Poor Larry Summers. His problems started months ago when he got pulled over by the gender police at Harvard for a misdemeanor. He was caught talking and thinking out loud at the same time.
Basically, Larry asked the faculty to consider the possibility that men might be better at science and math. Well, the howls were loud and predictable. And the misdemeanor suddenly became a felony.
Quickly, an intellectually intolerant left leaning media joined with a spoiled, pampered, lazy, attention starved element of the faculty to portray Summers as Archie Bunker with a mensa-like ability to do a New York Times crossword puzzle in 60 seconds or less.
By the time this academic-media cartel had carved up Summers' ample arse, he was viewed as a guy who would soon be telling female faculty to skip teaching on days when they had their period. The cartel killed him, turning him into a dead man walking whose every word was used as a weapon to hasten his departure.
In Cairo, fringe fundamentalists offended by cartoons portraying Muhammad as a walking time bomb riot and burn embassies. In Cambridge, they simply hold no-confidence votes among the faculty.
Make no mistake: the Summers slaying was academic terrorism. It was a successful and lethal attack on a guy who made the mistake of believing that Harvard was where ideas - good, bad and stupid - deserved open and on-going discussion.
And it wasn't an ambush either. It was public, frontal and constant. It was led by the equivalence crowd - academic and media - who believe that America is its own worst enemy, the U.S. military ought to be disbanded, people who don't see 'Broke Back Mountain' are homophobic, civil service and SAT scores are racist and Larry Summers - or anyone else - better not ask them to think outside the narrow academic box they've lived in most of their lives.
Here is what a tenured member of the Harvard faculty is required to do in order to earn a paycheck: Wake up and draw a breath.
Here is what they do when they feel threatened by someone asking that they work harder and think more deeply about the life around them: Whine, hold closed meetings, make noise, complain about the boss's temperament and - worst sin of all in Cambridge - hint that he's not inclusive enough.
Summers should have stood up in the furious firefight after his remarks about women and the sciences and told the easily offended professors to shut up, go back to their classrooms and teach. But he wimped out, incorrectly figuring his concession would be viewed as a willingness to co-exist.
It wasn't. Instead, it was a fatal weakness that only encouraged and emboldened his opposition and their allies on various editorial boards.
And if you're keeping score at home, here's a late final from Harvard: Demagoguery just beat debate and it wasn't even close because it was a home game for the winners.
Email JScarborough@msnbc.com
Who cares if the Vice President shot a man in the face and kept it from the press for 24 hours?
Well, I do.
Seems to me that for an administration already under suspicion for keeping too many secrets from the American people, hiding such a dramatic news item quiet for even more than an hour would be a political mistake. White House political hands had to know that this was going to be a talkable story that would have news outlets and late night comedian jabbering for weeks to come. So why hold it when they had to know doing so would generate hostility in the press?
I have no good answers. Do you?
Let me know what you think.
Email JScarborough@msnbc.com
Media misses mark on cartoon riots (Joe Scarborough)
Is it just me or are you getting fed up with the in the Middle East?
Being politically correct is one thing, but giving a free pass to these radicals is just irresponsible. Isn’t it time news commentators and other reasoned souls across the world started calling these people the freaks that they are?
They are, after all, burning down buildings because a cartoon suggested that Islam has become a religion associated with bombings.
Oh, Gee. Stop the presses.
And while we’re at it, let’s stop lying about how Muslim radicals are a small, misguided group of violent renegades who have perverted the true meaning of Islam.
I actually believed that Urban Media Legend until Palestinian election results handed Hamas a landslide victory. Hamas is, after all, an ultra-violent terrorist organization who has spent the last decade blowing up little children at bus stops and grandmoms in public markets.
And through it all, Western commentators keep blaming US foreign policy for these thugs' murderous acts.
Time Magazine predictably suggested Arab rioters have turned on us because of Iraq.
Huh?
I thought we went into Iraq after 19 Muslim extremists killed 3,000 innocent Americans on September 11th.
And after Muslim extremists killed American troops aboard the USS Cole.
And after Muslim extremists killed American troops at Khobar Towers.
And I was just sure those African Embassies were blown up by Muslim radicals before we went into Iraq.
And unless I am really getting my dates confused, I thought Muslim radicals also tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993--a full decade before we ousted Saddam Hussein.
Come to think of it, radical Muslims have been trying to kill Americans for a long time. These freaks hated Americans long before George W. Bush first stepped into the Oval Office. And they will still be trying to kill us all long after Bush has gone back to Texas. So don’t try the Blame Bush First game with me.
It’s not about Iraq.
