Wednesday, January 28, 2004
The Free? World of the Academy
What follows is an article that originally appeared in Salon about, what I find to be, the scariest thing the US government is planning right now. This is essentially talking about passing legislation that can punish college faculty for not towing the government line. This hits especially close to home for me...
Osama University?
Neoconservative critics have long charged Middle
Eastern studies departments with anti-American bias.
Now they've enlisted Congress in their crusade.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
Nov. 6, 2003 | On Oct. 21, the House of
Representatives unanimously passed a bill that could
require university international studies departments
to show more support for American foreign policy or
risk their federal funding. Its approval followed
hearings this summer in which members of Congress
listened to testimony about the pernicious influence
of the late Edward Said in Middle Eastern studies
departments, described as enclaves of debased
anti-Americanism. Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at
the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank,
testified, "Title VI-funded programs in Middle Eastern
Studies (and other area studies) tend to purvey
extreme and one-sided criticisms of American foreign
policy." Evidently, the House agreed and decided to
intervene.
Emboldened by its dominance of Washington, the right
is trying to enlist government on its side in the
campus culture wars. "Since they are the mainstream in
Washington think tanks and the right-wing corridors of
Congress, they figure, 'Let's translate that political
capital to education,'" says Rashid Khalidi, who was
recently appointed to the Edward Said Chair of Arab
studies at Columbia University.
It's not surprising that they started with Middle
Eastern studies. There's a particular enmity between
hard-line supporters of Israel -- who, with the
extraordinary ascension of neoconservatives in the
Bush administration, now dominate the American right
-- and academics who specialize in studying the Arab
and Muslim world. That enmity burst into open conflict
after Sept. 11, when conservatives saw an opportunity
to accuse Middle East academics not just of biased
scholarship but of representing a kind of intellectual
fifth column. Soon after the World Trade Center fell,
the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a
Washington-based group co-founded by Lynne Cheney,
wife of the vice president, and Sen. Joe Lieberman,
D-Conn., published a report called "Defending
Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America
and What Can Be Done About It," which listed examples
of insufficiently patriotic behavior of the part of
the professoriate and called universities the "weak
link" in the war on terror.
At the same time, Martin Kramer, editor of the
right-wing Middle East Quarterly, published a book
called "Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle
Eastern Studies in America," in which he argues that
academia, in thrall to romantic third-worldism, has
turned a blind eye to the region's dangerous
pathologies. Last year Daniel Pipes, a colleague of
Kramer's who has since been appointed by President
Bush to sit on the U.S. Institute of Peace, launched
Campus Watch, a Web site devoted to monitoring Middle
Eastern studies departments for signs of anti-American
bias. He published dossiers cataloguing the political
sins of some of the most respected professors in the
field, and invited students to submit reports on their
instructors.
Until recently, though, this fight has been
rhetorical, confined to Web sites, books, magazines
and lectures. Now, with HR 3077, the International
Studies in Higher Education Act, the House has taken
sides. If it becomes law, it will create a board to
monitor how federally funded international-studies
centers impact national security. The board will
evaluate whether supporters of American foreign policy
are adequately represented in university programs.
Conservatives, says Kramer, "need to be able to
compete on a level playing field with others."
Inherent in the act is the assumption that if most
established experts believe American Middle East
policy is bad, the flaw lies with the experts, not the
policy. "There's the threat that centers will be
punished for not toeing the official line out of
Washington, which is an unprecedented degree of
federal intrusion into a university-based area studies
program," says Zachary Lockman, a New York University
history professor and director of the school's Hagop
Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.
The International Studies in Higher Education Act
would not grant the government the power to exclude
voices from Middle Eastern studies departments, but it
would give the government a role in defining which
views need to be included in the academic mainstream.
The seven-member board it creates would make
recommendations to Congress about how the centers
"might better reflect the national needs related to
the homeland security," and make sure that programs
"reflect diverse perspectives and represent the full
range of views on world regions, foreign languages,
and international affairs." Two members of the board
would represent national security agencies, while
others would be appointed by Congress and the
administration.
The bill also mandates that centers allow government
recruiters full access to students in the centers. In
the past, professors have resisted cooperating with
national security agencies, fearing that if the line
between independent research and government
intelligence was blurred, they and their students
might be targeted as American agents while studying
abroad.
And because the bill mandates that centers train
students for government service, Kramer hopes students
who plan to pursue fields useful to national defense
will be given special consideration when fellowships
are awarded. Right now, he says, "If you're interested
in gender in eighth century Cairo, you're just as
likely to receive a grant as if you're interested in
the discourse of Osama bin Laden. Studying gender in
eighth century Cairo is perfectly valid, but I'm not
sure it's a taxpayer priority."
Of course, right now all this is speculative -- the
bill remains just a bill. "This is a bill that's
passed the House," says Terry Hartle, senior vice
president of the American Council on Education, the
country's foremost higher education lobby. "There are
several other steps in the process. Obviously a lot of
people remain very concerned about the bill. People
will continue to try and perfect it."
The American Council on Education decided to support
the bill, which also reauthorizes funding for area
studies, after language was added to prohibit the
board from reviewing syllabi or interfering with
curricula. After all, says Hartle, there's nothing
inherently objectionable about having a panel oversee
federal grant-making programs. "Stanley Kurtz is
someone who is looking for a conspiracy behind every
tree, but that doesn't mean a properly constructed
advisory committee has to be a threat," he says.
But many Middle Eastern studies professors fear that
the committee will consist of the very
neoconservatives who pushed for its creation. After
all, the Bush administration routinely raids
right-wing, pro-Ariel Sharon think tanks to fill
foreign policy positions. (In the latest example,
David Wurmser, a key neoconservative scholar known for
his close ties to the Israeli right, was appointed six
weeks ago as a Middle East advisor to Dick Cheney's
national security team headed by Lewis "Scooter"
Libby.) Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern
History at the University of Michigan, worries that
the International Studies Act would give the field's
most vituperative critics a perch from which to judge
their doctrinal opponents.
"One of the subtexts is they don't like criticism of
Ariel Sharon and want to shut it down," says Cole, who
formerly directed the school's Center for Middle
Eastern and North African Studies, which could have
its funding threatened under the act. "I could imagine
the board making it a criterion that the politics of a
faculty are not balanced, so the university must
balance things out by hiring pro-Likud scholars, or
else funding could be withdrawn."
