Academia follows the rest of the Left off Backfire Cliff
Most of you probably don’t even know that U.C. Berkeley hosts the “Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements,” an oh-so-very serious academic department and university think tank founded in 2009 for the specific purpose of slandering the Tea Party on a permanent ongoing basis. (You think I’m joking but alas, no.) Students can now get a Bachelor’s degree in TEAPARTY=NAZI with a minor in OMGREDNECKS!
Anyway, the nation’s leading scholarly center devoted to analyzing modern conservatism just followed the rest of the Left off Backfire Cliff when its executive director (looking unnervingly like a pallid DailyKos blogger surviving on Cheetos in mom’s basement) posted his definitive masterwork on the Tuscon shootings, which he titled Tucson: Is this an Oklahoma City moment?. He ties himself into pretzels trying to construct a parallel between Jared Loughner and Timothy McVeigh, and between the Tea Party and the Clinton-era militia movement. To the author Rosenthal’s apparent dismay, however, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Loughner had even heard of the Tea Party, much less been a member, so he concludes,
Unlike in the case of Oklahoma City, where the perpetrator was explicit in his insurrectionary aim and managed to pull off his catastrophe, in Tucson there is enough ambiguity about the perpetrator that radicalism on the right is unlikely to feel the need to abate. In the absence of, as it were, a smoking gun—the perpetrator himself assuming responsibility in the name of the movement—the impact of Tucson is likely to be an amplification rather than any amelioration of the fierceness of our political climate.
All hail the Tea Party martyr, Jared Loughner! He took the fall for his compatriots, defending conservatism by “assuming responsibility in the name of the movement.”
If I didn’t have the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements to explain it to me, I wouldn’t have known what a selfless act Loughner is now doing by accepting blame personally himself rather than confessing the right-wing plot of which he was just the point man.
UPDATE:
Rosenthal gets an assist from the top banana at U.C. Berkeley, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who just sent out an email blast blaming the shooting on…Arizona’s “discrimination” against illegal immigrants! Whew — glad to hear that’s cleared up.
These people are so isolated in their ivory towers that they’re always sitting down at the very moment everyone else is standing up in America’s endless game of breaking-news musical chairs. At the exact instant that the concerted slander against conservatives was exposed as an unmitigated fraud, Berkeley’s academics finally chime in on the now-discredited meme. Don’t you hear it, Rosenthal and Birgeneau: the music’s stopped. It’s already time for a new game, and you’re still playing the old one!
Krauthammer has torn this meme of “Right-wing assassin” to pieces in the WAPO. His last line was a beauty. I’m doing this from memory but: “Lochner’s delusions were brought about by mental illnes. What brought about Krugman’s?
By the way, may I take a few lines to plug my new book? “The Clownishness of Bearded Economists” in Two Volumes. New York Times Books. Thank you (and Francois Rabelais).
Unbelievable. At Berzerkeley and elsewhere, the credentialed-not-educated anointed class out-clowns itself.
It’s so hard to believe that these people aren’t embarrassed.
Where are all the respectable UC Berkeley scholars trying to uphold the reputation of this school?
Interesting bunch of people, the CCSRWM crowd. Hey, there’s another famous economist listed there!
It’s Brad “Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now.” DeLong!