Pajama Man Slimed

My partner in pajama crime Charles Johnson and bloggers in general were under attack in Denver yesterday, according to this Denver Post report:

Former University of Colorado president Betsy Hoffman said Thursday it became increasingly difficult to make ethical, principled decisions while a “perfect storm” of media fired upon her.

Hoffman said the spread of rumors on Internet blogs creates an instantaneous “trial and conviction” before both sides are heard. She announced her resignation in March amid scandals involving the school’s football recruiting program and professor Ward Churchill’s essay comparing some victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to a Nazi official.

Now that was not just any “official,” as we know, but Adolph Eichmann himself, one of history’s great mass murderers. But let’s not linger on that “minor” point because the Post (in its euphemistic reporting) doesn’t. Here’s what they report Ms. Hoffman had to say about Charles:

One of the first mentions of Churchill’s essay [the one that compared 9/11 victims to “little Eichmans”] appeared on a blog called “little green footballs” after the professor was invited to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. Within 10 minutes, people were calling Gov. Bill Owens and asking him to tell Hoffman to fire Churchill, she said.

“Ten minutes – that’s how fast things happen today,” she said. “There was a period there when I was measuring my e-mail in boxes and pounds. You cannot manage and lead by the number of e-mails you get. You really have to think about what is best for the institution.”

Of course what the Post and Ms. Hoffman omit in all their condemnation of Johnson’s alacrity is that he was one hundred percent correct in his post about Churchill’s appearance on the Hamilton campus. Ms. Hoffman is engaging in the old practice of killing… or sliming… the messenger who brings the bad news. But she’s not even remotely successful. Little Green Footballs is thriving and Ms. Hoffman is canned. Perhaps she would have done better to have studied Mickey’s Feiler Faster Principle. But I will give her credit for speaking in public though. If I had been humiliated as she had, I would have moved long ago to South America.