The funding that's at stake supports area study
centers -- interdisciplinary programs devoted to
researching specific regions. It was appropriated
under Title VI of the 1958 National Defense Education
Act. Although the International Studies Act would
affect centers concentrating on all parts of the
globe, almost all of the debate about it, both inside
and outside of Congress, has been about Middle Eastern
studies.
There are 17 Middle Eastern studies centers in
America, many of them at the nation's best schools,
including Harvard, Columbia, New York University and
the University of Chicago. They receive Title VI
grants to fund graduate student fellowships and to do
community outreach and education -- activities like
training high school teachers about Middle Eastern
issues and providing insight on the region to the
media. No Title VI money is used for professor
salaries.
The centers form the core of American higher education
about the rest of the world. According to Kramer, "70
percent of Ph.D.'s in international studies did their
work at these national resource centers, and
government money has been vital to the production of
Ph.D.'s in this field."
But government money is being misspent, conservative
critics say, because, having imbibed Said's sinister
post-colonial ideology, Middle Eastern studies
departments have become apologists for the Arab world
and have neglected the study of inconvenient subjects
like the rise of fundamentalist Islam and terrorism.
"Take a look at the program of the Middle Eastern
Studies Association's annual conference," says Kramer.
"There are hundreds of papers there, and none of them
are on terrorism. That's because from an ideological
point of view, a lot of academics look at the study of
terrorism as an overemphasis of an aspect of reality
that they would just as soon go away."
Many Middle East studies scholars, says Kramer,
entered the field because "they were enamored of the
subject, but that subject has an underside. A lot of
academics who entered the field in certain generations
did so with a third-worldist perspective. They're
sympathetic to revolution and believed the Middle East
was on the brink of it. They became enthusiasts of
various resistance movements, nationalist movements,
even at one point Islamist movements."
Other neocons decry the fact that the field has been
overtaken by non-Westerners. David Horowitz, a
right-wing pundit who has spent much of his career
documenting and fighting what he claims is rampant
leftist bias in academia, says that in 1979, 3 percent
of Middle Eastern scholars were non-Western. "As a
result of leftist control of hiring, now 50 percent
come from Middle Eastern countries," he says. One
might not think it was surprising that a significant
percentage of scholars working in a field with a
specific regional, cultural and religious emphasis
would be from that region, but Horowitz apparently
regards many Middle Eastern scholars as mere
mouthpieces for their countries' terrorist ideologies.
"These are fascist countries!" says Horowitz. "They're
Islamofascist countries, and they support terror."
To restore balance to this degraded field,
conservatives propose a kind of ideological
affirmative action. They want to see a revolution in
the ethos of contemporary universities, in which
scholars will devote themselves to pulling their
weight in the war on terror. That means schools must
be compelled to seek out faculty devoted to furthering
American interests. If this sounds oddly like a
flag-waving version of the extreme academic left's
strident calls for "engagement," that doesn't trouble
the conservatives.
As Kramer wrote in "Ivory Towers on Sand," "Middle
Eastern studies must regain their relevance, or risk
becoming 'Exhibit A' in any future case against public
support for area studies. They can best achieve this
by rediscovering and articulating that which is
uniquely American in the American approach to the
Middle East. The idea that the United States plays an
essentially beneficent role in the world is at the
very core of this approach."
To those who object, Kramer writes on his blog,
Sandstorm, "Get off the federal dole. Float
undisturbed in your post-orientalist bubble while more
practical people use the resources to build credible
alternatives."
But Cole says the neocon vision of Middle Eastern
studies as post-orientalist bubble is a deranged
fantasy. (The expression "orientalist" refers to
Edward Said's seminal work, "Orientalism," which
argued that racist blinders led the West to see people
of color as "exotic" Others.) "These arguments that
Kurtz, Kramer and others make are only plausible if
you don't actually refer to reality," he says. As an
example, he reels off the backgrounds of political
scientists at centers receiving Title VI grants. "The
political scientist at the UCLA Middle Eastern center
is Leonard Binder, one of the greats of the field, who
fought on Israel's side in the 1948 war. At the
University of Seattle, the political scientists of the
Middle East are Ellis Goldberg, who does rational
choice and political economy, and Joel Migdal," a
Harvard Ph.D. whose latest book is "Through the Lens
of Israel: Explorations in State and Society."
"At the University of Michigan," Cole continues, "our
political scientist is Mark Tessler, who does survey
and opinion research. He has a Ph.D. from Hebrew
University. There's Gary Sick at Columbia, who served
on Jimmy Carter's National Security Council. We could
go on."
The real radicals, many professors say, are Kurtz and
company -- and they're lightweight radicals at that.
Kurtz, Pipes and Kramer all have Ph.D.'s, but have not
established themselves in American academia, finding a
home in the world of partisan think tanks instead.
Khalidi believes they're trying to punish the academic
mainstream for rejecting them.
"It's amusing that people who are by and large failed
academics, people who just didn't make it through the
standard approach, should argue that it's because of
radical bias," says Khalidi. "Theirs are the sourest
of sour grapes."
If they wanted to, Khalidi argues, conservatives could
do what others do who want more attention paid to a
neglected field. "They could raise money for a chair
in terrorist studies," he says. "The problem is they
want respectability. They want to displace virtually
everybody who teaches the Middle East in this country
>from the center and say the center is between us and
them. They want the academic respectability that comes
with having federal funding. They want to move from
the extreme fringe."
In the end, the debate about what constitutes the
mainstream, about the role of ideology in evaluating
scholarship, can go on ad infinitum, with evidence on
both sides. For all their hysterical nationalism,
Kramer and his cohorts obviously aren't wrong that
Middle East departments, and the humanities in
general, tend to be liberal, or that shrill radicalism
abounds on college campuses. Horowitz is just one of a
group of conservatives who have made their names
documenting leftist excess at American universities,
and they rarely have to look far for egregious
examples. In one infamous case last year, a U.C.
Berkeley course on "The Politics and Poetics of
Palestinian Resistance" warned, "Conservative thinkers
are encouraged to seek other sections." The graduate
student instructor was forced to remove the notice
after a national outcry.
"Clearly, Martin Kramer and his colleagues see
themselves as an embattled minority who have been
unfairly excluded from academia by what they see as
the liberals and leftists who run Middle Eastern
studies in the United States, so they want the federal
government to come in and somehow make sure people
like them get hired or their views get more
attention," says Lockman.
