From today’s Washington Post, a bit of Bollinger’s bollocks as he tried to deflect criticism about giving a tyrant a podium from which to spout his propaganda. Bollinger used the time-honored tactic of ‘faint praise’, I guess:
President Lee Bollinger. He called Ahmadinejad a “petty and cruel dictator” and ended with the thought that “today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for.”
Ok, not to be a grammar Nazi or anything, but wouldn’t you think a fucking University President would use correct English in a prepared speech? That’s a mangled sentence by anyone’s standards, even without the “stand for”.
How about:
“…today I feel the weight of the modern, civilized world, yearning to express revulsion FOR THE DISHONEST, BIGOTED AND HATEFUL RHETORIC YOU EMPLOY AND THE BARBARIC SYSTEM BY WHICH YOU RUN YOUR COUNTRY AND OPPRESS YOUR OWN CITIZENS AND THREATEN THE PEACE OF THE REGION IN WHICH YOU DWELL, AND, IN FACT, EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING FOR WHICH YOU STAND.
How about that? Can I be University President now and invite Todd Rundgren to speak? Because it’d be more interesting and considerably less revolting to hear him talk about that for which he stands.
Here’s a more thoughtful take by Cal Thomas.
And this from All NY Blog is hilarious, the LameStreamMedia© is fawning all over Bollocksger for his “courage” in “facing down” the “petty dictator”. Wow, profiles in courage indeed. He let the Islamofascist tyrant make a propaganda speech, then asked him “tough questions”, none of which he answered. Bollocksger got exactly one soundbite out of the entire futile exercise, the admission that Iran had killed all its gays, so no more gay problem.
HotAir has a video of the entire fiasco, if you can stomach it.
I agree with Anwyn that this was merely a stunt by Bollocksger in response to the backlash for inviting the Persian pissant, and it was done in a very clumsy, transparent and counter-productive way. UPDATE: Actually I was trying to be sarcastic and failed, Anwyn makes the opposite argument and very persuasively. Give her blog a look, it ROXXORZ.
Anwyn’s Notes in the Margins
Now all the posturing about giving Ahmadinejad a forum as a gesture of debate, free speech, open dialog etc. turns to shit, because you don’t offer an invitation to a guy, then spend ten minutes just reading what amounts to a long insult as an introduction to inoculate yourself from anything he might say: he wouldn’t fucking be there if you hadn’t invited him, you dumb shit! If he’s so heinous, why give him a public platform to propagandize?
Can American public universities sink any lower? Well, since you ask, yes