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Monday, September 11, 2006

Horowitz defends Americans’ civil liberties against “brazen,” “damaging” attacks

On Friday, David Horowitz, general secretary of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and commissioner ex officio of Minitrue, lashed out at critics of “The Path to 9/11,” ABC-Disney-Rove’s factual docudrama about the factual history of Bill Clinton’s criminal negligence and how it left America unprepared for the attacks on the homeland that occurred five years ago today.  In a FrontPage exclusive essay, Secretary Horowitz wrote,

The attacks by former president Bill Clinton, former Clinton Administration officials and Democratic US senators on Cyrus Nowrasteh’s ABC mini-series “The Path to 9/11” are easily the gravest and most brazen and damaging governmental attacks on the civil liberties of ordinary Americans since 9/11.

Secretary Horowitz, widely known and revered for his lifelong work as a civil rights activist, pointed out that criticism of “The Path to 9/11” violates the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Act of 2004, which expressly forbids liberals from taking exception to imaginative re-enactments of their high crimes and misdemeanors.  Secretary Horowitz noted that the Swift Boat Act has political roots that go back to the founding of the Republic, when Thomas Jefferson wrote his famous letter to James Madison on the importance of maintaining a free and open society that promotes the work of historical revisionists and fantasists:

There remains little Doubt among the opinions of Men, that the legitimacy of liberal Society rests on its willingness to support the Harangues of deranged and vicious Persons of the far Right, particularly if they be subsidized by media Conglomerates of vast Size.

To which, Secretary Horowitz added, Madison replied,

Nay, Thomas, I know of none who would doubt such a thing.  And yet these be but empty Words, if we of liberal Mind do not further seek to ensure that these well-subsidized Harangues of the “Wing-Nuts” be promulgated throughout the breadth of the Nation, by means of every Channel public and private.  For no Nation can long endure or prosper, unless it be sure to foster a mature political culture of Lying and Calumny.

Secretary Horowitz then called for the prosecution of far-left blogofascist Max Blumenthal, who, on Friday, wrote:

“The Path to 9/11” is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11’s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to “transform Hollywood” in line with its messianic vision. . . .

Horowitz’s PR blitz began with an August 16 interview with [scriptwriter Cyrus] Nowrasteh on his FrontPageMag webzine. In the interview, Nowrasteh foreshadowed the film’s assault on Clinton’s record on fighting terror. “The 9/11 report details the Clinton’s administration’s response—or lack of response—to Al Qaeda and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests,” Nowrasteh told FrontPageMag’s Jamie Glazov. “There simply was no response. Nothing.”

A week later, ABC hosted LFF co-founder Murty and several other conservative operatives at an advance screening of The Path to 9/11. (While ABC provided 900 DVDs of the film to conservatives, Clinton administration officials and objective reviewers from mainstream outlets were denied them.) Murty returned with a glowing review for FrontPageMag that emphasized the film’s partisan nature. “‘The Path to 9/11’ is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I’ve ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support it and promote it as vigorously as possible,” Murty wrote. As a result of the special access granted by ABC, Murty’s article was the first published review of The Path to 9/11, preceding those by the New York Times and LA Times by more than a week.

Blumenthal’s illegal essay was published at “The Huffington Post,” a far-left website operating on an unauthorized sector of the Internet.  As a result, ABC-Disney-Rove has asked President Bush for authority to shut down all unauthorized and illegal websites and web “logs,” including that of Dave Johnson of Seeing the Forest, who on Friday provided an illegal link to an April 2, 2000 Washington Post article detailing Richard Clarke’s counterterrorism initiatives prior to the millenium:

As the national coordinator for infrastructure protection and counterterrorism, Clarke has presided over a huge increase in counterterrorism budgets over the past five years to meet a wide array of new—and some would argue, still hypothetical—challenges, such as cyber warfare or chemical or biological attacks in New York or Washington. Last month, the administration submitted an $11.1 billion request to Congress to strengthen “domestic preparedness” against a terrorist attack. In the meantime, by contrast, security assistance to the former Soviet Union to tackle proliferation problems has been stuck in the region of $800 million a year.

“In America, there is a morbid fascination with greater-than-life technological threats, which you don’t see in other countries,” says Ehud Sprinzak, a terrorism expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Clarke has an ax to grind. It makes him big. If nobody talked about catastrophic terrorism, what would people like Dick Clarke be doing?”

Such talk irritates national security adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, Clarke’s direct supervisor, who insists that the threat of large-scale terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is “a reality, not a perception.” “We would be irresponsible if we did not take this seriously,” he says. “I hope that in 10 years’ time, they will say we did too much, not too little.”