Yet the question, finally, isn't whether conservatives
really are an embattled minority in the university.
It's whether the federal government should supersede
experts in deciding which scholarly views deserve to
be promoted, and which can be overlooked.
Ironically, given the epic scope of the debate, the
actual amount of federal funding at stake is quite
small by the standards of large universities. Most
centers only receive a few hundred thousand dollars
annually from the government. But experts say the
programs are often dependent on it. Khalidi presided
over five such programs when he was director of the
Center for International Studies at the University of
Chicago prior to moving to Columbia. Title VI grants,
he says, are "peanuts in university and federal terms,
but in terms of these fields, they're really
important." Around 30 percent of his graduate students
learned foreign languages on area study grants, he
says.
Because federal funding is so crucial to these
centers' survival, Khalidi says, the threat that HR
3077 poses to Middle Eastern studies in America is
"deadly serious." The bill, he says, would do one of
two things. Either it would "impose the teaching of
one twisted version of Middle East reality, what I
call terrorology, impose it at the taxpayers' expense
as one central element in the way the subject is
taught. Or, by subjecting self-respecting universities
to conditions they will not under any circumstances
accept, it would curtail the teaching of the Middle
East."
Cole says scholars will have a hard time convincing
their bosses to give up funding. "It may be that some
centers would forgo it if the interference looks like
it's too heavy-handed," he says. "But it's really hard
to go to a dean and ask to throw away $200,000 a year
if the criteria that has to be met could be met in
some way that isn't completely odious to the
university. There would be pressure to meet it."
Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the
House Subcommittee on Select Education and author of
the bill, insists that's not what lawmakers intend.
The advisory committee, he says, will be there "to
help schools to learn from each other, to gather
information and help schools learn what other schools
are doing so they can really improve their own
international programs."
Hoekstra agrees with some of Kurtz's criticism of
Middle Eastern studies, but says that has nothing to
do with his legislation. "I do think that there may be
some validity in some of his comments," he says. "I
don't believe these studies should be used to promote
an ideological point of view. I'm about getting
students educated in international affairs, not having
students get into a classroom and have them be
indoctrinated into a political philosophy. But did we
put anything into the bill that puts in some kind of
screening process? For those who believe it's there,
ask them to point out where it is."
Other congressmen, though, have been less cagey about
the bill's likely effect. Welcoming its passage, Rep.
Harold Berman, D-Calif., said, "I am encouraged that
the creation of this Advisory Board will help redress
a problem which is a great concern of mine, namely,
the lack of balance, and indeed the anti-American bias
that pervades Title VI-funded Middle East studies
programs in particular ... surely it is troubling when
evidence suggests that many of the Middle East
regional studies grantees are committed to a narrow
point of view at odds with our national interest, a
point of view that questions the validity of advancing
American ideals of democracy and the rule of law
around the world, and in the Middle East in
particular."
The International Studies in Higher Education Act is a
singular victory for Martin Kramer, who proposed
similar legislation in "Ivory Towers on Sand." An
American-born Israeli citizen with a Ph.D. in Near
Eastern studies from Princeton, he served as the
director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern
and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. Returning
to the States, he joined the same network of
conservative think tanks that nurtured defense
intellectuals like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.
The journal he edits, Middle East Quarterly, is
published by the Middle East Forum, whose director is
Daniel Pipes, the man behind Campus Watch. His book
was published by the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, a staunchly pro-Israel think tank whose
board of advisors includes Perle and former CIA
Director James Woolsey. Wolfowitz resigned from the
board when he joined the administration.
Kramer's entire book can be read as an argument for
legislation like the International Studies Act. Most
of "Ivory Towers on Sand" is a discussion of what
Kramer sees as the ideological corruption within
Middle Eastern studies, but he also details the
minutia of government funding, outlining Title VI's
history in order to examine how it can be reformed.
As Kramer reports, Title VI was, from its inception in
1958, "administered as a no-strings-attached benefit."
Back then, though, the leaders of the field were
people "of a patriotic disposition, who could be
counted upon to help out," Kramer writes. This, he
makes clear, is no longer the case. Thus the time has
come to attach strings.
"It is important for Congress to take a deeper
interest in Title VI, and Middle Eastern studies are
as good a place as any to begin asking questions," he
wrote in "Ivory Towers on Sand." "A relevant
congressional subcommittee might hold a hearing on the
contribution of Middle Eastern studies to American
public policy."
In June, the Congressional Subcommittee on Select
Education did just that, convening hearings on
"International Programs in Higher Education and
Questions of Bias." At the end of his opening
statement, Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., said, "I am
interested in opening the discussion and debate to
learn more about the merits of and concern for federal
support given to some of the international education
programs that have been questioned in regard to their
teachings, which have been associated with efforts to
potentially undermine American foreign policy."
Kurtz, testifying before the subcommittee, nodded to
Kramer, calling his book "the most comprehensive and
authoritative account of the extremist bias against
American foreign policy that pervades contemporary
Middle East studies." Much of the blame for this bias,
he said, is a result of the malign influence of Edward
Said and post-colonial theory, which he called the
"ruling intellectual paradigm in academic area
studies."
He proceeded to list some of Said's more inflammatory
statements, including his 1999 call for Bill Clinton,
Madeleine Albright and Wesley Clark to be tried for
war crimes along with Slobodan Milosevic. Said, Kurtz
continued, "has even treated the very idea of American
democracy as a farce. He has belittled the reverence
in which Americans hold the Constitution, which Said
dismisses with the comment that it was written by
'wealthy, white, slaveholding Anglophilic men.'"
There might have been an eerie déjà vu in seeing a
congressional committee examine the work of a renowned
scholar for treasonous intent, but Kurtz told the
panel he was not proposing to blacklist Said. "My
concern is that Title VI-funded centers too seldom
balance readings from Edward Said and his like-minded
colleagues with readings from authors who support
American foreign policy," he said. This was more
generous than Kurtz's comrades have been toward their
enemies' work. Last year, Pipes told Salon, "I want
Noam Chomsky to be taught at universities about as
much as I want Hitler's writing or Stalin's writing.
These are wild and extremist ideas that I believe have
no place in a university."
At the end of his testimony, Kurtz made several policy
recommendations, including the creation of a board to
manage Title VI. Asked about the role of the board in
an e-mail interview, Kurtz wrote, "The board should
look to encourage intellectual diversity, and it
should also encourage programs that successfully bring
students into positions of responsibility in the areas
of international affairs, international business,
foreign language expertise, and national security."
