SAUDI DEMOCRACY?

No longer an oxymoron, after, ahem, a certain occurrence in a nearby state. All that war did was make things worse, didn’t it?

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “I think one of the big problems in France is that we are anti-American without knowing why. It’s just kind of a natural thing. I mean so many people I meet are anti-war, and they’ll just say that Bush is stupid and the Americans are awful imperialists. It’s just their typical answer, and they never think of why. That’s crazy. I think it’s because we’re all being brought up like that, especially at school. It’s incredible how we’re taught about America — they’re always explaining, for example in geography or history courses, how Americans are imperialistic.” – Sabine Herold, 22-year-old French dissident, in Reason.

THE CONSERVATIVE CLOSET: “With respect to your comment, ‘imagine being a right-of-center student at his school’: well, imagine working there, or at any other academic institution in the Bay area. I teach at Stanford, which is supposed to be more conservative – when I accepted a position here I was razzed by my liberal friends for my new proximity to that vortex of neocon evil, the Hoover Institution – but here, as everywhere else in the Bay (and academia in general), there is a hegemony of leftist ideology that permits no dissent.
I keep my opinions to myself (I do have an instinct for self-preservation) and can ‘pass for liberal,’ which means that I get to hear how academics really feel about the role they think conservative ideas ought to play in public discourse (none). Their public line is that they are committed to untrammeled free expression and don’t know what all this fuss about ‘political correctness’ is about — it’s all a plot of Fox News to delegitimize public dissent. Their private stance is that, since the Bush administration is ‘evil’ (I have heard this exact characterization many times) it doesn’t matter how one treats the enemy and his ideas; it’s a battle of good against evil, after all. It is taken for granted that any sign of conservative politics will ruin a professor’s career. If you get an interview, you will not get hired; if you are hired, you will not get tenure. My colleagues will casually allude to this fact, but it does not trouble them unduly. After all, no-one they know is a conservative.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.