The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education Is, Unsurprisingly, the Exact Opposite of What It Pretends to Be

Baker Library at Dartmouth College

This one is long, even by Curmie’s standards, Gentle Reader.  Buckle up.

A few months ago, Curmie wrote a blog post criticizing the president of his alma mater, Dartmouth College, for declining to sign on to the “Call for Constructive Engagement” from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. 

Here’s a snippet of Curmie’s commentary: 

At the moment, Dartmouth is one of only two Ivy League schools not to have substantial cuts in federal funding based on little but the caprice of the most anti-intellectual administration in history.  Dartmouth’s time will come, no doubt.  Surely we’re not under the impression that craven silence is any kind of reasonable solution.

Sometimes Curmie hates being right.  When you’re dealing with an authoritarian bully like Donald Trump, the slightest capitulation, even if it’s manifested as inaction, will be seen as weakness, and further demands are both inevitable and imminent.  And so… here we are.  Dartmouth is one of nine colleges and universities currently being extorted into agreeing to asked for commentary about the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which, of course, has literally nothing to do with academic excellence, but is instead an authoritarian wet dream of governmental control over some of the nation’s most reputable, I dare say prestigious, bastions of higher education.  Dartmouth’s response, alas, couldn’t be more wishy-washy.  Curmie detects just a little too much Susan Collins in President Sian Leah Beilock’s statement.

Side note: The other schools on this particular hit list are Arizona, Brown, MIT, Penn, USC, Texas, Vanderbilt, and Virginia.  Gentle Reader, if you are an alum of any of the nine institutions listed here, Curmie urges you to head to a webpage created by a group called Stand for Academic Freedom and sign on to a petition to your alma mater’s president and trustees urging them to refuse to submit to the Compact.  By the way, apparently these schools were chosen because the White House believes they “are, or could be, ‘good actors.’”  Curmie, a theatre director for a half century or so, hereby hopes for more bad actors.  The Compact is essentially a threat masquerading as an opportunity: about as close as a government can come to a protection racket.

We start with the threat at the end of the first paragraph of the document: “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”  (Curmie can’t suppress a giggle here: the word the idiots who wrote and distributed this missive meant is “forgo.”  “Forego” means precede.  Oh, and they make the same mistake in the other direction in Section 9.  <Snort.>)  The “federal benefits” which might be jeopardized by failure to adhere to edicts from the Mad King of Trumpistan include access to federally-affiliated student financial aid, research grants, and student visas. 

OK, on to Section 1: “Equality in Admissions.”  There’s the predictable anti-DEI blather, but the really problematic paragraphs, to Curmie’s mind, come later: 

University admissions decisions shall be based upon and evaluated against objective criteria published on the University’s website and available to all prospective applicants and members of the public.

Institutions shall have all undergraduate applicants take a widely-used standardized test (i.e. SAT, ACT, or CLT) or program-specific measures of accomplishment in the case of music, art, and other specialized programs of study. Universities shall publicly report anonymized data for admitted and rejected students, including GPA, standardized test score, or other program-specific measures of accomplishments, by race, national origin, and sex.

What.  Utter.  Crap.  “Objective criteria”?  That would eliminate any thought process by admissions offices.  How do you reconcile, for example, excellent grades and a poor SAT score?  Could be the school has no standards; could be the student had test anxiety, or was ill or dealing with some other form of life issue the day of the test.  Curmie has been on both ends of alumni interviews: does this student have what it takes to succeed in this specific environment?  Recommendations from high school teachers really do matter; Curmie has read a few hundred of them, and not infrequently made recommendations about scholarships accordingly.

That student over there doesn’t have a very good grade point average overall, but look at how much better he did when he quit the football team and joined the marching band (or vice versa).  That other student went in the opposite direction.  Knowing why would be a good thing.  Yet another applicant is brilliant in one area but barely passable in another (Curmie saw a lot of that in theatre majors, a fair number of whom were not necessarily noted for their mathematical prowess.)  Do we celebrate the specialized excellence or go for the applicant who is very good (as opposed to outstanding) across the board?  Curmie once again reveals his inner Confucian: there is simply no way to factor all of the potential variables into an “objective” model… and if there were, it would be so complex that it could be parsed only by someone with an advanced degree in statistics and probability, not by high schooler looking at a website.

More importantly, the past matters, but it isn’t the sole determinant of future success.  Standardized tests measure test-taking ability more than knowledge.  Curmie has made this point more times than it’s practicable to link to all the examples here, but this one, with reference to his own experience as a test-taker, may be taken as illustrative.

Oh, one more thing: this administration sure does care about “objectivity” when it means rich white folks benefit (students really do perform better on the SAT if they’ve taken one of those often expensive prep courses).  And their quest for transparency inevitably means lawsuits, and that, too, benefits families that can afford lawyers.  The desire to break down the data by race, national origin, and sex—but not the economic status of the student—is sort of a tell, isn’t it?  But, more significantly, where was that reverence for objectivity when the nation was saddled with cabinet appointees like Kennedy, Hegseth, and McMahon, all of whom are objectively unqualified to be hired by their agency, let alone lead it?

The Compact, in other words, should be rejected based on its first section alone.  But (insert late-night infomercial voice here) wait!  That’s not all!  Moving on to Section 2: Marketplace of Ideas & Civil Discourse.  Here’s the money quote: 

A vibrant marketplace of ideas requires an intellectually open campus environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines. Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.  

That all sounds pretty innocuous: well, except for the paranoia about sparking violence (!) against conservative ideas.  (Curmie, who has spent considerable time on college campuses over a period of more than half a century, has literally never seen anything approaching violence against conservatives.)  Tellingly, the proposal is sufficiently vague that virtually any actual examination of an ideology could be seen as attacking it.  Racism is conservative.  Sexism is conservative.  Homophobia is conservative.  True, most 21st-century conservatives reject, or at least purport to reject, these ideologies, but all have been standard conservative doctrine in Curmie’s lifetime.  (Curmie is old, but not that old.)  And transphobia and Islamophobia are still central to the right’s playbook.

Curmie belittled more than a few arguments from the right at some point in his career: not because they were from the right, but because they didn’t stand up to scrutiny.  He also got in trouble for saying that not all feminist arguments are good arguments, and that a proposal to enforce “anti-racism” (not being racist was insufficient) on all students in a program was “Stalinistic.”  That kind of criticism would no doubt be applauded by the Regime, not because it was well-reasoned, but because it furthered their point of view in an “enemy of my enemy” sort of way.