According to Kurtz, the legislation is in the spirit
of the best liberal tradition. "I hope that HR 3077
will encourage vigorous debate within the academy on
the state of the world generally, and on American
foreign policy in particular," he writes. "I'd like to
see the sort of debate that now goes on between the
academy and its outside critics take place within the
academy itself. That doesn't mean excluding critics of
American foreign policy from the academy. It means
bringing supporters back in."
For professors of Middle Eastern studies, though, it's
outrageous, and dangerous, that the government is
meddling with academic freedom. And it's especially
galling that those who are calling for government
intervention are the very neocons whose fear-mongering
claims about Iraq have been shown to be false. "The
thing that burns me, these are the guys who told us
that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program and
would have a nuke within three years," says Cole. "And
they're coming back and telling us that our
scholarship is shoddy and we need to be overseen by
them?"
To Khalidi, the neoconservative attack on Middle
Eastern studies recalls the assault launched earlier
this year on American intelligence agencies that
failed to confirm right-wing assumptions about Iraq.
Once again, conservatives are questioning the
competency of those who don't agree with them about
the Middle East, insisting their views would triumph
if only they weren't suppressed by a mandarin
establishment in need of immediate reform. And just as
Pentagon hawks set up their own intelligence office
when the CIA didn't tell them what they wanted to hear
about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, now the
neocons are trying to do the same thing in academia.
"Neoconservatives want to substitute zealotry and true
belief for real expertise," Khalidi says. "They're not
just after us in the Middle East field. They're not
just after academics. You see this inside the
military, inside the intelligence community. You see
this in the way the State Department has been treated.
Anybody who knows anything about anything is suspect.
Unless you have the right views you are not allowed to
speak, and if you do, you do so at your peril."
What follows is an article that originally appeared in Salon about, what I find to be, the scariest thing the US government is planning right now. This is essentially talking about passing legislation that can punish college faculty for not towing the government line. This hits especially close to home for me...
Osama University?
Neoconservative critics have long charged Middle
Eastern studies departments with anti-American bias.
Now they've enlisted Congress in their crusade.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
Nov. 6, 2003 | On Oct. 21, the House of
Representatives unanimously passed a bill that could
require university international studies departments
to show more support for American foreign policy or
risk their federal funding. Its approval followed
hearings this summer in which members of Congress
listened to testimony about the pernicious influence
of the late Edward Said in Middle Eastern studies
departments, described as enclaves of debased
anti-Americanism. Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at
the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank,
testified, "Title VI-funded programs in Middle Eastern
Studies (and other area studies) tend to purvey
extreme and one-sided criticisms of American foreign
policy." Evidently, the House agreed and decided to
intervene.
Emboldened by its dominance of Washington, the right
is trying to enlist government on its side in the
campus culture wars. "Since they are the mainstream in
Washington think tanks and the right-wing corridors of
Congress, they figure, 'Let's translate that political
capital to education,'" says Rashid Khalidi, who was
recently appointed to the Edward Said Chair of Arab
studies at Columbia University.
It's not surprising that they started with Middle
Eastern studies. There's a particular enmity between
hard-line supporters of Israel -- who, with the
extraordinary ascension of neoconservatives in the
Bush administration, now dominate the American right
-- and academics who specialize in studying the Arab
and Muslim world. That enmity burst into open conflict
after Sept. 11, when conservatives saw an opportunity
to accuse Middle East academics not just of biased
scholarship but of representing a kind of intellectual
fifth column. Soon after the World Trade Center fell,
the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a
Washington-based group co-founded by Lynne Cheney,
wife of the vice president, and Sen. Joe Lieberman,
D-Conn., published a report called "Defending
Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America
and What Can Be Done About It," which listed examples
of insufficiently patriotic behavior of the part of
the professoriate and called universities the "weak
link" in the war on terror.
At the same time, Martin Kramer, editor of the
right-wing Middle East Quarterly, published a book
called "Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle
Eastern Studies in America," in which he argues that
academia, in thrall to romantic third-worldism, has
turned a blind eye to the region's dangerous
pathologies. Last year Daniel Pipes, a colleague of
Kramer's who has since been appointed by President
Bush to sit on the U.S. Institute of Peace, launched
Campus Watch, a Web site devoted to monitoring Middle
Eastern studies departments for signs of anti-American
bias. He published dossiers cataloguing the political
sins of some of the most respected professors in the
field, and invited students to submit reports on their
instructors.
Until recently, though, this fight has been
rhetorical, confined to Web sites, books, magazines
and lectures. Now, with HR 3077, the International
Studies in Higher Education Act, the House has taken
sides. If it becomes law, it will create a board to
monitor how federally funded international-studies
centers impact national security. The board will
evaluate whether supporters of American foreign policy
are adequately represented in university programs.
Conservatives, says Kramer, "need to be able to
compete on a level playing field with others."
Inherent in the act is the assumption that if most
established experts believe American Middle East
policy is bad, the flaw lies with the experts, not the
policy. "There's the threat that centers will be
punished for not toeing the official line out of
Washington, which is an unprecedented degree of
federal intrusion into a university-based area studies
program," says Zachary Lockman, a New York University
history professor and director of the school's Hagop
Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.
The International Studies in Higher Education Act
would not grant the government the power to exclude
voices from Middle Eastern studies departments, but it
would give the government a role in defining which
views need to be included in the academic mainstream.
The seven-member board it creates would make
recommendations to Congress about how the centers
"might better reflect the national needs related to
the homeland security," and make sure that programs
"reflect diverse perspectives and represent the full
range of views on world regions, foreign languages,
and international affairs." Two members of the board
would represent national security agencies, while
others would be appointed by Congress and the
administration.
The bill also mandates that centers allow government
recruiters full access to students in the centers. In
the past, professors have resisted cooperating with
national security agencies, fearing that if the line
between independent research and government
intelligence was blurred, they and their students
might be targeted as American agents while studying
abroad.
And because the bill mandates that centers train
students for government service, Kramer hopes students
who plan to pursue fields useful to national defense
will be given special consideration when fellowships
are awarded. Right now, he says, "If you're interested
in gender in eighth century Cairo, you're just as
likely to receive a grant as if you're interested in
the discourse of Osama bin Laden. Studying gender in
eighth century Cairo is perfectly valid, but I'm not
sure it's a taxpayer priority."