So if these riots and killings have nothing to do with Iraq, it must be Israel’s fault. Right?
I mean, we’ve always been told that if Israel would only give the Palestinians their own state, Arab resentment would fade away. But now we learn that the more the Israeli leaders offer the Palestinians, the more the Palestinians seem to want to kill the Jews.
After Sharon turned over Gaza over to the Palestinians, the Palestinians turned their future over to a bloody terrorist group whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel.
Meanwhile, Muslims across the world riot away over a cartoon that is disrespectful to their religion. They show their displeasure by vandalizing a Catholic Church.
With their track record on tolerance, these extremists should be on their knees praying for forgiveness instead of in the streets burning down buildings.
They have no right to be offended by events of the past month.
We do.
So why aren’t we?
Email JScarborough@msnbc.com
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New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin must be feeling the heat from his political base or the brutal Louisiana sun. As you probably know, the dumbstruck mayor used this year’s Martin Luther King celebration to declare that God had told him New Orleans would always be a "chocolate city" run by African Americans.
Don’t know exactly whose god the Mayor Nagin was chatting up, but it certainly wasn’t one with a grasp on the current situation in the still storm ravaged New Orleans area.
Blacks that once made up 80% of the city’s population have been reduced to a fraction of that percentage. And a study released this week predicted that whites would could be the city’s majority for the next several decades.
Yesterday, the not-so-chocolate Mitch Landrieu declared his interest in running for mayor of the Big Easy.
Chances are good the political insider will win.
Chances are even better that his sister, US Senator Mary Landrieu, will do everything in her power to drag as many African Americans across state lines before her next reelection campaign. Because if blacks refuse to return to their destroyed communities, paint Louisiana as a reliable Republican red state for years to come.
More fallout from a storm that is making New Orleans look a less like Mayor Nagan’s chocolate dream every day.
Email JScarborough@msnbc.com
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Washington Post cartoon lies about troops (Joe Scarborough)
The Washington Post’s left-wing cartoonist Tom Toles breached the boundary of good taste this week when he depicted the United States Army as a quadruple amputee.
Forget the tastelessness of the maimed soldier. Toles’ implication that the
US Army has been reduced to helplessness is nothing more than a liberal lie.
Talk to anyone who has gone to Iraq and Afghanistan and they will tell you our troops are ruthlessly efficient and battle hardened in a way that makes them warriors, not cripples.
Toles can frame it anyway he wants, but his cartoon is not a message of support to our troops. It is another attack from a leftist who still seems to think we should be more worried about Rumsfeld and Cheney than Bin Laden and Zarqawi.
What a dangerous fool.
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Is he really that stupid? (Joe Scarborough)
George W. Bush is on the attack. Last night's State of the Union Address showed that the Bush Administration is going to spend this election year attacking opponents of the war and his brand, spankin' new "Terrorist Surveillance Program."
Who could be against that, after all?
The new tact is a change for a White House that spent the fall crouched in a fetal position following their shameful handling of Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, Harriet Miers, the CIA Leak case and just about everything the President touched.
But for now, things look like they are breaking the President's way. Oh, I know what those pesky polls say but January polls in 2000, 2002 and 2004 were predicting Democratic victories. Trust me. This week's polls mean about as much as who Sports Illustrated picks as preseason football champs.
Besides, Bush's political opponents are not exactly helping their cause.
Democrats looked like idiots during the Alito hearings. They fumbled over a futile filibuster that Republicans reveled in. Many want to send Democratic Senator John Kerry boxes of French pastries as thanks for walking into that trap.
Republicans I talked to on the Hill this week asked me one question. "Is he really that stupid?"
Maybe he is.
How else could you explain this?
"And there’s no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women."
Yes. That’s John Kerry on "Face the Nation" accusing US troops in Iraq of conducting terror campaigns against the Iraqi people. That would be the same John Kerry who said the following about US soldiers 30 years ago:
"They raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."
John Kerry emphasized to America and the world that "these war crimes committed in Southeast Asia are not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
I practically begged Senator Kerry to apologize for those Vietnam remarks, predicting early in the campaign they could cost him the Presidency. Reading them almost two years later, I can’t believe he was too stupid to apologize then, and so stupid now that he would slander our troops again--this time the ones fighting and dying in Iraq.
But like Massachusetts' Senior Senator, Ted Kennedy, Senator Kerry presents a terrible front for the Democratic Party. And as with Senator Kennedy, loyal Democrats need to tell him to shut his mouth.
The past few months have shown political winds can always shift. Democrats just need to know when to duck for cover to let the Republicans destroy themselves.
Email JScarborough@msnbc.com