In a recent Reason piece, Matt Welch lamented how the blogosphere — which once carried promise of upending the linear, red-blue, Donkeys-vs.-Elephants duopoly on political debate — has degenerated into little more than an online duplication of the cable TV shout shows and shrill tomes on the bestseller lists.

I’d like to think there are a few exceptions to Welch’s thesis, including the blog you’re reading, but unfortunately, I think he’s largely correct. The more prominent blogs have shown an unfortunate tendency to fall rather neatly into red-blue divide, particularly around election time, and thus far, acclaimed “blogosphere” victories have been limited to uncovering sordid details about a political opponents’ personal life (Jeff Gannon) and getting people fired (Mary Mapes, Eason Jordan, Ben Domenech, et. al.)

One of Welch’s chief examples is Michelle Malkin, a talented writer who unfortunately discovered that there’s more money and fame as a crazy-ass authoritarian wing-nut than as the interesting, almost-libertarian she was several years ago (sadly, she’s right!).

Liberty and Power’s David Beito recently uncovered a particularly juicy example of how Malkin’s passion for scalp collecting and red-blue demagoguery has trumped her alleged principles.

It apparently started when a student leaked acopy of a test question a professor at Bellvue Community College had given his students. The math question began with this set up:

“Condoleezza holds a watermelon just over the edge of the roof of the 300-foot Federal Building, and tosses it up with a velocity of 20 feet per second.”

The question put Malkin and a host of conservative bloggers on the warpath, aiming to get the professor who wrote the question disciplined.

Yes, the question was in poor taste. And yes, it smacks of reverse racism, the usual bullshit black politicians like Rice or Colin Powell or Klen Blackwell unfortunately endure for countering the orthodoxy one can’t be legitimately black without subscribing to leftist politics.

But I have a hard time believing that if the name “Condoleezza” were changed to “Jesse,” “Rev. Al” or even a more generic, traditionally-black name like “Jerome” or “Andre,” and wwere written by a white professor, Malkin would have raised the ruckus she did. In fact, it’s not hard to see her taking the opposite position under such a scenario, decrying criticism of the question as overblown political correctness gone amuck. Also, where was the real harm done here? Condolezza Rice’s accomplishments (or demerits, if you share my opinion of Bush’s foreign policy) speak for themselves. Is it really news that some two-bit community college professor dissed her on a math test?

Nevertheless, Malkin publicized the case on her blog, and set off a chain-reaction of right-wing outrage.

Wel, they got their reprimand. But school administrators then went further, also granting the college’s diversity cops greater authority to monitor academic curriculum and personnel decisions. The school then hired a huckster named Ken Singleton to teach a series of mandatory diversity workshops to the school’s faculty. In academic circles, Singleton is apparently a notorious race-pimp, a guy who preaches victimization, identity politics, and the usual counterproductive multicultural nonsense. Beito adds:

Most ominously, for those of us who believe in academic freedom, [the Bellvue president] said that Bellevue will add a diversity [err "pluralism"] component to “program review and employee evaluations.” This looks like some sort of loyalty oath. Some victory!

I doubt Malkin much cares. She got what she wanted — a public spanking of one of those loony academic lefties. Nevermind that she and her righty blog cohorts stooped to playing the victim card to get it, or that the academic climate at Bellvue is now undoubtedly worse off as a result. I like how one commenter at Crooked Timber put it:

Malkin and her ilk have become a kind of lame, caricatured version of the very thing they profess to hate: self-appointed thought-police who comb through the vast and largely mundane world of academia looking for trivial violations of orthodoxy to feed their contrived outrage.

It would be sad if it weren’t so hilarious.

March on, blog warriors. There’s always Ward Churchill!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 11:15 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.