Clarke’s warnings about America’s vulnerability to new kinds of terrorist attack have found a receptive ear in Clinton. With little fanfare, the president has begun to articulate a new national security doctrine in which terrorists and other “enemies of the nation-state” are coming to occupy the position once filled by a monolithic communist superpower. In January, he departed from the prepared text of his State of the Union address to predict that terrorists and organized criminals “with increasing access to ever more sophisticated chemical and biological weapons” will pose “the major security threat” to the United States in 10 to 20 years.

Secretary Horowitz pointed out that citation of the Washington Post article on Richard Clarke violates Executive Order 13414, which amended Executive Order 13233 and is usually referred to in official Washington as the “Order for the Disposal of Inconvenient Information about Past Presidents.” “The article itself should never have been available in the Internets archives,” said Horowitz.  “The fact that an illegal website, operating on a pirate Internet frequency, can reproduce an article that should have been eliminated from the public record constitutes one of the gravest and most brazen and damaging governmental attacks on the civil liberties of ordinary Americans since 9/11.”

On Sunday, in response to Blumenthal, Secretary Horowitz insisted that he has no connection to the creators of “The Path to 9/11.”

This is just one of many of attempts by the left to create a right-wing caricature they can attack. Apparently the real David Horowitz—a free speech liberal, a supporter of artistic freedom in Hollywood and academic freedom in the university—is too much of a challenge for their feeble minds to handle.

“It just so happens that I’ve spent the last two years telling the truth about how the Left undermined national security before 9/11,” Secretary Horowitz said today upon re-posting his March 2004 essay on the subject.  “The fact that I now have independent factual corroboration of my work, from a wholly independent and completely factual source which I’ve never even heard of and has no connection to me whatsoever, is apparently too much of a challenge for liberals’ feeble minds.” Thoughtfully stroking his goatee, Secretary Horowitz added, “Their feeble, feeble minds.  Bwah hah hah hah hah hah hah!  Bwah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah.”

A spokesman for the David Horowitz Freedom Center added that while citation of the April 2000 Washington Post article on Clarke is a felony violation of the Inconvenient Information Disposal Order and the Swift Boat Act, the article itself should have been sent to Minitrue for revision under the Richard Clarke Unperson Order of 2004, which forbids all references to Clarke’s counterterrorism activities prior to 2001.

“The Path to 9/11” concludes this evening on ABC-Disney-Rove.  At the conclusion of this factual docudrama, which has no connection to the work of David Horowitz other than agreeing with it in great detail, there will be a two-minute period during which citizens are encouraged to express their feelings about Democrats’ history of incompetence and malfeasance in matters of national security.

Posted by Michael on 09/11 at 08:38 AM
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Thursday, August 17, 2006

Horowitz Center announces name change

LOS ANGELES— Just six weeks after David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture almost made local news by changing its name to the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the organization has announced that yet another name change is in the works.

“The David Horowitz Freedom Center turned out to be a little bit unfortunate,” admitted Board of Directors Chair Jess Morgan.  “For one thing, it suggested to our donors that David had been incarcerated and that we were setting up a foundation to ‘free’ him.  You know, like ‘free Mumia’ or ‘free Bobby Seale.’ That came as something of a surprise to our supporters.”

But that wasn’t the only difficulty with the new Horowitz Center, Morgan reported.  “The other problem was that everybody and her brother is attaching their name to ‘freedom’ these days,” Morgan said.  “If it’s perpetual global war you want, you call yourself a ‘freedom center,’ if it’s the Jews and minorities you’re after, you call yourself a ‘liberty lobby.’ It turns out that even Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has a ‘freedom center’ set up somewhere in Beirut.  So the Horowitz Freedom Center wasn’t nearly as salient or as distinctive as we thought it would be.”

In early July, the Horowitz Center sent out a press release that touted Horowitz’s many accomplishments, noting that

David Horowitz, an important American writer and thinker since the 1960s, has been called “the Left’s most brilliant and articulate nemesis.” He is the author of several books, most recently The Professors, which describes the corruption of American universities by political ideologues. He founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1988 with the intention of establishing a conservative presence in Hollywood and showing how popular culture had become a political battleground. Under his leadership during the next 18 years, the Center attracted 70,000 contributing supporters and established programs such as:

* The Wednesday Morning Club, a lunch forum that provides a platform in the entertainment and media industry for conservative speakers and ideas [not to be confused with the Tuesday Night Music Club];

* Restoration Weekend, an annual event which has featured national leaders of the conservative movement [not to be confused with the American Renaissance Conference];

