harmonicminer

Remember during the 2008 election, the big-brain Republicans told us we shouldn’t say Obama is a socialist, because that might discredit us? Because since everyone knew he wasn’t REALLY a socialist, calling him one was just giving ammo to the left to call us crazy? I distinctly recall many of us saying that if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck….. but the brilliant Republican elite just couldn’t quite get there, somehow.  Apparently, things have changed:

The Stanley Kurtz Interview

during the election campaign, I was certainly a critic of President Obama. I looked into the radical connections in his past. I wasn’t shy about saying that, but the socialism charge seemed to me to be a bridge too far. I mean, how do you define socialism? That’s a big problem right there. So my inclination when I started this research was to just bracket the whole thing, set it aside, and focus on the fact that Obama is ultra-liberal, much further to the left than he claims to be. But for example, I started to change my mind when I ran across the programs of the Socialist Scholars Conferences that Obama clearly attended when he lived in New York City between 1983 and 1985. And those programs really shocked me, because they included a number of people from Obama’s current political world. And they even included James Cone, who is the theological mentor of Jeremiah Wright. And when I saw that, I really had to rethink my attitude toward the socialism issue. And the more I followed it out, the more I saw that Obama at minimum lived deeply in the midst of a world of socialist community organizers. You know, people can read my book and they can agree or disagree with the idea that Obama himself was a socialist community organizer. But one thing is certain. There are a lot of socialist community organizers. They intentionally keep their socialism secret. And they were Obama’s mentors and colleagues.

That like “walk/look/quack like a duck” logic to me. At the end of the day, arguing about whether Obama IS a socialist is stupid. It is indisputable, and was in 2008, that he had always supported socialist perspectives and policies, and surrounded himself with self-described socialists. Who cares if he had the word stenciled on his t-shirt under his suit?  What was obvious then, and has been proved since, is that he would govern like a socialist.

It’s nice to hear the Republican intelligentsia coming around….  finally.

This lady is absolutely right. Abortion IS the civil rights issue of our time, and the most helpless among us are those whose civil rights have been taken away.

During the runup to the health-care jam-down, Obama said repeatedly that, “If you like the coverage you have now, you can keep it.”  He said it loudly, everywhere, to everyone.

We knew it was a lie.  The media is finally starting to admit it.

In an unintentionally humorous reference, AP reporters remind us that women really are different from men, as Fearing rout, Obama, Dems reach to female voters

Women could hold the key for Obama and his party as Democrats look to minimize expected widespread losses at all levels of government in a year when, particularly on the Republican side, female candidates top ballots in statewide races in Connecticut, South Carolina, California, New Hampshire, New Mexico and elsewhere.

Hope for the Democrats: A lot of women are undecided, and more than a third who are likely to vote say they could still change their minds before the election.

If that doesn’t underscore the kinds of women voters that the Democrats court, I’m not sure what would. The election is less than two weeks off… nothing new remains to be learned about any candidate… and over a third of “likely women voters” haven’t made up their minds for sure…. and Democrats see that as a hopeful sign.

Truth, Not Ideological Balance

As the academy grows more stridently left wing, conservatives respond with calls for ideological affirmative action, for schools to hire more right-thinking faculty so students encounter intellectual diversity. This is a seductively alluring scheme, and thanks to wealthy donors, it is proliferating.

It is an ill-advised and ultimately anti-intellectual strategy, even in the unlikely event that it succeeds. The academy can not be, nor should it be, an intellectual version of Noah’s Ark. Sadly, this conservative version of “inclusion” mimics the Left’s subordination of truth to ideology.

The quest should be about insisting that whatever professors teach, content should be truthful, whether this truth is liberal, conservative, reactionary, or Marxist, whether the subject in English or sociology. After all, who wants conservative falsehoods to “balance” radical dishonesty? It is fantasy to insist that if students learn at 9 a.m. that 2+2=3 and at 11 a.m., 2+2=5, they will eat lunch knowing that 2+2=4.

The hunt to hire truth-seekers changes everything. Out with the ideological litmus tests; in with character and temperament. If a Marxist job candidate argues that Africa is poor owing to colonial exploitation, the sharp rejoinder should be, “Can you prove this?” Ditto for the conservative job seeker who insists that only capitalist free markets can solve Africa’s poverty.

Admittedly, abandoning ideological labels complicates life, and may even discourage donors from funding pet projects, but this is what the life of the mind is about.

I admit to having made the argument before that the leftists in higher education (including Christian higher ed) should include conservative, right leaning viewpoints just because they are there, for the sake of balance if nothing else.

But maybe that’s because my sights were set too low.  Of course, if this kind of skeptical search for evidence behind assertion became the norm in higher education of almost any stripe, a great many of the favored programs and initiatives so beloved of administrators and public relations people would have to be reconsidered.    So I’m not holding my breath about some new rebirth in higher education’s ability to be skeptical about itself, and, for now, I’ll settle just for a balance between right and left…  the eventual dialectic may take care of the rest, if that elusive balance is ever achieved.

I suppose the message to us all is this:  be sure you know the difference between what you actually know and what is just your PR.

During WWII, as the Allies were trying to deceive German intelligence about the D-Day invasion location and timing, they used “inflatable military hardware” to make it look to German air-based photo recon as if the Allies were massing in places that the weren’t on the British coast.

This idea seems to have caught on….  here it is employed in Russia, although I’m not sure whom they’re trying to fool these days.

In any case, I do find myself wondering if this isn’t a great metaphor for Obama’s economic policy.

You know:  make it look like you’re doing something, as long as people don’t look too close.  Talk about stimulus a lot, without actually pointing at something that has been stimulated.

Other than the tea parties, of course.

Harry Reid is busy looking for something he can inflate as a successful policy.

But he only has to look in the mirror to see a balloon that’s about to pop.

I so resonate with this post in diversity in higher education that I’m just going to link to it.  More interesting links there.