Of course, right now all this is speculative -- the
bill remains just a bill. "This is a bill that's
passed the House," says Terry Hartle, senior vice
president of the American Council on Education, the
country's foremost higher education lobby. "There are
several other steps in the process. Obviously a lot of
people remain very concerned about the bill. People
will continue to try and perfect it."
The American Council on Education decided to support
the bill, which also reauthorizes funding for area
studies, after language was added to prohibit the
board from reviewing syllabi or interfering with
curricula. After all, says Hartle, there's nothing
inherently objectionable about having a panel oversee
federal grant-making programs. "Stanley Kurtz is
someone who is looking for a conspiracy behind every
tree, but that doesn't mean a properly constructed
advisory committee has to be a threat," he says.
But many Middle Eastern studies professors fear that
the committee will consist of the very
neoconservatives who pushed for its creation. After
all, the Bush administration routinely raids
right-wing, pro-Ariel Sharon think tanks to fill
foreign policy positions. (In the latest example,
David Wurmser, a key neoconservative scholar known for
his close ties to the Israeli right, was appointed six
weeks ago as a Middle East advisor to Dick Cheney's
national security team headed by Lewis "Scooter"
Libby.) Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern
History at the University of Michigan, worries that
the International Studies Act would give the field's
most vituperative critics a perch from which to judge
their doctrinal opponents.
"One of the subtexts is they don't like criticism of
Ariel Sharon and want to shut it down," says Cole, who
formerly directed the school's Center for Middle
Eastern and North African Studies, which could have
its funding threatened under the act. "I could imagine
the board making it a criterion that the politics of a
faculty are not balanced, so the university must
balance things out by hiring pro-Likud scholars, or
else funding could be withdrawn."
The funding that's at stake supports area study
centers -- interdisciplinary programs devoted to
researching specific regions. It was appropriated
under Title VI of the 1958 National Defense Education
Act. Although the International Studies Act would
affect centers concentrating on all parts of the
globe, almost all of the debate about it, both inside
and outside of Congress, has been about Middle Eastern
studies.
There are 17 Middle Eastern studies centers in
America, many of them at the nation's best schools,
including Harvard, Columbia, New York University and
the University of Chicago. They receive Title VI
grants to fund graduate student fellowships and to do
community outreach and education -- activities like
training high school teachers about Middle Eastern
issues and providing insight on the region to the
media. No Title VI money is used for professor
salaries.
The centers form the core of American higher education
about the rest of the world. According to Kramer, "70
percent of Ph.D.'s in international studies did their
work at these national resource centers, and
government money has been vital to the production of
Ph.D.'s in this field."
But government money is being misspent, conservative
critics say, because, having imbibed Said's sinister
post-colonial ideology, Middle Eastern studies
departments have become apologists for the Arab world
and have neglected the study of inconvenient subjects
like the rise of fundamentalist Islam and terrorism.
"Take a look at the program of the Middle Eastern
Studies Association's annual conference," says Kramer.
"There are hundreds of papers there, and none of them
are on terrorism. That's because from an ideological
point of view, a lot of academics look at the study of
terrorism as an overemphasis of an aspect of reality
that they would just as soon go away."
Many Middle East studies scholars, says Kramer,
entered the field because "they were enamored of the
subject, but that subject has an underside. A lot of
academics who entered the field in certain generations
did so with a third-worldist perspective. They're
sympathetic to revolution and believed the Middle East
was on the brink of it. They became enthusiasts of
various resistance movements, nationalist movements,
even at one point Islamist movements."
Other neocons decry the fact that the field has been
overtaken by non-Westerners. David Horowitz, a
right-wing pundit who has spent much of his career
documenting and fighting what he claims is rampant
leftist bias in academia, says that in 1979, 3 percent
of Middle Eastern scholars were non-Western. "As a
result of leftist control of hiring, now 50 percent
come from Middle Eastern countries," he says. One
might not think it was surprising that a significant
percentage of scholars working in a field with a
specific regional, cultural and religious emphasis
would be from that region, but Horowitz apparently
regards many Middle Eastern scholars as mere
mouthpieces for their countries' terrorist ideologies.
"These are fascist countries!" says Horowitz. "They're
Islamofascist countries, and they support terror."
To restore balance to this degraded field,
conservatives propose a kind of ideological
affirmative action. They want to see a revolution in
the ethos of contemporary universities, in which
scholars will devote themselves to pulling their
weight in the war on terror. That means schools must
be compelled to seek out faculty devoted to furthering
American interests. If this sounds oddly like a
flag-waving version of the extreme academic left's
strident calls for "engagement," that doesn't trouble
the conservatives.
As Kramer wrote in "Ivory Towers on Sand," "Middle
Eastern studies must regain their relevance, or risk
becoming 'Exhibit A' in any future case against public
support for area studies. They can best achieve this
by rediscovering and articulating that which is
uniquely American in the American approach to the
Middle East. The idea that the United States plays an
essentially beneficent role in the world is at the
very core of this approach."
To those who object, Kramer writes on his blog,
Sandstorm, "Get off the federal dole. Float
undisturbed in your post-orientalist bubble while more
practical people use the resources to build credible
alternatives."
But Cole says the neocon vision of Middle Eastern
studies as post-orientalist bubble is a deranged
fantasy. (The expression "orientalist" refers to
Edward Said's seminal work, "Orientalism," which
argued that racist blinders led the West to see people
of color as "exotic" Others.) "These arguments that
Kurtz, Kramer and others make are only plausible if
you don't actually refer to reality," he says. As an
example, he reels off the backgrounds of political
scientists at centers receiving Title VI grants. "The
political scientist at the UCLA Middle Eastern center
is Leonard Binder, one of the greats of the field, who
fought on Israel's side in the 1948 war. At the
University of Seattle, the political scientists of the
Middle East are Ellis Goldberg, who does rational
choice and political economy, and Joel Migdal," a
Harvard Ph.D. whose latest book is "Through the Lens
of Israel: Explorations in State and Society."
"At the University of Michigan," Cole continues, "our
political scientist is Mark Tessler, who does survey
and opinion research. He has a Ph.D. from Hebrew
University. There's Gary Sick at Columbia, who served
on Jimmy Carter's National Security Council. We could
go on."
The real radicals, many professors say, are Kurtz and
company -- and they're lightweight radicals at that.