* The Individual Rights Foundation, an organization that litigates high-profile conservative and libertarian public interest cases [not to be confused with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education];

* Students for Academic Freedom, a national coalition of student organizations with chapters on 160 campuses, whose goal is to end the political abuse of the university and restore its academic integrity [not to be confused with Students for a Democratic Society];

* FrontPage Magazine, the Center’s online journal, features “news of the war at home and abroad.” FPM receives 1.5 million visitors and 620,000 unique visitors a month (with 65 million hits) and is linked to more than 2,000 other websites [not to be confused with the Front Magazine Network]; and

* DiscoverTheNetworks.com, launched in 2005, is the largest publicly accessible database, defining the chief groups and individuals of the Left and their organizational interlocks. DTN has had more than 8 million visitors in its first 18 months of operation [not, not, not to be confused with Discover the Nutwork].

“This is a truly impressive array of activities,” said Morgan, “especially if you don’t know what ‘hits’ and ‘links’ are.  We think ‘Freedom Center’ doesn’t really do it justice.  Here, in just one office with David’s legendarily small staff, you get boatload upon boatload of primo-quality wingnuttery at a discount rate.

“Accordingly, we have decided to rename our enterprise The David Horowitz Savings Center.”

Morgan pointed out that The David Horowitz Savings Center combines the madcap fun of Townhall.com, the wacky unpredictability of Tech Central Station, and the glassy-eyed fanaticism of the Club for Growth—all while offering copies of David Horowitz’s books at astonishingly low, low prices.

“We offer David’s new book, The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party and Turned it into the Pot-Smoking, Free-Loving, Private-Property-Abolishing Phenomenon We Know and Hate Today at a forty percent discount,” said Morgan.  “We offer David’s previous book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America and How They Seized Control of George Soros, Katie Couric, and Ned Lamont at a thirty percent discount. We’re also offering autographed copies for only $50 and personalized copies for $100.  We’re practically giving away The End of Time for twelve bucks—fifty percent off, just for you, very special. Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes is nine dollars. Why Are We in Iraq is $2.05.  These two books we will personally deliver to your house!”

Morgan could not confirm rumors that an extremely rare, “almost error-free” edition of The Professors would be auctioned off to pay for the redesign of the David Horowitz Freedom Savings Center.  “An almost error-free edition of that book would be a real hen’s tooth,” Morgan acknowledged, “and probably almost as valuable, on the open market, as a first edition of Blake’s Songs of Innocence.  I cannot confirm or deny the existence of such an edition at this time.  But hey, listen, while I’ve got you here—if you would be so kind as to take this box of spare copies of Unholy Alliance: How a Radical Son Left His Illusions about the Destructive Generation at the End of Time off my hands, I’d really appreciate it.”

Posted by Michael on 08/17 at 09:12 AM
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Friday, April 14, 2006

Sports roundup

Everyone wants to know how Jamie did yesterday.  A couple dozen people want to know how David Horowitz did yesterday.  And two people want to know what the hell is going on with the Rangers.  Well, you Jamie- Horowitz-Rangers people have come to the right place!  This blog is your one-stop Jamie-Horowitz-Rangers Information Center.

First, the important stuff.  Last year, Jamie finished second in his heat in the 50m dash, third in his heat in the standing broad jump, and sixth (that is, last) in his heat in the softball throw.  I missed the third event because I had to get back to my day job, and was puzzled by the outcome, since Jamie can hurl a ball like Vlad “The Impaler” Guerrero.  But on the whole, I was so proud of him I could hardly speak.  Jamie had never run 50m before.  In fact, before his Special Olympics debut last year, he didn’t like to run at all.  When he was younger, he didn’t like to walk for any significant distance, either.  In 1999, on our very first European vacation, I basically carried him around Rome on my back.  In 2002, when we briefly sublet an apartment in New York’s Peter Cooper Village, he complained about walking from Avenue B to First Avenue, and took it upon himself to go to the curb and hail a cab for a journey of a few hundred yards.  (I put the kabosh on that.) Quite apart from the fact that the physical aspects of his disability occasionally made him a difficult traveling companion in cities, Janet and I were (understandably) concerned that his aversion to ambulatin’ would have long-term implications for his cardiovascular health.

But once he got inside Penn State’s indoor track-and-field facility, it was, as they say, a Whole Nother Story.  We’d practiced running 50m with him in the weeks before the Special Olympics, because we wanted him to understand how far fifty meters is—and because we didn’t think he would voluntarily run the entire distance.  (A few years ago, when he had to complete a mile “run” for Phys Ed, he subjected his teacher’s aide to something like a four-hour mile, as he complained his way around the outdoor track for four excruciating laps.) Sometimes he was up for practice, sometimes he wasn’t.  But there’s nothing like the thrill of competition, apparently.  Once he saw that he was among a hundred kids with disabilities and that they were all kicking butt and being brave in the attempt, he put on his game face and adopted a new Jamie identity:  Jamie the Multi-Sport Athlete.

