Tracking Dissimulation

An excellent post over at Left2Right tracks how, in the "crosstalk" of talking heads on cable news, minor, laughably-wrong, points become the dominant strand of discussion and the point that everyone takes away from watching.

So the question is, are there thousands of Ward Churchill's on college campuses? (My view might be biased as I am currently taking a class with Jean Elshtain, the antithesis of Ward Churchill, who will come down on anyone like a ton of bricks - quite justifiably and reasonably, I might add - who engages in apologetics for terrorism.)

Well, it depends on how you define "Ward Churchill," I guess. If by "Ward Churchill" you mean people who were given tenure even though they shouldn't have gotten it, who publish articles that are hardly academic, and who shoot of their mouth to get attention, then I'd say no. (Although there may be plenty of people who bear the last character trait just listed.)

On the other hand, if you define "Ward Churchill" as representative of a certain set of political beliefs, as Joe Scarborough was clearly trying to do, then the answer is probably yes. Two problems with this: I don't think you can conflate the "liberalism" of Ward Churchill and the liberalism that predominates on college campuses and second, I'm not sure that predominant liberalism is a huge problem on campus.