I have been following the kerfuffle surrounding a recent blog post by The New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz and the consternation it has caused within academic circles with amused interest.  The timing of this dust-up could not be more exquisite, for Peretz is about to be honored by Harvard, his alma mater and employer.  Marty, who is also a benefactor of Harvard, being as he is a major donor and a member of the faculty, landed in hot water because he wrote

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

Needless to say, them fightin’ words gave NYT opiner, sensitive Nicholas Kristof, a bad case of the vapors, which he relieved by firing back in his Sunday, September 12 column with incite-full words of his own, “For a glimpse of how venomous and debased the discourse about Islam has become, consider [Martin Peretz's] blog post in The New Republic this month.”

Nicholas Kristof (r) reminds Martin Peretz to watch his p's and q's.

Venomous? Debased? Aren’t those terms more rightly applied to the activities of certain Muslims, the activities that might’ve led Peretz to his conclusion? The sectarian violence in Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, Somalia, for example. The Muslim-on-Muslim attacks that generally result in bombed-out mosques replete with the late worshippers’ assorted body parts in such disarray so as to suggest that the “religion of peace” is actually the “religion in pieces.” Peretz couldn’t possibly have had that in mind when he wrote those words. Nor is it likely he was thinking about the many ways in which Muslim girls and women are killed in the name of family honor. When it comes to the final solution for flirtatious females, only the imagination limits the choices available to the dissed fathers, sons and brothers: beheading, stoning, burying alive, hacking, flinging acid at the offender. Take your pick. They do. Nicholas Kristof apparently doesn’t like to think about that, so he resorts to name-calling those who dare state the obvious.

Also offended by what Peretz had to say is University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor Robert Paul Wolff.  In his blog, Wolff wrote:

Back in 1960, Marty was an egregious little wannabe hanger-on to the group of young proto-lefties who called ourselves “The New Left Club of Cambridge,” but subsequently, he married money, bought The New Republic, and turned that fine old progressive magazine into a flack for the State of Israel. Marty has done well for himself, if you ignore the sort of person he is. It seems there is a Martin Peretz Professorship of Yiddish Literature at Harvard, no less. A scholarship fund will now be set up in his name at Harvard, and he will be honored at the lunch.

When I heard that I was going to be sharing the podium with Marty, I thought seriously about canceling. I don’t know how much time I have left on this earth, and somehow spending even a lunch of it in the presence of Marty Peretz doesn’t strike me as a good use of my time. But I am genuinely proud of my small role in the establishment of Social Studies, and besides, Susie and I have arranged to have dinner Friday evening with our old friends, Milton Cantor and Margaret Taylor. So we will go.

The good professor will deign to accept his honor, but not without setting stern, non-negotiable conditions: “I told Anya Bernstein, the current Head of Social Studies, that I was well brought up and will behave myself at the lunch, but I begged her not to seat me next to Marty at the head table.” Can’t you picture Professor Wolff stomping his foot in high dudgeon and, yes, with righteous indignation as he laid down the law to Dr. Bernstein?

Professor Wolff: I get so jeal--er,--mad when I think about Marty Peretz.

There is no figure more risible than the academic whose tenured status relieves him of the obligation to be accountable for his behavior, or even to have the thought enter his head that the standards to which he holds others apply to him too. Well, maybe there is one more risible: the professor who won’t let his principles stand in the way of chowing down on a free lunch.

Dr. Bernstein agreed to Professor Wolff's demand to seat Martin Peretz elsewhere.

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