There’s a fair amount of argumentation in Section 2 that’s actually good policy, but rather ironic coming from this administration.  It’s fine to assert the importance of civility and to note that “Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views.”  But this administration was strangely quiet when tenured faculty were fired for being insufficiently obsequious in mourning the death of Charlie Kirk.  Free speech for me, but not for thee.

Plus, of course, the kinds of policies proposed in this section about safeguarding free expression have already been adopted, generally long ago, by virtually every college or university in the country.  There may not have been universal enforcement, but these matters are often more complicated than the Trumpsters would have us believe.  Curmie is especially fond, though, of this sentence: “The university shall impartially and vigorously enforce all rights and restrictions it adopts with respect to free speech and expression.”  It follows shortly after the prohibition of “support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.”  (“Support” is, of course, undefined.)  Oh, and there’s a prohibition against countenancing genocide (except when perpetrated by Israel, bien sûr).  We’ll just antiphrastically avoid noting that even supporting violence is protected speech unless there is a specific and imminent incitement.

By the way, Antifa, which is not an organization at all, but simply an anti-fascist (notice the first six letters) ideology, is now characterized by Dear Leader and his merry band of sycophants as a terrorist threat.  So much for free speech, a ”broad spectrum of viewpoints,” and similar sentiments. 

Section 3: Nondiscrimination in Faculty and Administrative Hiring.  Boy, that would be great.  Having, say, a university president not be selected by the politically appointed trustees here in Texas would be a big step in the right direction.  Oh.  Wait.  That’s probably not what this section means, even if that’s what it says.  There’s also the same bullshit about objectivity as for admissions.  I mean, hire the professor who has the best (perhaps padded) résumé, not the one students respond to, right?  These people neither know nor care about actual education.

Section 4: Institutional Neutrality.  This is actually reasonable, except, of course, that it is intended in this document (see above re Charlie Kirk aftermath) to extend past insisting on neutrality from employees in their “capacity as university representatives.”  It’s also interesting and ironic that President Beilock of Dartmouth is quoted approvingly in this section of a document that is being used to extort her college.

Section 5:  Student Learning.  This is a screed against grade inflation.  Curmie wishes them luck.  Really.  No irony intended here.

Section 6: Student Equality.  Mostly an attack on trans athletes, with some argument against, say, scholarships designated specifically for students of a particular sex, race, national origin, etc.  The section is simplistic and predictable.  (Curmie would be interested in seeing a discussion of donor’s rights in this regard.  So, he suspects, would Beloved Spouse, who works in Financial Aid.) 

Section 7: Financial Responsibility.  The GOP, which has been largely responsible for under-funding public universities (including some of the nine schools affected by the Compact), is suddenly concerned with students being “saddled with life-altering debt.”  It’s certainly true that there are a lot more administrative staff than necessary, especially in Student Affairs; it’s also true that upper-level administrators are almost universally overpaid relative to other staff and faculty.  (That part doesn’t get mentioned, of course.)

But the level of reporting demanded in this section (and others) actually increases administrative costs.  Curmie is so old that he remembers when it was the liberals who were all about administrivia.  Not so much, now…

There’s also a demand to freezing “effective tuition rates” (does that mean inflation-adjusted?) for five years.  Yawn.  More grandstanding than policy.  Next.  Oh, and universities should “refund tuition to students who drop out during the first academic term of their undergraduate studies.”  This has got to be a contender for stupidest fucking idea in the history of stupid fucking ideas.

And… there would be no tuition charges for students in the hard sciences at schools with more that a $2 million endowment per student.  This one, apart from being profoundly stupid by de facto punishing universities for having good science programs (and de facto penalizing students in other fields: that tuition money has to come from somewhere), seems aimed at specific schools.  Curmie’s alma mater, for example, is certainly in good financial shape, but it comes in at $1.8 million or thereabouts in this metric.

This entire section, like Section 1, is enough to make any competent administrator reject the entire Compact, even if other parts of it make a fair amount of sense… which it sort of does in a couple places.

Section 8: Foreign Entanglements.  There’s a lot of nonsense about money laundering and such-like before we get to the real stuff about limiting enrollment by foreign students.  This is supported by predictable jingoistic argumentation about requiring “foreign students [to] exhibit extraordinary talent that promises to make America stronger and more economically productive, and the selected students are introduced to, and supportive of, American and Western values, ultimately increasing global understanding and appreciation for the United States and our way of life.”

Curmie speaks here from years of experience with an exchange program with a British conservatory.  The rationale wasn’t about making America more economically productive (the only thing this administration cares about); it was about enhancing American students’ education by exposing them to peers who had grown up in a different society and a different political system, and had been educated in a different manner.  It was about establishing relationships that would be beneficial to students from both sides of the Atlantic.  (For the record, there are at least a few of those British students who now live and work in this country.  This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it is simply a thing.)

Trump’s purported America First ideology in fact diminishes opportunities for American students to experience… wait for it… a “broad spectrum of ideas.”  It also wants to deny access to anyone who might not be willing to swear allegiance to “American and Western values.”  How would they know without being exposed to them except in the abstract?  And if those values are indeed superior, wouldn’t even a skeptical student smart enough to get into one of those universities end up being converted?

By the way, apparently those “objective” standards for admission apply only to American students.  Curmie speaks only for himself, but he’d rather have a better student who happens to be Chinese or Saudi than a lesser student who’s American.  If you’re an American student who can’t compete: get better.

Anyway… Section 9: Exceptions.  Nothing of substance here.

Section 10: Enforcement.  More busy-work; more threats.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.

The Compact, as expected, does exactly the opposite of what it purports to do.  It places the government as the de facto decision-maker for both public and private universities.  It restricts freedom of speech even as it pretends to support it.  It reveals a profound ignorance about the way higher education works and a contempt for scholarship, teaching, and learning.  Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…

Orwell was an optimist.

Reacting to the Reactions about Charlie Kirk's Assassination

A few quotations from the Dear Departed

Curmie was going to write about the assassination of Charlie Kirk as part of a larger discussion about the rule of law, also discussing things like the attack on that Venezuelan boat, the co-opting of the National Guard to <checks notes> spread mulch and pick up trash, and the absurd SCOTUS ruling allowing ICE and DHS to forgo anything in the same area code as obeying Fourth Amendment protections, enabling those assholes to engage in practices that far exceed mere racial profiling and would be called unconstitutional by anyone except a political hack supporting authoritarianism.