This year . . . well, this year they didn’t record runners’ times in the 50m, so I don’t know whether he improved on his 14.82 from last year.  But I do know where he placed in his heat:

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The next event was the standing broad jump.  I know, it’s not a great picture, but it does capture something kinetic about the event:

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His jump:  4 feet 4 inches.  Now, Jamie himself is 5’ 1”.  In other words, he jumped 85 percent of his height.  Go ahead, try it yourselves.

And the result?

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At this point my Jamie is seriously outperforming that Bode Miller guy.

And then we moved to the softball throw.  Still clueless as to what happened in last year’s competition, I advised Jamie not to throw the ball too high: “You have such a strong arm,” I said.  “You could throw it right out of the building, you know.” “I know,” Jamie replied.  His coach assured me that Jamie could reach distances of 50, maybe 55 feet, and I agreed.  But I wanted to stick around and see, despite the fact that the Special Olympics were now encroaching on my office hours.

Jamie’s competition, in heat 14 of the softball throw, consisted of three girls—each of whom could sling it.  The first girl posted a throw of 53 feet.  Yeesh!  The second broke 54.  The third tossed off a mighty 57.  And then Jamie toed the line, reared back, stepped well over the line, and threw 66.  “Jamie,” I yelled, “stay behind the line.” He stepped back, took his second ball, and hurled it 69’ 6”.  Well, you know what that meant:

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Three events.  Three gold medals.  And the funny thing is, it never gets old!  No one says, “aw, jeez, not the top step again?” as he or she stands atop the “1.”

So here’s to Jamie!  He’s still not over his cold, but he gave the local Special Olympics everything he had, and now he has a bunch of medals to show Janet’s family as we head off to Connecticut today.

As for that other person:  he didn’t do so well last night.  He won over surprisingly few hearts and minds when (as you can read on this fine website) he responded to a couple of students’ critical questions in a somewhat less than gracious manner:

To one student, Horowitz said “you are obviously deaf and brain-dead.” To another, “you don’t have the mental capacity to understand it.” Finally, in response to a question he didn’t care to answer, “what are the requirements for getting into this school!”

This might be a good time to ask why Horowitz doesn’t receive speaking invitations from professors.

My friend and colleague Aldon Lynn Nielsen has a pretty hilarious account of the talk as well.  In fact, Aldon has a blog!  The account is on his blog, you see.  As is a lot of other great stuff.  Check it out and say hello from me.

Finally, the Rangers.  When the Rangers clinched a playoff spot a little while ago, I foolishly thought it was safe to write about them.  I was wrong.  In the past week, they have lost to the Devils (OK, it happens), the Islanders (um, not good, guys) and—last night—the mother-lovin’ Penguins (WTF?  did the Rangers decide to play in street shoes?).  And remember when I noted that no Ranger had won a scoring title since 1942?  Yes, well, while the Rangers have been floundering, Joe Thornton picked up seven assists in two nights as the San Jose Sharks eliminated the Vancouver Canucks from the postseason.  (Real assists, too—the kind that set up goals.  It was Thornton’s coast-to-coast rush that set up the Sharks’ OT winner Tuesday night, and his dish to Cheechoo that sealed the Canucks’ fate last night.) Thornton is now tied with Jagr for the scoring lead.  So yes, Scott Lemieux, God does love you that much.  His love is boundless, and because all things are possible with Him, the team that cravenly made Todd Bertuzzi an assistant captain will be sitting at home and watching your Calgary Flames on TV next week.  But if God would just love my Rangers a teeny bit more, that would be cool, too.  Thanks, God!  Oh, and God, while I have you on the blog, I just want to say I liked a lot of Your early work, especially the funny stuff, but I really love the way You orchestrated that whole “evolution” thing just to find out which of Your creations was capable of intelligent thought.  That was quite clever of You.  Now, the Rangers travel to Philly this Saturday and then finish the season at home against Ottawa on Tuesday.  Please see what You can do.  Thanks again.

Posted by Michael on 04/14 at 07:46 AM
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Thursday, April 13, 2006

Leftwing media day!

Today’s a great day, everyone!  No, it’s not because David Horowitz is comin’ to town and you’d better be good for goodness’ sake.  It’s Jamie’s Special Olympics track-and-field day!  Surely you remember last year’s debut, in which Jamie ran his first-ever 50m in 14.82 seconds.