Kurtz, Pipes and Kramer all have Ph.D.'s, but have not
established themselves in American academia, finding a
home in the world of partisan think tanks instead.
Khalidi believes they're trying to punish the academic
mainstream for rejecting them.
"It's amusing that people who are by and large failed
academics, people who just didn't make it through the
standard approach, should argue that it's because of
radical bias," says Khalidi. "Theirs are the sourest
of sour grapes."
If they wanted to, Khalidi argues, conservatives could
do what others do who want more attention paid to a
neglected field. "They could raise money for a chair
in terrorist studies," he says. "The problem is they
want respectability. They want to displace virtually
everybody who teaches the Middle East in this country
>from the center and say the center is between us and
them. They want the academic respectability that comes
with having federal funding. They want to move from
the extreme fringe."
In the end, the debate about what constitutes the
mainstream, about the role of ideology in evaluating
scholarship, can go on ad infinitum, with evidence on
both sides. For all their hysterical nationalism,
Kramer and his cohorts obviously aren't wrong that
Middle East departments, and the humanities in
general, tend to be liberal, or that shrill radicalism
abounds on college campuses. Horowitz is just one of a
group of conservatives who have made their names
documenting leftist excess at American universities,
and they rarely have to look far for egregious
examples. In one infamous case last year, a U.C.
Berkeley course on "The Politics and Poetics of
Palestinian Resistance" warned, "Conservative thinkers
are encouraged to seek other sections." The graduate
student instructor was forced to remove the notice
after a national outcry.
"Clearly, Martin Kramer and his colleagues see
themselves as an embattled minority who have been
unfairly excluded from academia by what they see as
the liberals and leftists who run Middle Eastern
studies in the United States, so they want the federal
government to come in and somehow make sure people
like them get hired or their views get more
attention," says Lockman.
Yet the question, finally, isn't whether conservatives
really are an embattled minority in the university.
It's whether the federal government should supersede
experts in deciding which scholarly views deserve to
be promoted, and which can be overlooked.
Ironically, given the epic scope of the debate, the
actual amount of federal funding at stake is quite
small by the standards of large universities. Most
centers only receive a few hundred thousand dollars
annually from the government. But experts say the
programs are often dependent on it. Khalidi presided
over five such programs when he was director of the
Center for International Studies at the University of
Chicago prior to moving to Columbia. Title VI grants,
he says, are "peanuts in university and federal terms,
but in terms of these fields, they're really
important." Around 30 percent of his graduate students
learned foreign languages on area study grants, he
says.
Because federal funding is so crucial to these
centers' survival, Khalidi says, the threat that HR
3077 poses to Middle Eastern studies in America is
"deadly serious." The bill, he says, would do one of
two things. Either it would "impose the teaching of
one twisted version of Middle East reality, what I
call terrorology, impose it at the taxpayers' expense
as one central element in the way the subject is
taught. Or, by subjecting self-respecting universities
to conditions they will not under any circumstances
accept, it would curtail the teaching of the Middle
East."
Cole says scholars will have a hard time convincing
their bosses to give up funding. "It may be that some
centers would forgo it if the interference looks like
it's too heavy-handed," he says. "But it's really hard
to go to a dean and ask to throw away $200,000 a year
if the criteria that has to be met could be met in
some way that isn't completely odious to the
university. There would be pressure to meet it."
Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the
House Subcommittee on Select Education and author of
the bill, insists that's not what lawmakers intend.
The advisory committee, he says, will be there "to
help schools to learn from each other, to gather
information and help schools learn what other schools
are doing so they can really improve their own
international programs."
Hoekstra agrees with some of Kurtz's criticism of
Middle Eastern studies, but says that has nothing to
do with his legislation. "I do think that there may be
some validity in some of his comments," he says. "I
don't believe these studies should be used to promote
an ideological point of view. I'm about getting
students educated in international affairs, not having
students get into a classroom and have them be
indoctrinated into a political philosophy. But did we
put anything into the bill that puts in some kind of
screening process? For those who believe it's there,
ask them to point out where it is."
Other congressmen, though, have been less cagey about
the bill's likely effect. Welcoming its passage, Rep.
Harold Berman, D-Calif., said, "I am encouraged that
the creation of this Advisory Board will help redress
a problem which is a great concern of mine, namely,
the lack of balance, and indeed the anti-American bias
that pervades Title VI-funded Middle East studies
programs in particular ... surely it is troubling when
evidence suggests that many of the Middle East
regional studies grantees are committed to a narrow
point of view at odds with our national interest, a
point of view that questions the validity of advancing
American ideals of democracy and the rule of law
around the world, and in the Middle East in
particular."
The International Studies in Higher Education Act is a
singular victory for Martin Kramer, who proposed
similar legislation in "Ivory Towers on Sand." An
American-born Israeli citizen with a Ph.D. in Near
Eastern studies from Princeton, he served as the
director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern
and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. Returning
to the States, he joined the same network of
conservative think tanks that nurtured defense
intellectuals like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.
The journal he edits, Middle East Quarterly, is
published by the Middle East Forum, whose director is
Daniel Pipes, the man behind Campus Watch. His book
was published by the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, a staunchly pro-Israel think tank whose
board of advisors includes Perle and former CIA
Director James Woolsey. Wolfowitz resigned from the
board when he joined the administration.
Kramer's entire book can be read as an argument for
legislation like the International Studies Act. Most
of "Ivory Towers on Sand" is a discussion of what
Kramer sees as the ideological corruption within
Middle Eastern studies, but he also details the
minutia of government funding, outlining Title VI's
history in order to examine how it can be reformed.
As Kramer reports, Title VI was, from its inception in
1958, "administered as a no-strings-attached benefit."
Back then, though, the leaders of the field were
people "of a patriotic disposition, who could be
counted upon to help out," Kramer writes. This, he
makes clear, is no longer the case. Thus the time has
come to attach strings.
"It is important for Congress to take a deeper
interest in Title VI, and Middle Eastern studies are
as good a place as any to begin asking questions," he
wrote in "Ivory Towers on Sand." "A relevant
congressional subcommittee might hold a hearing on the
contribution of Middle Eastern studies to American
public policy."
In June, the Congressional Subcommittee on Select
Education did just that, convening hearings on
"International Programs in Higher Education and
Questions of Bias." At the end of his opening
statement, Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., said, "I am
interested in opening the discussion and debate to
learn more about the merits of and concern for federal
support given to some of the international education
programs that have been questioned in regard to their
teachings, which have been associated with efforts to
potentially undermine American foreign policy."