That essay may yet be written, but the response to the killing of Kirk has taken on a life of its own, both among the yammering politicians and the complacent media.  We haven’t seen this level of coverage since the murder of another loathsome rich guy, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson… and most of that was about how Luigi Mangione, the (technically still “alleged”) killer is a rather handsome young man.

Noteworthy in the previous paragraph is the fact that the intervening attacks on Minnesota legislators and their spouses, leaving two people and a family dog dead and two other people seriously injured, received far less coverage: some, but nowhere near as much.  Those murders were, of course, clearly politically motivated, and we knew that early on.  The relative lack of coverage is attributable at least in part to the fact that the victims weren’t obscenely wealthy.  However liberal the media are alleged to be, the fact is they’re all controlled by the uber-rich, and those folks think wealth translates into importance… and that killing a rich dude is far worse than killing a poor one.

Please note, Gentle Reader, that Curmie is in no way endorsing any of these murders.  He is not “celebrating” the death of Kirk, although he does believe the world to be a better place without his racism, misogyny, trans- and homophobia, Christian nationalism, mendacity, and general assholitude.  Well, at least until and unless the right-wing ideologues are successful in their attempt to make Kirk into a “moderate” and therefore even more of a martyr.  He was neither, of course.  His sole attribute was his ability to sell every conceivable variety of hatred as if it were a heavenly elixir.

Curmie and Beloved Spouse are fans of murder mysteries, and we not infrequently watch a film or a TV show in which the victim is a truly horrible person, thereby providing potential motives for a number of suspects.  When this occurs, one of us (usually Curmie) sometimes adopts an exaggerated Texas drawl and proclaims that the deceased “wanted killin.’”  But we’re well aware of the fictiveness of what we’re watching.  Real life is different, and no one, not even Charlie Kirk, deserves to be shot in cold blood.  There may be little in the way of mourning at Chez Curmie, but there is precisely zero celebration.

It now appears that the suspected shooter, Tyler Robinson, did have a political, or at least quasi-political, motive.  He disagreed with Kirk on some issues.  But no one knew that when the invective started to fly.  To be fair, it was a reasonable guess, but it didn’t at the time come close to a certainty.  Moreover, although Robinson is said to have become more political of late, he is not registered with a political party and has not voted recently.  He seems to have grown up around guns, and he comes from a Republican family.  [EDIT: It now appears that Robinson may have thought Kirk was insufficiently right-wing for Robinson’s taste.  Yes, the shooting could have been political, but not in the way it was described by Trump, et al.  Go figure, right?]

Curmie has long decried the media’s prioritization of getting the story first over getting it right.  One example was that attack at a cinema in Aurora, CO; another was the (perhaps staged) attempt in Butler, PA, about which Curmie suggested that the motive may never be known, but “perhaps there’s a latter-day Jodie Foster to impress out there somewhere.”  And, of course, DJT has always been quick to blame someone unlike himself, evidence be damned: witness his screed on New Year’s Day against “criminals coming in” when the New Orleans terrorist actually turned out to be a Texas-born Army vet.

Let’s take as given that Robinson was the shooter and that the reason for the attack was that he objected to Kirk’s politics.  That rationale would have been a reasonable, even probable, surmise before Robinson’s apprehension.  But it was certainly insufficient to claim as fact.  There was the possibility of a “false flag,” of an internal division in the right-wing power structure (Kirk had been accused of insufficient obeisance to Dear Leader, after all), or the gunman had some other motive altogether.  Curmie even saw a post that suggested that since it would take military-style training to be able to shoot that accurately, and since the military is comprised mostly of conservatives… well, you get the point, Gentle Reader.  Yes, that’s a rather strained argument, but until this morning it was at least possibly accurate.

Of course, the vituperation started emanating from the White House long before any real information became known.  Donald Trump, in his usual reckless manner, bypassed any attempt at national unity and blithely accused the “radical left political violence,” and deplored “demonizing those with whom you disagree.”  A more ironic and hypocritical utterance has seldom if ever occurred in all of human history.  Demonizing political opponents is, of course, Trump’s stock in trade, to the extent that when someone else does it, we’re surprised he doesn’t sue them for copyright infringement.

Of course, all this hand-wringing and pearl-clutching casually ignores the attacks on Paul Pelosi, Josh Shapiro, and Melissa Hortman, and the kidnapping plot aimed at Gretchen Whitmer.  But it’s only those on the left we need to worry about, correct?  What utter bullshit!  True, we expect this kind of crap from the usual suspects: Trump, Vance, Miller, Musk, Loomer, Mace, et al.  They are uniformly devoid of actual ideas (or at least good ones) and have nothing but rage and self-righteous hypocrisy to offer.  But it is terrifying that even once reasonable conservatives are buying into this nonsense.  (There’s a reason Curmie abandoned Ethics Alarms, for example.)

Name a nationally-known Democrat—Obama, Biden, Harris, Newsom, Whitmer, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani, the list goes on and on—and you’ll find a message of sorrow, empathy, and sometimes outrage about the murder of Charlie Kirk.  Of course, some of them may have been pro forma or even insincere, but Curmie’s challenge on his Facebook page remains: name a prominent Republican who offered similar sentiments over the death of Melissa Hortman, who was an actual legislator as opposed to a talking head. 

One more thing crossed Curmie’s mind when he woke up in the middle of the night.  A little over 50 years ago, Curmie was a freshman in college, taking a course called “Political Ideals.”  One of the key differences identified in that course was the tendency of conservatives to think in terms of the individual and liberals to think of groups with something in common (race, gender, economic class, etc.).  It’s an over-simplification, but it isn’t, or at least wasn’t, inaccurate.

But when it comes to these attacks on politicians or quasi-politicians, those characterizations no longer hold.  There is little if any attempt by liberals to blame all conservatives for the deaths of Hortman or the torching of Shapiro’s home, but all of a sudden all liberals are responsible for Kirk’s death.  There are even insane, and yes, Curmie does mean that term literally, rantings from the likes of Congresscritter Clay Higgins, who wants to violate the First Amendment and censor both individuals and corporations because some people think Charlie Kirk wasn’t all that great a guy, after all. 