We’re looking to shave at least a second off that time this year.  I’m bringing the digital camera and will be sure to let you know!

Now, as for matters Horowitzian.  Yes, it will be a day full of cognitive dissonance, but that’s just fine with me.  We’re Cognitive Dissonance Central around here.  At 5:15 today, the good folks at Radio Free Penn State are having me back, this time for a 45-minute conversation with Professor of Education David Warren Saxe.  Then at 6:30 this evening, I’m taking part in a Celebration of Horowitz on the steps of the Penn State library.  It should be fun!  My float is almost done.  Thanks to everyone who stopped by and helped with the carnations!

As for the Great Man Himself: in honor of his visit to my fair campus, I am not going to say anything to discredit him on this blog today.  Instead, I will let David do the job himself.

For you might imagine that David Horowitz would be feeling pretty good about things.  His book is national news, available in thousands upon thousands of bookstores from coast to coast, even in airports.  He has just concluded a rollicking conference in which he picked up the support of people like Lamar Alexander and new House Majority Leader John Boehner.  He’s been on Hannity & Colmes at least half a dozen times in recent weeks, as well as the Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough shows.  He’s testified to Pennsylvania’s subcommittee on academic freedom and written about the experience in the Los Angeles Times.  Is he pleased with all the attention?  Is he happy about how conservative media have been the wind beneath his wings?

Um, no.

Here’s his blog post from this Sunday, April 9:

Getting my message out is harder than you think. The media work off the talking points of the teacher unions. And so far I am getting virtually no help at all from the conservative press (Human Events and the Washington Times excepted) or from conservative websites.

The poor dear!  Walking around the country with nothing but a hand-lettered sandwich board, David Horowitz is getting virtually no help at all in getting his message out.

For who can underestimate the power of the teachers’ unions to dictate their agenda to the mass media?  Remember when American Federation of Teachers president Edward J. McElroy advised the Bush Administration that the United States would be “greeted as liberators” if we invaded Iraq, and the Washington Post, ever the AFT lapdog, promptly fell in line behind the invasion?  And who can forget the machinations of the National Education Association, whose press liaisons worked together with Judith Miller of the New York Times to spread the news that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent and that Iraq was only minutes away from deploying weapons of mass destruction? 

It’s true, David Horowitz appeared on Fox News.  But even there, he was hounded and persecuted:

Those who saw the Hannity & Colmes segment may have noted that Colmes accused me of promoting legislation in Ohio that would give the state power over education and restrict professors’ speech. This is standard fare for the leftwing media (and for libertarian media like Reason and the Wall Stret Journal).

Well, it’s true, Horowitz has no Stret Creed with the Wall Stret Journal.  Unhinged as the WSJ can be when it comes to Clintonistan, they tend to let the Michael Savage / David Horowitz wing of the party operate on a different frequency.  And as for Fox News, what can you expect from leftwing media?  They have that powerful Alan Colmes, who dares to suggest that David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights was sponsored in Ohio by state senator Larry Mumper, who famously said that universities should stay out of “religion and politics.” Suggesting that the Ohio bill have restricted professors’ speech is just standard fare for the loony left.  And, as Horowitz notes,

It is also false. I have no legislation in Ohio that would do any such thing. I had legislation in the form of a resolution which would not have restricted professor’’s speech or introduced any statutory requirements. But the legislators who sponsored the resolution agreed to withdraw it (with my blessing) when Ohio’s universities agreed to institute academic freedom reforms that will protect students from political discrimination and encourage intellectual diversity.

Despite these facts which are irrefutable the campaign of lies against my efforts continues; leftwing operatives feed journalists and talk show anchors like Alan with these lies and they repeat them. This campaign is complimented by a ferocious campaign of slander to portray me as a liar and my facts as unreliable. (See dangerousprofessors.com for some of these attacks.) This pincer movement couldn’t be more diabolical or unprincipled.  And is aided by the silence of the conservative media which—with the exceptions mentioned above—has yet to come to my defense.

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Hmmm.  Narcissistic personality disorder much?  Why, he doesn’t even thank Pat Robertson for all his help in rooting out leftist campus killers. You know, maybe conservative media should think twice about promoting this guy.  He sounds kinda whining and ungrateful, don’t you think?  And kinda pathetic, even.