Kurtz, testifying before the subcommittee, nodded to
Kramer, calling his book "the most comprehensive and
authoritative account of the extremist bias against
American foreign policy that pervades contemporary
Middle East studies." Much of the blame for this bias,
he said, is a result of the malign influence of Edward
Said and post-colonial theory, which he called the
"ruling intellectual paradigm in academic area
studies."
He proceeded to list some of Said's more inflammatory
statements, including his 1999 call for Bill Clinton,
Madeleine Albright and Wesley Clark to be tried for
war crimes along with Slobodan Milosevic. Said, Kurtz
continued, "has even treated the very idea of American
democracy as a farce. He has belittled the reverence
in which Americans hold the Constitution, which Said
dismisses with the comment that it was written by
'wealthy, white, slaveholding Anglophilic men.'"
There might have been an eerie déjà vu in seeing a
congressional committee examine the work of a renowned
scholar for treasonous intent, but Kurtz told the
panel he was not proposing to blacklist Said. "My
concern is that Title VI-funded centers too seldom
balance readings from Edward Said and his like-minded
colleagues with readings from authors who support
American foreign policy," he said. This was more
generous than Kurtz's comrades have been toward their
enemies' work. Last year, Pipes told Salon, "I want
Noam Chomsky to be taught at universities about as
much as I want Hitler's writing or Stalin's writing.
These are wild and extremist ideas that I believe have
no place in a university."
At the end of his testimony, Kurtz made several policy
recommendations, including the creation of a board to
manage Title VI. Asked about the role of the board in
an e-mail interview, Kurtz wrote, "The board should
look to encourage intellectual diversity, and it
should also encourage programs that successfully bring
students into positions of responsibility in the areas
of international affairs, international business,
foreign language expertise, and national security."
According to Kurtz, the legislation is in the spirit
of the best liberal tradition. "I hope that HR 3077
will encourage vigorous debate within the academy on
the state of the world generally, and on American
foreign policy in particular," he writes. "I'd like to
see the sort of debate that now goes on between the
academy and its outside critics take place within the
academy itself. That doesn't mean excluding critics of
American foreign policy from the academy. It means
bringing supporters back in."
For professors of Middle Eastern studies, though, it's
outrageous, and dangerous, that the government is
meddling with academic freedom. And it's especially
galling that those who are calling for government
intervention are the very neocons whose fear-mongering
claims about Iraq have been shown to be false. "The
thing that burns me, these are the guys who told us
that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program and
would have a nuke within three years," says Cole. "And
they're coming back and telling us that our
scholarship is shoddy and we need to be overseen by
them?"
To Khalidi, the neoconservative attack on Middle
Eastern studies recalls the assault launched earlier
this year on American intelligence agencies that
failed to confirm right-wing assumptions about Iraq.
Once again, conservatives are questioning the
competency of those who don't agree with them about
the Middle East, insisting their views would triumph
if only they weren't suppressed by a mandarin
establishment in need of immediate reform. And just as
Pentagon hawks set up their own intelligence office
when the CIA didn't tell them what they wanted to hear
about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, now the
neocons are trying to do the same thing in academia.
"Neoconservatives want to substitute zealotry and true
belief for real expertise," Khalidi says. "They're not
just after us in the Middle East field. They're not
just after academics. You see this inside the
military, inside the intelligence community. You see
this in the way the State Department has been treated.
Anybody who knows anything about anything is suspect.
Unless you have the right views you are not allowed to
speak, and if you do, you do so at your peril."
Monday, January 26, 2004
Can we Finally Talk About Bush's Draft Dodging?
Here's some info from Michael Moore about Bush's AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard, a story original broken by the Boston Globe in 2000 and immediately ignored by the "Liberal Media". I'm hoping to see this finally get some play, hopefully before Kerry's admited war crimes get brought up by the Republicans.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?messageDate=2004-01-23
Here's some info from Michael Moore about Bush's AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard, a story original broken by the Boston Globe in 2000 and immediately ignored by the "Liberal Media". I'm hoping to see this finally get some play, hopefully before Kerry's admited war crimes get brought up by the Republicans.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?messageDate=2004-01-23
Green Party = Linux
This is probably the first time I'm discussing my affiliation with the Green Party on this blog, but here comes a little comparison between the three largest political parties in the US with the three largest computer operating systems in the world written by my friend Steve Herrick and originally published at http://www.unrepentantnadervoter.com. The site's also got some interesting stuff about the Greens and the 2004 presidential race and the Green frontrunner, Peter Camejo.
Green Party = Linux?
Filed under: General— The Management @ 02:32 PM
How Microsoft is like the Republican Party:
- Run by wealthy white men with bad haircuts.
- Arrogant, confrontational, and often deceptive way of dealing with the world.
- Leaders are frequently overrated.
- Priority is expanding and controlling everything and everyone, despite claiming to stand for freedom.
- Based in the US.
- Uniform, though probably not nearly as monolithic as reputed. Extremely slow to change.
- Hasn’t come up with a truly innovative idea in more than half its lifetime.
- Is probably spying on you at this very moment.
- Slow to recognize the power of the Internet.
- Extremely large budget for organizing and publicity.
How Apple is like the Democratic Party:
- Run by wealthy white men with good haircuts.
- Suave, clever way of dealing with the world, masking the fact that it’s still controlled and controlling.
- Leaders are quite bright, but still polemical.
- Priority is on providing a kinder, gentler (and slicker) product to the market.
- Based in the US.
- Uniform, but somewhat flexible and open to change.
- Still occasionally comes up with some good ideas, though using other people’s ideas is more common.
- Thinks spying on people is generally a bad thing.
- Quick to recognize the power of the Internet.
- Large budget for organizing and publicity.
How Linux is like the Green Party:
- Not really run by anybody. Participants are working and middle class, with every conceivable haircut.
- Deeply but quietly enmeshed in the world.
- Leadership is distributed widely, and most often exercised only by example.
- Priorities are interdependence, participation, sharing, transparency and freedom.
- Based in dozens and dozens of nations, with countless languages and local variations.
- Highly diverse. Followers of different variants bicker endlessly, but will stand united against real enemies.
- A steady source of good ideas, big and small.
- Works actively to prohibit and prevent government and corporate spying.