We’re already seeing a variation on the theme, as the list of people—teachers, state university administrators, restaurant employees, writers, coaches, even firefighters— fired or suspended for what clearly should be protected speech is long and growing.  FIRE, which Curmie criticized only yesterday, is actually all over this one: here’s a list of literally dozens of incidents, already (!).  This is, as FIRE’s headline rightly points out, the embodiment of “cancel culture”: you know, Gentle Reader, that horrible plague the right always complains about… except, of course, when they’re the ones doing it.

But we aren’t talking about the jobs report, or Russia attacking Poland on Trump’s watch, or the Epstein files, so at least there’s that.

There are problems here, and the solutions aren’t easy.  The political right will cheerfully abandon the 1st and 4th Amendments to bolster the 2nd, but the kind of gun control labelled by liberals as “common sense” wouldn’t have saved Charlie Kirk, at least if, as seems likely, Tyler Robinson was indeed the perpetrator.  He had no record of mental illness or criminality, and the weapon was neither a handgun nor a semi-automatic rifle. 

It is sadly ironic that one of Charlie Kirk’s most famous lines was “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”  But even calling attention to that quote is seen by some of the more fragile snowflakes of the right as a firing offense.  Yet another reason Curmie is glad he’s retired.

Note: one particularly unfortunate outcome here is that the Tyler Robinson Foundation, named for a different young man, will probably take a hit because of this because, in the words of a beloved former student, “people are stupid, y’all.”  The TRF is a charity offering support to families dealing with pediatric cancer.  Seems like a great cause, especially if you’re also a fan of the band Imagine Dragons, who have been involved with the foundation since its inception. Maybe send them a few bucks if you’ve got some to spare, Gentle Reader?

Today in Good Trouble: Melissa Calhoun

When educational policy is in the hands of dominionist jackasses Republican politicians (or their minions), bad things are likely to happen.  There’s the recent case in Idaho that Curmie wrote about a couple of weeks ago in which a poster reading “everyone is welcome here” was deemed political in nature.  (There’s a shocking but not surprising update on that story, by the way). 

There’s the ongoing attempt to require that public schools in Oklahoma teach the Bible; that one is currently “stayed” but not shot down by the state Supreme Court. 

There’s the attempt in Texas to give parents taxpayer-funded vouchers to pay for private school tuition (or to homeschool!), decreasing funding for public school in the process.  This should be unconstitutional, but isn’t, because the conservative majority on SCOTUS care more about ideology than about the Constitution want to pander to rich Christians think denying public funding for religious education is somehow a violation of the First Amendment.

But today, Gentle Reader, Curmie wants to write about a case in Florida, in which Melissa Calhoun (photo above), a high school English teacher at an arts magnet school in Brevard County since 2019, was de facto fired (she will not be re-hired for the next academic year) for violating an absurd law that prohibits teachers from addressing students by their preferred name.  This is all in the pursuit of “parents’ rights,” which is a catchy if deceitful term for denying students’ rights.

As Curmie wrote two years ago

The seemingly innocuous provisions of the [federal] Parental Bill of Rights actually provide a de facto open invitation for every homophobe, Christian nationalist, racist, or garden variety anti-intellectual within hailing distance to remove any topics of discussion, course materials, library books, or whatever else that might disrupt their myopic and theocratic view of the world. What purports to be an exercise in ideological balance and freedom of expression, therefore, is precisely the opposite.

In terms of what is immediately relevant in this case, which appears to be the first of its kind anywhere in the country, what is at stake is students’ rights to define themselves and to be treated with respect.  There are all sorts of problems with the law, not least of which is that no teacher worthy of the name would fail to call students what they want to be called, except in cases of something objectively offensive.  By “objectively” here, Curmie means a term that would clearly be offensive irrespective of questions of race, gender, religion.

Once again, Curmie quotes himself:

The laws in question, of course, are a paean to cis-gendering at the expense of individual liberty. What passes for the argument suggests that insisting on parental control over what a child can be called will somehow preserve that kid’s retention in the ranks of the cis-gendered. It won’t, of course; it will only add another layer of stress to a young citizen trying to figure things out.

Also, of course, there are some asshole parents out there who think they’re being cute by naming their kid something weird.  (Curmie once had Spring Day and Justin Case in the same class.)  Some poor kid named “Fauntleroy” or, God forbid, “X Æ A-12” or “Techno Mechanicus” is flat-out gonna get teased.  And whereas Muskian spawn are unlikely to venture into a public school, Daddy is a big enough asshole to refuse, on a whim, to let them go by “Bud” or “TM” or whatever. 

Think that couldn’t happen?  Curmie’s standard practice was to call roll on the first day of class by reading the surname and asking the students to tell him what they’d like to be called.  Some wanted to be known by their middle name or surname; some went by initials; a couple went by “Bud” or J.R. (for “Junior”); some used a standard nickname.  One young man said he’d like to be called Bob.  OK, Bob, no problem.  But he came up to me after class and said that if I ever had occasion to talk to his parents, I should always refer to him as Robert or he’d get in trouble.  Yes, really.  The lad was 19!

As Curmie wrote a couple of years ago, 

... if young Dana (to pick one of more than a few names that could refer to a boy or a girl) wants to be Daniel or Danielle (or Dan or Danny, or Dani…), and the parents object… THEY’RE THE PROBLEM. Curmie shudders to contemplate the fate of children who cannot trust their parents to support them as they work through questions of identity. And now, the state wants to take away their sanctuary: adults who see them as they believe themselves to be instead of what the parents want them to be.

The corollary to this is that if I’m in a class with my friend who wants to be called “Stephanie,” I’m gonna call her (or him) Stephanie, regardless of what their name was last year, or even last week.  And every kid in the class is going to follow suit.  So the teacher who submits to the absurd law that says that child must be called “Jacob” alienates not only Stephanie, but every other kid in the class… or, at the very least, all of Stephanie’s friends.  This does not create a positive learning environment.  Of course, the overwhelming majority of GOP pols aren’t actually interested in actual education, like knowing that the Civil War was about slavery or that there are millions of people alive today who remember when segregation was a thing.