THUGGERY UPDATE, April 14:  Ralph Luker, ordinarily a wonderful blogger, agrees that I am “thug-like” when I criticize his hero, KC Johnson.  You know KC—he’s the fellow who wrote on Campus Watch, “the Chronicle of Higher Education published an essay by Penn State English professor Michael Bérubé advising professors to treat conservative students as they would students with learning disabilities or who exhibited aberrant behavior.” That was over a year ago. When KC has the intellectual honesty or the common human decency to retract or apologize for that remark, we’ll consider him something other than a Horowitz protégé.  (Actually, Horowitz has done some serious hatchet work on my essays, as you know.  But even he’s never gone quite that far.)

Posted by Michael on 04/13 at 08:52 AM
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Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Thug life

A number of readers have written to ask me how I feel about David Horowitz calling me a “thug” on yesterday’s radio show.  Well, if I thought for a moment that David knew what he was talking about, I would be mightily pleased with myself: if, by the end of the year, I can get Ann Coulter calling me a maniac and Tom DeLay calling me a crook, I’ll have hit the trifecta.  But, alas, He Who Shall Not Be Designated By His First Initial and a Drastic Truncation of His Surname probably doesn’t deserve that much credit.  Veteran readers of U. No.’s work know that he is prone to making embarrassing “mistakes” regarding things like “accurate” “quotes” and “actual” “facts,” so I’m inclined, in this case, to believe that the poor old man has me confused with this guy.

Besides, today is Disability Studies day!  I’m off to teach my seminar.  Here’s a snippet from one of last week’s readings.  Hey, Andrew Sullivan—this would be a good day for you to stop by my humble blog and do some readin’.  From Steven Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, two quick tunes.  A one:

The difference between strict hereditarians and their opponents is not, as some caricatures suggest, the belief that a child’s performance is all inborn or all a function of environment and learning.  I doubt that the most committed antihereditarians have ever denied the existence of innate variation among children.  The differences are more a matter of social policy and educational practice.  Hereditarians view their measures of intelligence as markers of permanent, inborn limits.  Children, so labeled, should be sorted, trained according to their inheritance and channeled into professions appropriate for their biology.  Mental testing becomes a theory of limits.  Antihereditarians, like [Alfred] Binet, test in order to identify and help.  Without denying the evident fact that not all children, whatever their training, will enter the company of Newton and Einstein, they emphasize the power of creative education to increase the achievements of all children, often in extensive and unanticipated ways.  Mental testing becomes a theory for enhancing potential through proper education.  (182-83)

And a two (remember, this little gem goes all the way back to 1981):

I have said little about the current resurgence of biological determinism because its individual claims are usually so ephemeral that their refutation belongs in a magazine article or newspaper story.  Who even remembers the hot topics of ten years ago: Shockley’s proposals for reimbursing voluntarily sterilized individuals according to their number of IQ points below 100, the great XYY debate, or the attempt to explain urban riots by diseased neurology of rioters.  I thought that it would be more valuable and interesting to examine the original sources of the arguments that still surround us.  These, at least, display great and enlightening errors.  But I was inspired to write this book because biological determinism is rising in popularity again, as it always does in times of political retrenchment.  The cocktail party circuit has been buzzing with its usual profundity about innate aggression, sex roles, and the naked ape.  Millions of people are now suspecting that their social prejudices are scientific facts after all.  Yet these latent prejudices themselves, not fresh data, are the primary source of renewed attention.

We pass through this world but once.  Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.  (60-61)

Golly, that Gould could write, couldn’t he?  I wonder why The New Republic didn’t do more to promote his work in the 1990s.

_________________

THUG LIFE UPDATE:  Hey, kids, David Horowitz is at it again!  David’s froth-a-lot response to my op-ed has just appeared today, and contains a extra special bonus piece of stupidity, this one assisted by his ethically-challenged friend Art Eckstein:

Professor Berube himself has written that the notorious article by professors Mearsheimer and Walt, which blames the Jews for the war on terror and the Jewish lobby for controlling American foreign policy and the American media—a sort of contemporary version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—“has many virtues.”

I have?  Jeez, when did I write that?  I haven’t even read the Mearsheimer / Walt article!  Ah, here’s the answer:  I wrote a brief reply to Scott Jaschik’s Inside Higher Ed article about the Mearsheimer / Walt article.  Within a few hours of the appearance of Jaschik’s article on the morning of March 27, my dear friend KC Johnson showed up to bash the AAUP off-topic.  Here’s my reply to KC, in full:

I see that KC Johnson, as ever, wastes no time going after the AAUP, despite the many virtues of this article and despite Roger Bowen’s judicious remark about the blinders of scholars who are too ideologically entrenched on one side or another of the Israel-Palestine question. Reasonable people might remember that the AAUP opposed the AUT’s foolish boycott of Israeli scholars, but not our KC. He’s a culture warrior through and through, and doesn’t miss a single opportunity to rehearse a right-wing talking point. Those blinders must work pretty well.