- Probably wouldn’t exist without the Internet.
- Heavily dependent on volunteers and contributions for organizing and publicity.
Author: Steve Herrick (received in personal email)
This is probably the first time I'm discussing my affiliation with the Green Party on this blog, but here comes a little comparison between the three largest political parties in the US with the three largest computer operating systems in the world written by my friend Steve Herrick and originally published at http://www.unrepentantnadervoter.com. The site's also got some interesting stuff about the Greens and the 2004 presidential race and the Green frontrunner, Peter Camejo.
Green Party = Linux?
Filed under: General— The Management @ 02:32 PM
How Microsoft is like the Republican Party:
- Run by wealthy white men with bad haircuts.
- Arrogant, confrontational, and often deceptive way of dealing with the world.
- Leaders are frequently overrated.
- Priority is expanding and controlling everything and everyone, despite claiming to stand for freedom.
- Based in the US.
- Uniform, though probably not nearly as monolithic as reputed. Extremely slow to change.
- Hasn’t come up with a truly innovative idea in more than half its lifetime.
- Is probably spying on you at this very moment.
- Slow to recognize the power of the Internet.
- Extremely large budget for organizing and publicity.
How Apple is like the Democratic Party:
- Run by wealthy white men with good haircuts.
- Suave, clever way of dealing with the world, masking the fact that it’s still controlled and controlling.
- Leaders are quite bright, but still polemical.
- Priority is on providing a kinder, gentler (and slicker) product to the market.
- Based in the US.
- Uniform, but somewhat flexible and open to change.
- Still occasionally comes up with some good ideas, though using other people’s ideas is more common.
- Thinks spying on people is generally a bad thing.
- Quick to recognize the power of the Internet.
- Large budget for organizing and publicity.
How Linux is like the Green Party:
- Not really run by anybody. Participants are working and middle class, with every conceivable haircut.
- Deeply but quietly enmeshed in the world.
- Leadership is distributed widely, and most often exercised only by example.
- Priorities are interdependence, participation, sharing, transparency and freedom.
- Based in dozens and dozens of nations, with countless languages and local variations.
- Highly diverse. Followers of different variants bicker endlessly, but will stand united against real enemies.
- A steady source of good ideas, big and small.
- Works actively to prohibit and prevent government and corporate spying.
- Probably wouldn’t exist without the Internet.
- Heavily dependent on volunteers and contributions for organizing and publicity.
Author: Steve Herrick (received in personal email)
Da Pope is Dope
So, I'm sitting at Brown Jug, enjoying my lunch and a nice conversation with a colleague about our difficulties in discussing the visual in our research, a follow up to our seminar in Safavid Art History, when I spot something extremely surreal on the TV above the bar. The Pope watching breakdancers perform in the Vatican. Initially, I added this as another item on my list of reasons to hate Vatican II. Then I started thinking about how Sufi it all seemed. Anyways, it appears that the Pope approves of Polish breakdancing.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/01/26/pope.breakdancers.ap/index.html
So, I'm sitting at Brown Jug, enjoying my lunch and a nice conversation with a colleague about our difficulties in discussing the visual in our research, a follow up to our seminar in Safavid Art History, when I spot something extremely surreal on the TV above the bar. The Pope watching breakdancers perform in the Vatican. Initially, I added this as another item on my list of reasons to hate Vatican II. Then I started thinking about how Sufi it all seemed. Anyways, it appears that the Pope approves of Polish breakdancing.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/01/26/pope.breakdancers.ap/index.html
Another Way the Patriot Act can Screw You
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/26/email.scam/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/26/email.scam/index.html
Part of Patriot Act Rule Unconstitutional
To quote Georgetown University law professor David Cole, a court ruling stating that prohibiting expert advice and assistance to groups deemed terrorists is "a victory for everyone who believes the war on terrorism ought to be fought consistent with constitutional principles."
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/01/26/patriot.act.ap/index.html
To quote Georgetown University law professor David Cole, a court ruling stating that prohibiting expert advice and assistance to groups deemed terrorists is "a victory for everyone who believes the war on terrorism ought to be fought consistent with constitutional principles."
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/01/26/patriot.act.ap/index.html
Friday, January 23, 2004
But Will he be Buried in Red...
Captain Kangaroo... Dead.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/23/obit.kangaroo/index.html
Captain Kangaroo... Dead.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/23/obit.kangaroo/index.html
Senategate
So, it looks like Republican interns have been hacking the Democrats computer system and distributing confidential memos. Sound like a problem? Nah, of course not. Its not like any of those memos could be nearly as important as the Reagan papers Bush fought so hard to keep out of the public eye.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/23/politics/23JUDG.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1074885710-6FsLwm6Jk0jlgaTJlWtEYA
So, it looks like Republican interns have been hacking the Democrats computer system and distributing confidential memos. Sound like a problem? Nah, of course not. Its not like any of those memos could be nearly as important as the Reagan papers Bush fought so hard to keep out of the public eye.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/23/politics/23JUDG.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1074885710-6FsLwm6Jk0jlgaTJlWtEYA
Cheetos of Mass Destruction
So, all most of us know about Weapons of Mass Destruction is that they are bad and have the potential of killing us real bad. Therefore, when the Bush administration starts redefining what they are looking for, expecting to find, have found in Iraq, we don't really know what they are saying. The good folks at the Slacktivist have moved this dialogue into a realm we can all understand... Cheese.
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2004/01/cheetohs_of_mas.html
So, all most of us know about Weapons of Mass Destruction is that they are bad and have the potential of killing us real bad. Therefore, when the Bush administration starts redefining what they are looking for, expecting to find, have found in Iraq, we don't really know what they are saying. The good folks at the Slacktivist have moved this dialogue into a realm we can all understand... Cheese.
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2004/01/cheetohs_of_mas.html
Ha Ha, Drunk Elephants
Now, it's sad and all that the elephants died, but especially in light of someone showing me Mongol recipies for Elephant food that didn't look to different from the recipies for people food, drunk elephants are funny, even when they are terrorizing India.
Thanks to David for the link. He should have posted it himself.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3423881.stm
Now, it's sad and all that the elephants died, but especially in light of someone showing me Mongol recipies for Elephant food that didn't look to different from the recipies for people food, drunk elephants are funny, even when they are terrorizing India.
Thanks to David for the link. He should have posted it himself.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3423881.stm