Moreover, literally any deviation from the name at birth is verboten.  So if Susan wants to be called Suzy, there’s a form for that.  And when she’s in middle school and wants to be Suzi with a heart instead of a dot over the “i,” it’s another form.  And when she gets to high school and wants to be Sue, it’s another form.  And what happens if she still gets called Suzy by a teacher who goes to her church and has known her all her life?  Can that teacher get fired for the slip-up?  Can that teacher still call her Suzy outside of school?

Want to go by your middle name?  Get Mom and Dad to sign the form.  Curmie is so old that he remembers when Republicans were opposed to bureaucratic administrivia.

But revenons à nos moutons.  Is it reasonable that Calhoun should be out of a job for the transgression (get it? transgression) of acknowledging the right of a student to self-identify?  Well, as Curmie was notorious for saying in his Asian theatre classes, yes and no.  On the one hand, even stupid laws are laws, and disobeying them will inevitably have consequences.  She knew the risk.  On the other, willingness to stand against cruelty and stupidity ought to be applauded, not censured.  She did what she believes was right.  Curmie concurs with her assessment.  So, apparently, do her students and their parents.

The district bosses, having either made the announcement or confirmed its accuracy, are in a no-win situation.  They can’t follow through without being hammered by anyone with the slightest hint of empathy.  But they can’t back down without incurring the wrath of Ron (he’s an adult so we can call him that without a note from his mom) DeSantis and his merry band of howling banshees.

The best solution for Calhoun is to finish out the school year and head for a state that is a little more willing to face 21st century than Florida seems to be.  She could teach… or go on the lecture circuit for, probably, more money.  The best solution for the district is to concentrate on real problems, like the principal and teacher busted for partying with a couple hundred kids with alcohol, drugs, and weapons present.  Up until this week, nearly three months after the incident, those actual (alleged) criminals were on paid leave.  Oh, and the response from school board president Gene Trent?  “When we have thousands of employees, things happen.” 

La la how the life goes on.

Schrödinger's Cat and Right-Wing Punditry

Back in the days of yore, when Curmie was an undergraduate Government major, one of the core principles in his Political Ideals class, only slightly oversimplified, was that conservatives tend to think in terms of individuals, whereas liberals tend to think in terms of groups. When the discussion is about who gets the job or promotion or college admission or whatever, this distinction comes to the forefront.

That is, the definition of “level playing field” comes into dispute.  If we assume it up front, then in a field like academia that cis white male over there with the “best” credentials—GPA, board scores, publication record, grant money attracted, student evaluations, whatever—gets the gig.  But if we notice that some group—based on gender, race, religion, whatever—is under-represented and attempt to… wait for it… “level the playing field,” then maybe that guy isn’t the best choice.  Perhaps adding a different perspective is worth more than a couple of points on a standardized test.

In other words, liberals are looking for a socially equitable solution, whereas conservatives are looking to find the best-qualified individual irrespective of demographic profile.  Neither is inherently right or wrong, except at the extremes.  Claiming that, say, a black woman got an academic job based solely (or primarily) on DEI concerns is problematic if (hypothetically speaking) she has a doctorate from Harvard and received tenure at Stanford; saying that her firing is based solely (or primarily) on an anti-DEI agenda is just as bad if (hypothetically speaking) she’s a university president busted for plagiarism.

The paradigm breaks down, however, in the political sphere.  After all, here’s Curmie, well to the left of center politically, harping on and on about Confucian principles of looking at each case (and by extension each person) individually.  Meanwhile, look at any right-leaning publication or blog.  We don’t expect them to point out things like the fact that the economic “misery index” (unemployment plus inflation) is substantially lower now than it was when President Biden took office, or that if Republicans really cared about border security as anything but a campaign issue, they’d pass the supplemental spending request which earmarks $13.6 billion (with a “b”) specifically for that purpose.  That would be too much to ask, apparently.

Rather, look at the “honest” sites, the ones that recognize that Donald Trump is an unstable narcissist (even if they still prefer him to Biden), that Lauren Boebert is a vulgar hypocrite, that Nikki Haley will never answer a question truthfully if she sees an advantage to do otherwise. 

But look at how those stories are framed.  Chris Christie is a has-been blowhard.  George Santos is a mendacious jerk.  Marjorie Taylor Greene is a certifiable idiot.  But when the politician saying or doing something stupid or unethical is Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, or Chuck Schumer?  These are Democrats, and their boneheadedness is taken as representative of their kind.

This is a phenomenon Curmie calls the Schrödinger sentence, simultaneously true and untrue.  Yes, “Democrats say X,” because more than one of them say that, but the implication is that all Democrats say X, whereas a lot, perhaps even most, of them think X is downright moronic.  The other variation on the theme is the line beloved of Fox News, that “people are saying…”  No one outside the Fox studio is saying that, and they’re only saying it because their bosses told them to, but they are in fact saying it and they are in fact people, so it’s deceptive but not exactly a lie.

Curmie is neither partisan enough nor stupid enough to suggest that left-leaning sites like MSNBC, Alternet, or Raw Story don’t do exactly the same thing, or that the right has a monopoly on hypocrisy.  But sex scandals involving Republican pols schtupping the pool boy are more interesting (and newsworthy) than those involving Democrats because the Bill Clintons of the world aren’t yammering on about “family values” or whatever the latest right-wing catchphrase is.  Similarly, the cognitive dissonance alarms ring a little louder when the party that preaches individual merit is the one lumping everyone to their political left into an amorphous lump of Otherness. 

Let a single Democratic pol suggest that the minimum wage ought to be raised, that slavery existed in this country and that students ought to know about it, or that we ought to investigate the way higher education is funded in Western Europe, and there’s a dead cert guarantee that some on the right (notice that Curmie said “some,” not “all”) will start screeching that the moderate Democrat in question is a Communist.  If they’re really in a bind—losing an argument, for example—they’ll fall back to their go-to: “liberals [all of them!] hate America.” 

Curmie can’t think of a liberal in his acquaintance about whom that could reasonably be said, although he is getting more forgetful of late, so he refrains from saying it never applies.  Trying to fix the things that are wrong is precisely the opposite of hatred.  And disagreeing, even outspokenly, with this or that governmental policy or proposed legislation is no indication of hateful or even unpatriotic predilections. 

Curmie does admit, however, that whereas “hate” is a very strong word, he does have contempt for a small minority of Americans (as opposed to the country they were born into).  Those who ignorantly and arrogantly make sweeping generalizations about entire groups of people are on that list.  The ones who know better but use that rhetoric anyway are worse.

