Feeling rough today, thanks to throbbing temples, a temperature and fits of explosive sneezing. But this is too good to miss.

Jeff Goldstein on Juan Cole on Sarah Palin: 

Rhetorically, Cole’s trick is to ascribe to Palin motives that he knows his readership, who’ve been conditioned to believe that Christian boogymen are out to replace the Constitution with the New Testament, will believe uncritically; from there, it is but a small step to suggesting a sinister cause/effect relationship – the suggestion being all that matters, else the facts would have received a place of prominence in Cole’s “investigation”. But then, because the facts undercut the suggestion, and because the suggestion is what Cole hopes will have lasting power, Cole merely omits the facts. Academic rigor at its finest!

What Cole also fails to acknowledge is that, when it comes to book banning or bowdlerization, the real problem lies with PC progressives, who have, in recent years, had problems with the “ageist” Old Man and the Sea, the “racist” works of Faulkner and Twain, the “insensitive to the differently abled” title, Hunchback of Notre Dame, and on and on and on – to the point where textbooks themselves are being “cleaned” of anything that might give “offense” or be construed as “hate speech” – foregoing historical context and intent for a more sanitized and “diversity-friendly” world of literature and learning.

The whole thing.

Update: Anna points out that Cole is no stranger to censorious urges himself. From the Detroit Metro Times, February 2006:

I think it is outrageous that Fox Cable News is allowed to run that operation the way it runs it. It is a highly ideological, explicitly ideological operation, and it is polluting the information environment… Frankly, I think in the 1960s the FCC would have closed it down. It’s an index of how corrupt our governmental institutions have become, that the FCC lets this go on.

“Polluting the information environment”? Not at all like our esteemed academic, whose disregard for facts is a much loftier endeavour.

Update 2: The academic language police have issued new euphemisms. “Civilised” and “immigrant” are now racist words. And “seminal” is sexist. Please update your records and comply.

I often enjoy Nick Cohen’s writing, not least when he upsets his readers at the Guardian and Observer. Which he does again today:

For once, the postmodern theories so many [Democrats] were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was ‘the other’ – the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against…

Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right…

Naturally, umbrage ensues.

Eco-hippies weep for fallen trees. “I want you to know, trees, that we care.”

Emotional Hippies – Crying Over Dead Trees – Watch more free videos

Hand me the gun. No, the bigger one.

(h/t, Clazy.)

Arabella Weir, whose leftist credentials have previously been noted, today shares her wisdom on parenting and education:

Weir’s definition of a “good, responsible citizen” will become apparent in due course.

Some might think of that as where ideology collides with actual parenting.

Actually, Ms Weir attended the hardly-rough-and-tumble Camden School for Girls, a voluntary aided school, whose alumnae include Emma Thompson and Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor. Arabella is, lest we forget, the daughter of former British ambassador Sir Michael Weir and not short of a bob.

State schooling is, one might suppose, entirely free of disabling and alienating effects, being as it is so ideologically sound.

Here, the “right thing to do” has a sacrificial air and seems to mean trading educational opportunity – say, in terms of motivation, class size and a culture of learning – for an approved and “representative” social mix, i.e. one which involves mingling conspicuously with those deemed “disadvantaged”. Thus one’s leftist credentials can be seen by passers-by. Is this really about doing the right thing? Or is it just a matter of admiring one’s own socialist credibility?

For shame. Parents must make sacrifices, you hear? Not for their own children, of course, or for their peace of mind, but for the Greater Good.

Norman Geras spots some cultural cringing at The Observer:

“America and Britain talk about human rights and democracy as if their benefits are self-evident and universal. But when it suits their strategic aims, in Latin America, Central Asia or the Middle East, they collaborate with brutal dictatorships.”

OK, so you should practise what you preach. But can’t you also preach what you practise if you do practise it? America and Britain do have a certain record they can point to as democracies. And the benefits of human rights and democracy are universal, aren’t they? Or did The Observer change its spots and retreat from its attachment to liberalism?

“American and European interests will not be served by military grandstanding and asserting the moral superiority of their political systems.”

Hmmm… I thought democratic political systems were superior. I thought The Observer might think this too.

Indeed. The rest.