Okay, Now It's McCarthyism:
Much spittle has been spread about how Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, and the advance guard of the new Red Scare are leading us down the road to a new round of McCarthyism. Beck's specious little rant a week or so ago comparing himself to Edward R. Murrow exposing McCarthy, but let's remember that Murrow may have brought down McCarthy, but McCarthy and those he drove to spasmodic paranoia about Communists were out to destroy as many careers as possible. That meant not only politicians and Hollywood lefty types, oh, no. Blacklisting and fear of possible blacklists were used against librarians, schoolteachers, and university professors.
And now, in this retro-era of the new communist witch hunt (based some fantasy version of communism that has little to do with real and actual communism), everything old is new again. The difference this time has to do with so many activities the government used to do on its own: the cause has been privatized. This is different than random cranky whores desperate for attention, like David Horowitz and his little book of fucktardery, The Professors, where he identifies the "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," which is not unlike uncovering the deadliest prairie dogs on the plains.
No, now we have an honest-to-god, well-funded effort from a conservative organization, the Leadership Institute, a kind of school for assholes that claims to have trained Mitch McConnell, Grover Norquist, and other various and sundry right-wing spoogebuckets. The new effort of the Institute is CampusReform.org, which started this week. The Rude Pundit received a letter of invitation to join up from LI's founder, Morton Blackwell, which explained the goals of this "massive new website I have created at LI to combat leftist abuses and bias at our colleges and universities."
Mr. Blackwell wants the Rude Pundit to spread word of CampusReform.org to conservative students on college campuses: "CampusReform.org will dramatically increase the number of battles fought against leftist abuses on college campuses this year. And based on my long experience, I confidently predict conservative students will win most of those new battles as they identify, expose, and combat leftist abuses and bias." And how?
Why, through CRorg's easy-to-use narcing system. Sort of like RateMyProfessor for even bigger cunts and dickwads, a conservative student can go and whine about the mean old meanie leftist professor who gave poor little Sean or Ann a bad grade because they don't want to lick the waxy folds of Barack Obama's nutsack. It's big fun. Want some examples?
Here's what some little shithead named "wareagle01" said about Auburn University PoliSci Prof Jim Seroka: "Obvious leftist. Denigrates Republicans and conservatives in class. Cuts off criticism of Democrat politicians. Seems to be especially fond of any foreign TV shows that denigrate the US. Uses terms such as 'gun nuts' to describe 2nd amendment supporters and 'fascists' to describe conservatives." Oh, Mary, pull the panties out of your ass and move on.
Or here's what someone said about University of Tennessee Psych Prof Eric Sundstrom: "While Professor Sundstrom does a great job with teaching this class, he unfortunately allows his liberal biases to creep into dicussions. I took this class in the fall of 2003 and he regularly attacked President Bush and his foreign policy during discussions of organizational theory." You know, teaching by using examples is not a bad thing.
What's fascinating is that the site doesn't even realize the total fucking hypocrisy built into its effort. If you praise people for being conservative and denigrate them for being liberal, how is that, in any objective way, qualitatively better than the reverse? Oh, fuck, wait. That was an application of logic. Sorry.
But, hey, thanks for proving why tenure exists with this entry on Lehigh University's David Amidon: "Having gotten tenure when he was a young liberal, the administration could not remove him when he changed his positions and became an old conservative."