John Lyly, Aldous Huxley, and Student Loan Forgiveness

Curmie did his MA “by thesis” at an English university.  That is, there was no coursework involved, just a research project considerably longer than the thesis capstone to an American MA.  Curmie ended up writing about 47,000 words on the subject of “John Lyly and His Audience.” 

I hear you, Gentle Reader: “Who the hell is John Lyly?”  If you’re one of Curmie’s former theatre history students, he’s a little disappointed you didn’t at least recognize the name, but it’s perfectly forgivable if you don’t remember the context.  Lyly was the leading playwright who wrote primarily for the “boy companies” of late sixteenth-century England.  His career was ending as Shakespeare’s was beginning.

This MA project took place fortysomething years ago, and Curmie has returned to the topic only sparingly since then: I can’t be certain, but I strongly suspect that it’s been over four decades since I read any of his plays or any critical commentary on them.  I did watch a zoomed production of Gallathea and Phillida during the COVID times. 

That play is notable for its gender confusion, which makes it particularly interesting today.  The two title characters are attractive young women, played, of course, in the original production by pre-pubescent boys.  Both, like Rosalind in As You Like It and Viola in Twelfth Night a dozen or so years later, dress as men.  Neptune, you see, demands the sacrifice of the fairest virgin, so the fathers of two of the contenders for that now-dubious distinction dress them as men and send them off into the forest.  Just go with me here, Gentle Reader.

Lyly takes the bit even a step further than Shakespeare would, however, as Gallathea and Phillida meet and, both believing the other to be a man, fall mutually in love.  Of course, any kind of homosexual behavior could not be tolerated, so what to do?  Have Venus appear on the scene, of course.  The goddess of erotic love leads the two title characters off stage, promising to change one of them into a man so their marriage can proceed.  It’s a right-winger’s nightmare scenario: avoiding a lesbian relationship by the divine intervention of making one of the lovers trans! 

That same play, however, also points in the opposite direction in terms of today’s politics in the characters of Rafe the page and his brothers.  They try, and fail, repeatedly, to learn the skills required of various professions: mariner, alchemist, astronomer, etc.  The underlying message here is that people should know their place and not try to move above their station—upward mobility is not a thing to be countenanced in Elizabethan England.

The idea of staying in your own class works in the other direction, as well, in one of Lyly’s other plays, Alexander and Campaspe.  Here, Alexander the Great and the painter Apelles are both in love with the fair Campaspe.  Alexander could, of course, simply claim her as his own, but he has worlds to conquer, so he munificently gives her to Apelles (talk about a women’s studies article waiting to be written!).  The moment both reinforces the idea that class is important in both directions and, of course, parallels the Virgin Queen’s “marriage to England.”

But perhaps Curmie is not alone in seeing here an anticipation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where the Betas rejoice that they are smarter than the Gammas but don’t have all those heady responsibilities required of the Alphas.  Curmie sees this being played out in the response to the recent SCOTUS ruling on student debt forgiveness.

There are two issues here: was President Biden’s plan just, and was it lawful?  Certainly those two terms are not interchangeable.  Curmie isn’t going to argue the latter consideration; he suspects that SCOTUS actually got it right in constitutional terms.  Nor is he going to suggest that Biden’s solution to the problem was the best option; he thinks it’s an over-reach.  But the impulse, the desire to at least reduce the financial and indeed emotional strain on literally millions of Americans, does not seem out of place, especially since the government cheerfully forgave close to a trillion dollars in PPP loans, mostly to people who didn’t need it.  Insert something about geese and ganders here.

Few of us have avoided misfortune or even injustice and betrayal in our lives.  There are two responses: “I went through it and came out okay [a dubious presumption to Curmie’s mind], so you can (and should), too,” or “That was awful, and I’ll do what I can to keep it from happening to you.”  Curmie need hardly mention which of these stances is adopted by the contemporary right.  This former perspective, of course, falls in the tradition of Paul Ryan, Clarence Thomas, and Rick Perry (to name but a few), as a variation on “I’ve got mine; you’re on your own.”

There are, to be sure, two variations on the theme: “I paid my way through college working summer jobs and waiting tables during the school year” and “I paid back my loans, so why shouldn’t these deadbeats?”.  Both tacks, of course, blithely ignore the reality that the world has changed.  

Some nine years ago, Curmie addressed this issue in a post entitled “Yes, A University Education Used to Be Affordable.”  Here are a couple of highlights: A student in 1978-79 who worked a full-time job for 13 weeks in the summer and 10 hours a week for 30 weeks during the school year, all at minimum wage, would make enough (before taxes) to pay 101% of total cost of attendance (not just tuition and fees) at in-state rates at the average 4-year state university. In 2011-12, that figure was down to 36.4%.

At the university from which Curmie recently retired, the average student loan debt at the end of four years would have been more than covered in 2011-12 if only two things had happened since ’78-’79: the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation, and state funding as a percentage of the university budget had remained the same. But neither of those things came close to transpiring.

Curmie promises (well, OK, maybe “hopes”) to update this piece in the near future, but suspects the situation has grown even more dire. 

The response from the right: “Well, lower your expectations, you not-rich student.  Forget about following your dreams and accept your lot.”  Curmie can’t speak for you, Gentle Reader, but Curmie heard all the way through elementary school and beyond about how one of the promises of the American Dream was upward mobility.  Now, the very people who were using that as an example of American Exceptionalism in Curmie’s youth are exposing it as a myth and actively seeking to quash the very idea that someone whose family has modest means might enter the workplace on firm financial footing (well, unless they’re 6’8” and have a good jump-shot).

If you, Gentle Reader, think this attitude sounds strikingly like “know your place, Betas,” you’re not wrong… but actually Huxley’s dystopian vision pales in comparison to 21st-century right-wing rhetoric.  At least the world inhabited by Bernard Marx delineated between the classes on the basis of their own skills and capabilities: the Alphas really were “better” than the Betas, who were “better” than the Gammas, etc.