KC, in return, responded with the sagacity that is his trademark:

I confess, Michael Bérubé has exposed me: I’m a pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, pro-Hillary Clinton “right-winger.” We’re a very large group. (I wasn’t aware, by the way, that sympathy for Israel was considered a “right-wing” position as well.)

Right on point, KC!  And then along came Art Eckstein with this stupefyingly dishonest comment:

Professor Berube finds that the Walt and Mearsheimer paper has “many virtues”. But Dennis Ross (Clinton’s leading Mideast negotiator) indicate it is the work of ignoramuses. But of course Ross is Jewish, Professor Berube—and you may have noticed that there are several folks on this blog, siding with you, who will therefore automatically discount it. You ought to think seriously about the company you’re keeping. . . .  That Professor Berube finds “many virtues” in a paper that rebirths The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a stunning statement—he should be ashamed of himself. Or, perhaps he should re-examine some of his assumptions.

And thence from Art Eckstein back to his friend David Horowitz, I am now an anti-Semite!  That’s how the smear factory works, folks!

But regular readers of this blog know what kind of shabby game Art is playing here:  he’s played it before, on this very blog, in fact.  He shows up and pretends not to know what the referent of “this” is (or worse, he actually doesn’t know, in which case one has to wonder how in the world he ever got a job in a university).  In this case, of course, he takes my praise for Scott Jaschik’s article (to which I referred, in a comment on Scott Jaschik’s article, as “this article"), and pretends that it is praise for the Mearsheimer / Walt article.

Eckstein should be ashamed of himself—for being incompetent, or for being something worse (we’ll leave that call up to him).  As for Horowitz, asking him to display shame about a claim like this (and by “this” we mean “this little stunt to which this here hyperlink refers") is like asking him to display some ordinary human decency.  Don’t worry!  We know better than to waste our time.

Posted by Michael on 04/12 at 08:52 AM
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Monday, April 10, 2006

How Horowitz is my valley

That’s right, the Happy Valley is in for a real treat.  David Horowitz is coming to Penn State!  Fresh from his not-very-exciting debate with his long-lost twin, Ward Churchill, Horowitz descends on our fair campus this Thursday.

This is a historic week!  Penn State’s College Republicans are doing their part to augment Horowitz’s half-million-dollar annual income, and campus and local media (including this very blog!) are helping out with the publicity.  Today’s Centre Daily Times features Pittsburgh Tribune-Review resident wingnut Bill Steigerwald’s 1300-word interview with David Horowitz, in which he fulminates about how the “Democrat party” has “lurched far to the left” and talks a lot about his unhealthy obsession of the week (don’t ask).  The CDT very graciously gave me space for a 650-word essay on Horowitz, and you can read it right here.  (About Steigerwald interviewing Horowitz: when one employee of far-right billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife interviews another, do they “kick up” to the boss?  ‘Cause I think they should.)

Somehow, a week or two ago, Mr. H. discovered that the CDT was going to run a little piece by me, and he wrote to the paper to congratulate them on their ecumenical spirit.  “That’s the kind of journalism we need to see in this country,” Horowitz wrote.  “Free and open exchange, healthy debate—just like the debate I want to inspire on college campuses.”

Fooled you!  Horowitz said no such thing.  On the contrary, when he found out that I had written something for my local paper, he simply lost it, going on one of his characteristically unhinged rants about bias this and IslamoCommunist terrorist that.  And if you’ve been following the sorry saga of Horowitz’s long decline, you know how he responds when someone points out that his new book is full of jawdropping stupidities and boneheaded errors: he whines about being “attacked.”

The latest development is this: on my way through the Cincinnati airport last month, I picked up a copy of The Professors and learned that David (or one of his employees) had, indeed, updated the “Discover the Networks” entry on me.  Even though I didn’t think it was humanly possible, they had made their discussion of my work even dumber.  In their online version, they had merely missed the point of my essay, “Teaching Postmodern Fiction Without Being Sure that the Genre Exists,” in which I suggested that most of the fiction being written today isn’t postmodern, and that postmodernist experimentalism resembles modernist experimentalism more than it resembles anything else.  As you’ll recall, the sorry old fraud had tried to claim that I advocate “teaching literature so as to bring about ‘economic transformations.’” His evidence for this was a sentence in which I wrote, “The important question for cultural critics, then, is also an old question—how to correlate developments in culture and the arts with large-scale economic transformations.” Competent readers understand that I’m asking for accounts of postmodernity to be grounded in empirical fact rather than in the claim that Pynchon is 20 percent more indeterminate than Joyce.  But David, by contrast, has since gone on record affirming that he does, in fact, believe that “correlate” means “bring about.” And mirabile dictu, the book version is still worse!  Now he’s accusing me of anti-religious bias.  Why?  Because I called antifoundationalists “sane” and “secular.” Anti-religious bias!  You gotta love it.  As I note in my CDT essay, my anti-religious bias will come as a shock to my Jesuit teachers. . . .

