David Horowitz, whining yet again.

Oh, look ... right-wing nutbar David Horowitz, crying like a little girl again. It's always great fun watching Horowitz trying to cast the mote out of his neighbour's eye, ignoring the log in his own. Poor David is obviously incensed by name calling:

The previous night I had spoken at Skidmore College, where a Professor of Psychology had publicly referred to the College Republicans as “America’s future fascists.”

Of course, this is the same Dave who titles his piece "Bowling Green Barbarians", and devotes a significant portion of his leftist-bashing "Discover the Network" web site to something called "Moonbat Central".

Poor Dave -- he just can't figure out why people don't like him.

SUSPICIOUS AFTERTHOUGHT: In an accusation in the above article eerily similar to his University of Northern Colorado fantasy, Horowitz writes:

At another school in Pennsylvania that I visited the week before, a biology professor showed Fahrenheit 9/11 to his biology class in the midst of the presidential campaign. In taking an entire class to show this propaganda film, the professor was obviously not teaching his students biology, or imparting any knowledge he was credentialed to share with them. He was simply inflicting his ignorance and prejudices on an audience that was unable to escape. There is something pathetic in adults who cannot restrain the urge to vent their political frustrations on a captive audience put at their disposal and take advantage of the vulnerability of audiences who in objecting risk ridicule (more frequently inflicted than you would imagine) or – worse – punitive grades that can negatively affect their careers (also more frequent than you would imagine).

First, just as he initially referred to "a University in Colorado" without being any more specific, making it extra-difficult to verify the details, Horowitz here refers to "another school in Pennsylvania" without naming names. So why the secrecy? If it's worth making the accusation, it's certainly worth being specific so readers can follow up, no? After all, as we've all seen, if Dave tells a story, you're almost guaranteed it's going to be bogus or missing some really important bits. So what to do? Against my better judgment, I'll spend a few minutes trying to corroborate Dave's bulls... uh, accusations. Where to start?

Well, how about googling on Dave's own site, Front Page Mag, for the combination of "Pennsylvania", "biology" and "Fahrenheit 9/11". Surely that should be specific enough to nail down this incident. Oh, look. Not so good. But let's not give up yet.

Since it happened on campus, surely the baby fascists over at Students for Academic Freedom would be all over this like religious wingnuts on a feeding tube. So let's google them with the same combination. Dang. This is getting tricky. But stepping back a bit, I think there's a bigger problem with Dave's accusation.

There's an irritating lack of detail even in that accusation above. Dave uses phrases like "unable to escape" and "captive audience", clearly suggesting that attendance at this film was mandatory, perhaps even done during class time. But who's to say that's how it happened? It's just as reasonable to imagine the faculty member, at the end of a class, just being informal and saying something like, "Hey, there's a special showing of Fahrenheit 9/11 at the local repertory this Friday, special prices for students and faculty, me and a bunch of buds are heading down. You're all invited and we can probably squeeze a few people into cars if you need a ride."

Do I know this is how it happened? Of course not -- any more than you know that it didn't. But given Dave's penchant for tall takes and making shit up, I don't think it's unfair anymore, when you hear a new claim out of Dave, to immediately react, "OK, what's he leaving out or misrepresenting this time?" I mean, given Dave's track record, it's a better than even bet that he's lying about something.

And, finally, what I think is a glaring omission -- what happened when any offended students reported this incident to the appropriate campus ombudsman? I mean, that's what campus officials are for, isn't it? To complain about inappropriate behaviour. And yet, amazingly, when Dave tells a story, there's a suspicious lack of what happened when the student followed the proper on-campus channels. It's almost as if they want these incidents to happen and crank up the sensationalism as quickly as possible by dragging Dave and the SAF into the picture as their initial strategy.

Ah, but that's just the conspiracy theory talking, isn't it?

P.S. If any readers have info on the alleged and maddeningly-vague Pennsylvania case Dave describes, by all means, let us know. I can't wait to add another Davey boy notch to my belt.

P.P.S. And I'm pretty sure it would be unnecessarily snarky to point out that the intellectual wizards at the SAF have, as their motto on their main page, the phrase, "You can't get a good education if they're only telling you half the story." That's right. And you certainly won't get a good English education with grammar like that. Conservative, higher education indeed.