Re: For Ignorance, Moonbattery, and Sarcasm...

With the Cap Times' support of Joel McNally's sophistry, should we be all that surprised about Kevin Barrett showing up to offer a primer in Islam at the U of the Sacred Liberal Bleeding Heart?

Particularly from a guy whose maxim is

If you don't believe at least a few wild-eyed government conspiracies, you're not paying attention.

But wait... let's dig a little deeper. McNally adds:

All this is to say that we've had far too many examples of government cover-ups and outright fabrications to dismiss out of hand as loony anyone who raises questions about the "official" version of events.

The premise is only problematic if you believe that governments are made of people, and people are free to act or react in different ways. By McNally's light, John F. Kennedy's administration is just like LBJ's administration, which is just like Nixon's, Carter's, and Reagan's, as well as those of Bush, Clinton and Bush.

But McNally eventually shows his colors - and his political allegiance:

And where better to have a free and open discussion of controversial ideas than on a college campus?

His allegiance is 'to the republic (of liberal schools), for which moonbattery stands, one union under tenure paid lavishly by public funds, with liberality and social justice for all designated minorities.'

Lest you question his sense of balance, McNally offers this:

Personally, I think the theory has a few holes. Given the "bad fiction" quality of other lies created by the Bush administration to justify the Iraqi war, if Bush and Cheney were going to all the trouble of faking terrorist attacks and killing thousands of Americans, you would think they would have at least forged a note from Saddam Hussein saying "I did it, ha, ha, ha." Perhaps the Bush administration is as incompetent at conspiracies as it is at everything else.

Without any evidence tying the attacks to Saddam, the president and his cronies had to make up all those nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

The problem for Kevin Barrett is that a lot of politicians who hate the University of Wisconsin listen to loony, right-wing radio shows.

If you're still chewing on that, this bit of sleight-of-hand easily slides by:

A nonexistent attack in the Gulf of Tonkin fabricated by the Johnson administration to justify the Vietnam War ended up killing more than 58,000 young Americans.

Freewheeling discussions of wild-eyed government conspiracies should never be banned from our college campuses. Too many of them turn out to be true.

Lance, you've hardly done the man credit.