Education

Obamian Acolytes vs Joe the Plumber

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Ever since Joe Wurzelbacher had his interchange with Barack Obama, “progressive” websites and left-leaning media have been working to discredit Joe and harm him. Indeed, much of the media has shown more interest in investigating Joe than they ever showed in investigating Senator Obama or asking him tough questions. The Anchoress has a summary and round-up of links; see also Hot Air and the thoughtful post at Bookworm Room.

The message is pretty clear: If you dare to challenge a candidate beloved by the “progressive” movement, they will do everything they can to destroy you. You’d better be careful that all aspects of your life are squeaky clean and that your family can stand abuse: otherwise, just keep your mouth shut and don’t challenge those who know better than you. Mess with Obama, and you’ll never plumb in this town again.

John McCain:

Last weekend, Senator Obama showed up in Joe’s driveway to ask for his vote, and Joe asked Senator Obama a tough question. I’m glad he did; I think Senator Obama could use a few more tough questions.

The response from Senator Obama and his campaign yesterday was to attack Joe. People are digging through his personal life and he has TV crews camped out in front of his house. He didn’t ask for Senator Obama to come to his house. He wasn’t recruited or prompted by our campaign. He just asked a question. And Americans ought to be able to ask Senator Obama tough questions without being smeared and targeted with political attacks.

Neptunus Lex quotes the old Japanese saying: “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” Today’s “progressives” want very much to hammer down nails in America.

Here’s what I think is going on: Over the last 20 years, too many of America’s universities have become places in which conformity is at a premium and genuinely independent thought is discouraged–“islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” as someone put it. It was inevitable that the spririt of repression inculculated in the universities would begin to poison the larger society, and that is now happening.

Here’s an item which I think is related: It’s been reported that at a (rare, small) McCain rally in NYC, somebody grabbed a McCain sign and beat up the woman carrying it. Beat her up physically, not metaphorically.

We seem to have a substantial population of “progressives” who simply cannot abide the idea that anyone would disagree with their policies and/or principles, and these people are, increasingly, a primary constituency–maybe the primary constituency–of the Democratic party. What would happen to free speech in a country with a Democratic administration and a Democratic-controlled Congress and (after a lapse of time) a court system dominated by Democratic appointees? I don’t want to be alarmist, but I think there’s something to be concerned about here.

More on Joe the Plumber from Neo, who has video and sees a rather “sneering and condescending” attitude on Obama’s part. “Sneering” might be a little too strong, but “snide and condescending” would IMNSHO be appropriate.

Snideness and smears should not be a recipe for electoral success in this country.

(some of the above links via Instapundit)

Update: See If the jackboot fits from Iowahawk; also Villagers with Torches.

Talk About Cognitive Dissonance

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Count up the innocent dead. Measure human misery, pain, and despair. Pile the corpses high.

The accounting makes it very clear that Communism is the greatest tragedy, the most murderous blight, in all of human history.

And yet, for some reason, the Left doesn’t seem to care. Liberal ideology is always worthy no matter the body count. It seems that the only real crime is in opposing their pet political philosophies.

Joseph McCarthy is a demon in their eyes, an odious and insidious monster. The fact that history has proven that some of his charges were valid is carefully ignored, as are the mountains of stinking corpses left behind by their favorite dictators and totalitarian regimes.

To be completely candid with you, dear reader, I have a hard time understanding why. How obvious does it have to be, anyway?

A recent article at The American Thinker sheds some light on this puzzle. It seems that the majority of educators, people who should be smart enough to know better, simply refuse to mention these undeniable historical facts to their students.

“This stuff isn’t rocket science. It is easy to teach, if the professor desires. The problem is that it isn’t being taught. Consequently, Americans today do not know why communism is such a devastating ideology, at both the level of plain economic theory and in actual historical practice. It is a remarkably hateful system, based on literal hatred and targeted annihilation of entire classes and groups of people.”

The author of the article, Paul Kengor, also explains why this refusal to pass on important details concerning the recent past has done much to create the situation we find facing us today.

“What does it all mean for November 2008? It means that millions of modern Americans, when they hear that Barack Obama has deep roots with communist radicals like Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis, don’t care; they don’t get it. Moreover, the leftist establishment — from academia to media to Hollywood — will not help them get it. To the contrary, the left responds to these accusations by not only downplaying or dismissing them but by ridiculing or even vilifying them, given the left’s reflexive anti-anti-communism. The left will create bad guys out of the anti-communists who are legitimately blowing the whistle on the real bad guys.”

I never had a problem telling good from bad. It is a pity the Left does.

Ramblings Late at Night, Looking into the Darkness

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Probably most of you have seen these, but if not they may amuse you:

As we infantilize ourselves.  (I view this somewhat ruefully because, unlike apparently most of   the Chicagoboyz, I’m totally incompetent.   Last New Year’s Day my brother walked into our kitchen, asked what was wrong with the sink I said we were going to phone a plumber after the holiday.   He looked at it, climbed under the sink, screwed the head on the hose, and it has worked ever since.)

The friend who forwarded that (who I might say is skilled at both dressing for success and hacking down a tree, at editing a paper and remodeling a room)  sent two sons to the first  Gulf War and one of them  forwarded this to her.  

And this rant is cheerful (even if the Iowa Trades are not likely to make us feel the sentiment is as widespread as we’d like).

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Quote of the Day

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Conjuring images of the medieval church or the Kremlin persecuting dissidents is delicious, but it comes from times and places where very few people even had access to the information that the academy was exposed to. Those controlling authorities could actually hope to keep certain opinions from spreading by applying pressure at a very few places. That world has been disappearing for years. Anyone can get ahold of the ideas of Foucault, or Trotsky, or Derrida at the touch of a button now. Where unavailability is still a problem, ironically, are precisely those areas where those ideas are in ascendance.
 
This is why online learning and other consumer-driven postsecondary education is pushing them out. Prestigious universities are losing prestige, not because Americans are anti-intellectual, but because they are anti-intelligentsia, anti-academy. Even George Bush reads Camus nowadays. The figure of The Professor in comic books and Gilligan’s Island, a person who knows much about all important subjects, does not even work as comedy or stereotype anymore. People chuckled about the comedic exaggeration of Russell Johnson’s character then – now they would fail to find it funny at all, except as some sort of retro thing. People have access to the information themselves and know that humanities professors are often not all that smart. Smarter than average people, perhaps, and trained in particular specialties, but not dealing with subjects far beyond the ken of mortals. That is in fact why these disciplines have developed their own coded vocabularies, to identify outsiders rapidly. They can no longer rely on their superior knowledge to do that for them. It’s too easy for a talented amateur to join the conversation after a little work.
 
There is no need to censor the academy. They are making themselves increasingly irrelevant. The entrenched, government-funded educators at younger levels is more worrisome.

–Assistant Village Idiot