What today’s right-wing pols and their adherents seek in this instance is not remotely merit-based, but founded solely on a student’s parents’ wealth.  Thus, the very people rejoicing at SCOTUS’s elimination of Affirmative Action, proclaiming that this will ensure that the best-qualified applicants will be accepted, are making damned sure that isn’t true: that spots, even at the most modest of four-year institutions, are reserved for those who can afford it.  There are, no doubt, tens of thousands of promising scholars—potential doctors, scientists, teachers, you name it—who, perhaps wisely, have decided not to take on the long-term debt associated with a college education.

It's also worth mentioning that these folks tend to think of business (of course) and the STEM disciplines as the only real courses of study.  Presumably this lessens the damage caused by the status quo because these graduates will be entering a lucrative field, so the repayments won’t be as crippling.  Curmie, who has not received a paycheck in the last half-century as other than an educator or theatre artist (oh… wait… there was that $75 honorarium from the county arts council fortysomething years ago), dares to suggest that there are professions requiring a college degree that are just as essential as marketing managers or plastic surgeons, but don’t pay as well.

Finding a way to encourage (or at least stop discouraging) the best candidates to move forward in their chosen profession helps us all.  If I, or someone I love, needs a doctor, I’d very much prefer that the physician in question is the one with the best aptitude for the job, not simply the best who had a rich Daddy.  Moreover, the money saved by loan recipients will actually stimulate the economy by being spent on goods and services, unlike tax breaks for billionaires, who just throw another few million bucks into their tax haven in the Caymans.

As you might guess, Gentle Reader, although Curmie is no fan of the Biden plan or of end runs around Congress, he’s more than a little pissed off at those who, having gotten their piece of the pie, show contempt for those who might also want a small morsel. 

Curmie comes by his name honest.

Mike Huckabee’s North Korean Inanity

I’m not sure, but I think the first time I wrote about political rhetoric per se in a blog essay was nearly nine years ago in a piece called “The Rhetoric of Gitmo.” It’s actually pretty well-written (what happened?). There are a number of points I made at the time, but here’s what seems particularly relevant today.

Back then, in 2005, Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan described the detention center as Guantánamo Bay as “the Gulag of our time.” I cited an article by Pavel Litvonov, who was imprisoned at the real Gulag. He argues that:

By any standard, Guantanamo and similar American-run prisons elsewhere do not resemble, in their conditions of detention or their scale, the concentration camp system that was at the core of a totalitarian communist system….

There is ample reason for Amnesty to be critical of certain U.S. actions. But by using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive regimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty's spokesmen put its authority at risk. U.S. human rights violations seem almost trifling in comparison with those committed by Cuba, South Korea, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia….

Words are important. When Amnesty spokesmen use the word “gulag” to describe U.S. human rights violations, they allow the Bush administration to dismiss justified criticism and undermine Amnesty’s credibility. Amnesty International is too valuable to let it be hijacked by politically biased leaders.

Similarly, Senator Dick Durbin described, objectively, the allegations regarding Guantánamo, then added:

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings.

He then backtracked on his description, not because it was inaccurate but because he was catching all manner of political flak. Here’s what I wrote in 2005:

Durbin is a seasoned politician. He knows that you don’t mention Nazis. You just don't. Even if you’re not really making a comparison, even (no, make that especially) if the point you make is legitimate, you’ve got to understand that all people are going to hear is a slur. What Durbin had to say was important, but even speaking the truth in the wrong way can lose you credibility. He should also certainly know by now that the Bush administration might not be very good at much, but they are masters of the political counter-attack. If you say something dumb, they’re going to eat your lunch.

If you get stopped for speeding and the cop writes down your driver’s license number wrong, the law says you go free. The Bush administration has been blazing through the small towns of Truth and Accountability, spending very little time there. But until Sheriff Journalism or Officer Democrat get all their facts right, they’ll continue to get away with it.

Times have changed, and not for the better. The level of vitriol has been ratcheted up several steps. Not that long ago, there were some things that were just off limits in political discourse. They just were. You didn’t compare any American politician or political decision to Hitler, Stalin, or any other despotic or tyrannous regime. There have been corrupt and incompetent Presidents of both parties—virtually all of them could reasonably be accused of advocating policies that didn’t work, of playing to their base rather than enhancing the common weal, of appointing political allies over better-qualified contenders for positions in government. But they didn’t systematically target millions of people for torture and death based on race or religion or heritage. They didn’t have their political adversaries assassinated. They weren’t, in fact, tyrants. Bush wasn’t Hitler; neither is Obama.

Since incendiary rhetoric was the only attribute Sarah Palin brought to the GOP ticket in 2008, however, such defamatory flights of fancy have become absolutely de rigeur in Republican circles, not least among those who bellowed the loudest when Senator Durbin—who actually had a point—made his rhetorical gaffe. Plug “Obama Hitler” into the Google Machine and you get over 52 million hits. That’s right, 52 million. (“Obama Stalin” yields “only” 11.4 million hits. You’d think it would be higher, given the whole being-a-communist thing and all…) And it’s not all from crackpots like Matt Drudge. Well, actually, it is all from crackpots, but some of them somehow avoid being viewed as such: a Catholic bishop, the billionaire founder of a Fortune 500 company, a leading venture capitalist, a top Republican donor.

More appallingly still, it’s almost a rite of passage in Republican circles among candidates and office-holders, a sort of perverse “no true Scotsman” riff in which you’re not a real American—and certainly not a real Republican candidate—if you don’t think Barack Obama is exactly like Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin (gotta have an African on the list after all: and you thought the GOP wasn’t interested in inclusion), Pol Pot (well, maybe not him, since the average Republican pol has no idea who he was), and Professor Moriarty all rolled into one. California gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly invokes both Hitler and Stalin, Arizona State Representative Brenda Barton has settled on “Der Führer” as her preferred appellation for the POTUS; Curmie’s own Congresscritter, Loony Louie Gohmert decided the BP escrow account was reminiscent of the Reichstag.

Quick: name the Republicans who seem to be jockeying for position for a 2016 Presidential run. What’s your list? Michelle Bachmann? Ted Cruz? Rand Paul? Rick Perry? Each has linked President Obama to at least one of the following: Hitler (or Nazis, the Reichstag, etc.), Stalin, communism, socialism, Sharia law. Bachmann leads the field, as far as I can tell, by scoring in four of the five categories (I can’t find a Stalin reference from her, but I trust it’s forthcoming). I won’t supply all the links, but trust me, they’re there. The only exception among the current front-runners is Marco Rubio, who always seems to stop just short of an actual allegation. But remember that it was Rubio who brayed the loudest when President Obama chose not to disrupt Nelson Mandela’s funeral and therefore shook Raul Castro’s hand; asked if Obama is a socialist, Rubio can muster nothing more than “he is not Hugo Chávez.”