Now, most sane people are aware that if you say X is sane, you have not thereby said that all non-X is insane.  Here, however, Horowitz mounts a powerful challenge to the sane/insane binary, just as he did in his recent appearance on The 700 Club with Pat Robertson, when he accused college professors of being “killers.”

As for David’s whining that I have “attacked” him by pointing this out, all I can say is that it’s kinda pathetic.  Crybaby pathetic.  I’m talking National Wuss League material.  Here’s a guy who goes around saying truly unhinged, anti-American things, like claiming that my “entire political focus since 9/11 has been in getting our terrorist enemies off the hook,” and when I calmly call him on a couple of his many lies and inaccuracies, he cries and screams and writes Very Angry E-Mails.  And that’s one reason why reasonably intelligent conservatives—and conservatives with some measure of cojones and self-respect—think of David Horowitz as 700 Club material.  That’s kinda pathetic, too, when you remember that Horowitz actually wants to be thought of as an “intellectual.”

Well, the rest of the week should be action-packed.  Tomorrow afternoon at 5 pm, I’ll be a guest on Radio Free Penn State, Lion Radio, WKPS 90.7 FM, and they’ll have Horowitz by phone.  Sam Richards, Penn State’s other Dangerous Professor, will join us at 5:30.  What about the main event on Thursday, you ask?  Well, back on March 31, I’d read in the Centre Daily Times that one of the leaders of the College Republicans “said she is planning to invite Berube and Richards to appear with Horowitz,” but last Friday all I got was a personal invitation to attend Horowitz’s talk.  I guess that counts as “appearing” with him, in the sense that people who sing along with “Positively Fourth Street” on the radio can say that they once sang with Bob Dylan.  Ah, well, life goes on.  I might still go . . . though I have to say that the hockey lineup for the night of April 13 is pretty tempting.  There are thirteen (!) games that night, including Flyers-Devils, Avalanche-Flames, and the critical Canucks-Sharks matchup.  So we will see.  Tomorrow night, April 11, a real intellectual comes to town: Salman Rushdie.  Janet and I got an invitation to that one, too.  Now, that’s a serious invitation.

There might be some anti-Horowitz activity this week, though so far as I know, it’s nothing more than a brief press conference.  I’ve advised the local left against doing any anti-Horowitz demonstrations, under the heading, “Horowitz’s Hands, Playing Right Into.” After all, we’re dealing with a guy who declares jihads against individual professors for handing out snarky T-shirts before his lecture and laughing at some of his remarks.  I think we here at Penn State should be careful to treat Horowitz very, very nicely so that he doesn’t get very, very angry.  For my part, I’m hoping to put together a special parade downtown, “A Celebration of Horowitz,” but I’m not sure I’ll be finished with my float—a 25-foot trailer depicting Horowitz’s service to the Black Panthers—by Thursday afternoon.  If anyone in central Pennsylvania can stop by and give me a hand with the Huey Newton I’m sculpting out of carnations, I’d really appreciate it.

Oh, speaking of Horowitz and black folk.  The publicity for his Thursday afternoon book signing at the Penn State bookstore lists him as “a nationally known author and lifelong civil rights activist.” Yes, I know it’s boilerplate.  Michael Jackson insisted that he be referred to as “the King of Pop,” Kim Jong Il goes by “Beloved Leader,” and David Horowitz demands that he be hailed as “a lifelong civil rights activist.” But since David has just seen fit to publish on FrontPage.com this inconceivably vile attack on the woman who was allegedly raped by members of Duke’s lacrosse team (the essay refers to her as “a divorced, 27-year-old ‘mother’ of two”—love those scare quotes!—and argues that “the story, as reported in the papers, indicates either profound social retardation on the part of the black ‘dancer,’ or else irrationality on the part of racist-oriented reporters”), you have to wonder whether this is a good time for poor old David to be touting his civil rights record.

UPDATE:  I just got word that Horowitz cannot manage to be available from 5 to 5:30 tomorrow, and that he will only debate Sam Richards.  You know, I do believe there’s a song about this kind of thing.  One, two, a one two three four. . . .

Posted by Michael on 04/10 at 01:12 PM
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