Professor Pinocchio -- Churchill and anthrax?

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the Islamic community in the U.S. suffered mightily at the hands of vengeful Americans, at least according to author Mike Davis in "Dead Cities," his new book. In the first six weeks after the attack, there were "a thousand serious assaults" on citizens who happened to look Arabic, Mr. Davis reports. If you haven't heard of this widespread violence it's only because a zealously patriotic media deliberately soft-pedaled coverage of "what otherwise might have been recognized as the good ole boy equivalent of Kristallnacht."

They won't know who Churchill is.
I was recently having a debate with someone about Clinton.
This other person claimed that he liked Clinton because of all he had done for education.
I asked him what exactly Clinton had done, and he couldn't tell me.
I then asked him if he even knew how the electoral voting system works, and he couldn't tell me that either.
He is a recent High School Graduate.
So much for education......

Great post... where do these frauds come from?

But... it's worth noting that nothing really happens to academic phonies, frauds and plagiarists, if they are politically dependable. Consider:

Mike Barnicle, who embarrassed the Boston Globe with his "interviews" with figments of his imagination, and his drinking problem are a feature on local TV.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, who copied almost an entire book into her The Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds without a word of attribution, is essentially unscathed. IIRC she is still on the History Pulitzer committee, which is like having Jeff Dahmer chair your potluck supper.
Michael(?) Bellesiles, whose Arming America has been exposed as the most celebrated academic fraud since Piltdown Man, is still being sheltered by Emory University, which continues to vility the guys and gals that have caught Bellesiles!
Pop historian Stephen Ambrose, was caught copying wholesale elements of less-famous books without attribution, and beaten up about a number of lesser violations, whereupon he announced he was croaking of cancer. Now, anyone that points out the McGovern hagiographer's failings is "insensitive." Well, too bad. While all saints must by definition be dead, dying isn't going to make this pretentious old fraud a saint.

So you see, you can get away with anything, in what passes for the academy in 2002, as long as your Party card is still valid. If Ambrose had written of Barry Goldwater's aerial adventures, if Goodwin had written a biography of the Taft or the Bush family, or if Bellesiles had fabricated evidence opposite of what he did, these people would have been thrown to the wolves by their friends in the press and the academy. That they have not been so handled reinforces what every alert child can see-- that political conformity is more important than honesty in those places.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

Fascinating bunch of folks at State University of NY-Stony Brook Campus ! Barbara Rosenberg (The Great Anthrax Authority ) was from there too.

Plus male feminist Michael Kimmel, left wing 'poet' Amiri Baraka....

I used to be on the faculty there too. The odd thing is the science faculty are quite good, particularly in physics. Away from the scientists, you have the most eclectic collection of left-wing weirdos. I vivdly recall a party in 1988 I attended for a certain teaching fellowship program (sponsored, oddly enough, by a conservative chemical company); I was the only person in the entire (large) group who was supporting Bush; a minority of the others were Dukakis supporters, whie the majority were for Jesse Jackson. They were all, of course, white.

I would guess the dominant brand of politics there is slightly to the left of...the late Mao Tse Tung.

Indeed. Useful idiots all; once they'd outlived their usefulness, of course, Mao would shoot them.

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