Why Do You Think They Call It 'Liberal Arts'?

As Glenn Greenwald has rightly pointed out this week, to much fanfare from other bloggers, Republicanism in America has oddly morphed into Bushism, a fanatical devotion to the President that deems any criticism of our nation's leader to be the treasonous, crazed chatter of a liberal. Anyone who speaks ill of Bush or any of his policies isn't worth listening to at all, and would be better off silenced.

I've written at some length already here and here about some particularly noxious Bushists attempting to intimidate college professors who speak out about current events and politics. Because, as everybody knows, college students shouldn't have to listen to opinions with which they might, potentially, disagree. That's not what getting an education is all about!

Now, according to an e-mail passed along by World O' Crap (one of my favorite sites keeping an eye on the batshit insane righty blogs), it seems David Horowitz is hopping on this exciting (and not at all fascist!) bandwagon with his new book: Evil Nazi Professors From Mars Want to Devour Your Children's Brains.

Oh, no, wait, it's called The Professors - The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

Sigh...

An Urgent Message
From the Desk of David Horowitz

Dear Newsmax Reader,

Because I know that you are as concerned as I am the radical left's stranglehold on our colleges and universities, I have set aside for you a copy of my new book, The Professors -- The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

What, exactly, makes these professors so "dangerous," you might wonder? Do they have crazy, unpredictable mutant powers like Professor Xavier, perhaps? Have they discovered how to manipulate space-time, like Dr. Who, or how to time-travel, like Doctor Emmett Brown? Perhaps, like Dr. Frankenstein, they're doing morally questionable work in the reanimation of dead tissue, or bizarre brain surgeries like Dr. Hfuhruhurr.

Oh, no, they're just starting student clubs and inventing holidays.

At Cal State-Long Beach: Ron Karenga is a Professor and Chairman of the Black Studies Department. He's also a convicted torturer and inventor of Kwanzaa.

But...wait...doesn't David Horowitz think torture is neat-o, and perfectly acceptable under some, extreme circumstances? Maybe Ron Karenga needed to beat two women with electrical cord (the torture for which he served a lengthy prison sentence back in the early 70's) for reasons of national security! (Bear in mind, I'm not trying to excuse Karenga's crimes...They're pretty horrible, and he strikes me as a pretty nutty individual...But still, he's one professor out of thousands. Singling him out is fairly meaningless, not to mention hypocritical.)

At the University of Texas-Arlington: Jose Angel Gutierrez is a Political Science Professor. He's also the founder of La Raza Unida, a racist Hispanic organization that calls on Hispanics and Mexican immigrants to seize U.S. land. Among his more notable racists rants is his repeated pronouncement that calls for the elimination of "the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have to kill him."

Oh my Lord! You might almost think these men were paid to provide outlets for students and to challenge their pre-conceived notions about the world! Next thing you know, they'll use provocative or controversial statements to get a reaction out of students and open them up to new ways of thinking.

Columbia University's Nicholas De Genova, who led an anti-war demonstration by wishing for deaths of thousands of American troops; and, Texas Journalism Professor Robert Jensen, who rabidly hates the United States, and recently told his students, "The United States has lost the war in Iraq and that's a good thing."

You mean, an American citizen? Speaking his mind and telling people what he thinks? That's not what our Founding Fathers intended. Clearly, they had wanted a poorly-educated, largely impoverished, devoutly Christian nation in a constant state of war in which the twin virtues of intense fear and hatred of brown people was drilled into the brains of everyone, all day, from birth to death. Clearly.

Imagine just for a moment being a conservative student and having to sit in a class taught by any one of the professors I've mentioned. Difficult? Stressful? All of that and more, and that's simply not what a college education is about.

Yes, encountering new ideas can sometimes be stressful, Dave. But it's also the only way that our own ideas grow and change over time. In other words, encountering other people's ideas is how we learn things, which is the entire purpose of going to college. It's quit simply "what a college education is about." Well, that and random sex with strangers and drinking incredibly terrible domestic keg beer.

I'd love it if David Horowitz read this blog, because I'd love to ask him some follow-up questions on this topic. First and foremost, if encountering new ideas that might clash with your own views isn't what college is about, then what is a college education about, Dave? Hearing a bunch of sycophants afraid to say what they really think, telling you that everything your Pappy taught you about the world was true, even if he was a dumb racist old fuck? Or maybe he thinks a college education is overrated in the first place. People are much more docile and easy to manipulate when you keep 'em really really dumb.

Yet the 101 professors highlighted in my book are representative of thousands of radical leftists who spew a violent anti-Americanism, preach anti-Semitism, and cheer on the killing of American soldiers and civilians! And they're living off taxpayer dollars and tuition fees as they indoctrinate our future leaders.

Okay, I went to UCLA for four years and USC for two. I took many, many, many, many classes about History, Communication, Political Science, Government, Journalism and Media. I had a whole lot of very outspoken, liberal professors who openly discussed the evils of American foreign policy and the previlence of intense anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism in the Middle East and around the world. As I said in a previous post, one of my professors - an English professor named Robert Watson - was highlighted by a reprehensible group of former UCLA students as representing an unsatisfactorily liberal sensibility.

But never once did I have a professor who called for violence against Americans (or anyone else, for that matter). I never heard a professor say something anti-Semetic, unless, of course, referring to something anti-Semetic that was said by someone else that pertained to the subject of the course. If you take enough classes about the modern situation in the Middle East, you neccessarily encounter some form of anti-Semitism. Finally, I never once heard a professor cheer the deaths of any Americans, military or otherwise.

This is an outright falsehood. To claim that this is the present situation on America's campuses is a blatant lie. But the fact of the matter is, David Horowitz isn't really even attempting to shut these professors up. He knows he has no power or authority on this issue, that this is pointless posturing and a way to sell books. The effect it will have is not to get these teachers fired, but rather a chilling effect on anyone who might think about speaking aloud their anti-Bush personal views.

It's the dream of Horowitz and his ilk to sufficiently terrorize anyone who speaks the truth to power, in public, so that others will shut the hell up and let George Bush do whatever he wnats. Selling millions of dollars worth of books to idiots...well, that's just icing on the cake.