But since Obama took office, one would be hard-pressed to find national Republicans saying even, “I disagree with President Obama on a wide range of policy issues, and I’m not sure he’s entirely honest, but he’s not a socialist, not a communist, not a Nazi, and he doesn’t want to impose Sharia law.” The best we can do comes from the ’08 campaign: John McCain’s response to the dingbat in Minnesota who declared Obama an “Arab”: “He’s a decent, family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” (We’ll leave aside the casual assumption that what makes Obama not an Arab is that he’s a decent family man.) That incident happened on October 10. Barely a week later, he was calling then-Senator Obama a socialist.

Mike Huckabee: not the sharpest knife in the drawer

So now Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, current Fox News talking head, and also-ran candidate in the ’12 Presidential race, wants to join the party. But however much he tries, he doesn’t quite fit. He’s not a mainstream corporatist like Romney or Ryan, not a “maverick” who doesn’t actually act like one like McCain, not batshit bonkers like Cruz or Bachmann. He needs something different, something that will attract the attention of the carefully selected Koch addicts in the audience. Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union: old news. What to do, what to do? Eureka! North Korea! Axis of Evil! Bad guys on M*A*S*H! That guy with the funny haircut!

Kim Jong-Un: his regime is even worse than his haircut

And so, presto change-o, we get one of the stupidest comments of recent years: “My gosh, I’m beginning to think that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States.” Genius! Because nothing says “freedom” quite like a “Supreme Leader” who not only kills his mentor (and uncle), but everyone in that immediate family, including women, children, the country’s ambassadors to Malaysia and Cuba—he’s a piece of work, this guy. Governor, if you’d like evidence that it’s a hell of a lot worse in North Korea than here, try this on for size: you’re still alive after your critique of the President, you disgusting piece of crap.  [Note: there was not the slightest hint of irony or snarky exaggeration in the delivery, so don’t try the “he was kidding” crap.]

Of course, Huckabee had other commentary, too. From the beginning of the embedded video in the Raw Story piece:

• “We hold these truths to be self-evident… that all of us are created equal…” [Pssst… we know what it says, gender specificity and all.]

• It’s the federal agents who shouldn’t have rifles in the showdown with serial deadbeat Cliven Bundy. I’m not taking sides, mind you, but you know, it’s only a few “blades of grass,” (not, you know, a million dollars worth of unpaid fees and a string of court decisions as long as your arm). Besides, Fast and Furious, because that’s relevant.

• Benghazi, because it’s the only incident of its kind, ever. Except for (for example) the twelve separate incidents leaving 60 people dead that happened during the Bush43 administration… none of which seem to bothered me in the slightest. Oh, and 9/11. Seems like that might have been preventable, too… but I digress.

• Brandeis reversed field on an honorary degree for Ayaan Hirsi Ali: clearly Obama’s fault.

• Freedom of speech = anyone (I agree with) can get paid to speak, anywhere and under whatever circumstances they choose, even if the sponsors think better of it.

• Condoleezza Rice’s position on the Dropbox board is being challenged, and that’s awful… because freedom of speech is only for people I agree with.

• The CEO of Mozilla was “pushed out of his position” because the board members are gutless idiots of a political stance. And I repeat, he has the right to contribute to whatever cause he wants, and nobody is allowed to be upset by that because Freedom of Speech exists for people I like and not for those who criticize them.

• Those nasty left-wingers want to “shut [your voices] down,” because challenging those in power is the sole preserve of the right (unless, of course, free speech for those on the left is completely ineffectual, in which case it’s OK), and I have no fucking clue what “freedom of speech” really means and BY GOD, I’m going to prove it.

• Now comes the North Korea analogy, which surprisingly nobody, even in an audience of Koch whores, thought was ever so clever.

• OMG, those airport security regulations put in place as an absurd over-reaction by the Bush administration haven’t all been lifted by Obama. I’m oppressed. And “people put hands all over me.” [The screening is annoying, officious, and useless, but I’ve gone through airport security dozens of times since 9/11; no one has ever asked for a second ID, and no one has ever touched me. Must be they just like you, Mike. Go with it—you could make new friends.]

• There’s no need to show any ID at all to vote… except for the ID you do have to provide, which doesn’t count because… uh… ACORN. [OK, he didn’t invoke ACORN, but only because he didn’t think of it.] And the President says “there’s no voter fraud,” which of course he didn’t say, but I’m not setting up a straw man, here. That’s somebody who looks like me. And I’ll make a clever little quip about “looking around” in the White House without an appointment or a photo ID. [Gotta give him that one: good line.]

The bottom line is that beneath the folksy pseudo-charm is… well… nothing. Mike Huckabee is either stupider than skunk shit or utterly devoid of any ethical center. I’m betting the latter: that, having seen the last GOP nomination taken by someone with no core beliefs, Huckabee figures he’d better jump on that train, because pretending to believe in something didn’t work out so well. Of course, to be willing to appear to be nothing more than an insincere opportunist, you actually have to be an insincere opportunist. Interesting philosophical case study…

As I wrote years ago, the real problem with saying remarkably stupid things is that they become the only thing people remember. The more valid your point, the more imperative it is to stay away from the stupid stuff. There remain too many unanswered questions about Benghazi. Brandeis should either have done their homework before offering an honorary degree and a speaking platform or stuck to their guns, having made the offer. The Mozilla thing is a fiasco, especially given that principal anatagonist Sam Yagan of OkCupid doesn’t exactly have clean hands on the whole gay rights thing, either. (He responded to the article in Mother Jones that pointed out this inconsistency by explaining that his contribution to a virulently anti-gay candidate was purely mercenary, and shouldn’t be perceived as endorsing a position. Well, those weren’t his exact words, but that’s what he said.) Airport security is a farce, as I’ve been saying for years. Voter ID laws, per se, aren’t the least bit repressive.

And, if we’re not a True Believer, what do we remember? The inane North Korea line. I take it back. Huckabee is stupider than skunk shit. And he’s welcome to open the Pyongyang bureau of Fox News whenever he wants.