Decorum for Dictators

Remember Jean Sara Rohe? She’s the arrogant little college graduate-cum-pseudo-folk singer who briefly became a left-wing hero last year. At her graduation ceremony at the Eugene Lang New School for Social Research, Ms. Rohe memorably used her role as senior class speaker to lambaste Sen. John McCain.

Sen. McCain, you’ll recall, would deliver his own address at the ceremony, and the arrogant Ms. Rohe decided to fill the auditorium up with moronic platitudes about peace, brotherly love, and likeminded sophomoric nonsense. In addition, Ms. Rohe lit into Sen. McCain, who gracefully refused to strike back at her in his own speech.

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” mention this, dear reader, because the Left’s reaction to Ms. Rohe’s antics is in striking contrast to its treatment of another ill-mannered collegiate speaker: Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University. Whereas Jean Sara Rohe became a folk hero on the Left, Mr. Bollinger is ridiculed for his purportedly gauche behavior.

As everyone on God’s green (and rapidly warming) earth must know, Mr. Bollinger recently excoriated Iranian whacko Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before the Nutter-in-Chief offered some dubious remarks to an audience at Columbia University. Mr. Bollinger took issue with President Ahmadinejad for, among other things, denying the Holocaust, maltreat gays, offering material support to terrorism, radically curtailing free speech and freedom of expression, and holding political prisoners.

Now, one might have thought that our buddies on the political Left would applaud such talk. After all, they supposedly don’t esteem those who, say, deny the Holocaust, hang homosexuals, and support theocratic terrorists.

If they cheered when Jean Sara Rohe ridiculed an American senator who supports the Iraq War, then, surely they’ll delight in the excoriation of an anti-Semitic, theocratic fascist who blithely supports terrorists who kill American troops.

Oh, but no. It turns out they believe that John McCain doesn’t deserve the sort of mannered, respectful treatment that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does. Executing homosexuals and declaring a desire to “wipe Israel off the map” appears not to rankle as much as hoping for an American victory in Iraq.

Accordingly, our buddies on the Left—at The Nation, Counterpunch, the Daily Kos, &c.—are in a virtual e-tizzy over Lee Bollinger’s bad manners. How horrid!

To be honest, dear reader, it is difficult to take such people seriously. They pretend offense when you say that they support any odious government, providing it’s sufficiently anti-American. And then…they support any odious government, providing it’s sufficiently anti-American.