Posts
It's Mao or Never
"The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for 'The Little Red Book' by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story," reports the Standard-Times of New Bedford, Mass.:
The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account.
Among those who fell for the story, as we noted Friday, was Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, who cited it in a Boston Globe op-ed piece (though he claimed the book in question was "the official Chinese version of Mao Tse-tung's Communist Manifesto"). According to a Globe news story on the hoax, the Globe interviewed the shifty student--whose request for anonymity both papers have respected even though he lied to them--"but decided not to write a story about his assertion, because of doubts about its veracity."
Kennedy, meanwhile, apologized for slandering America's dedicated law-enforcement agents by portraying them as totalitarian thugs.
Ha ha, we fooled you! Here's the actual Kennedy response as reported by the Globe:
Laura Capps, a Kennedy spokeswoman, said last night that the senator cited ''public reports" in his opinion piece. Even if the assertion was a hoax, she said, it did not detract from Kennedy's broader point that the Bush administration has gone too far in engaging in surveillance.
This puts is in mind of a 1953 quote from science-fiction author Robert Heinlein:
I found in traveling around the world that a great many people . . ., apparently well educated and sophisticated, were convinced that the people of the United States were in the grip of terror and that free speech and free press no longer existed here. They believed that the United States was fomenting a third world war and would presently start it, with Armageddon consequences for everyone else, and that the government of the United States smashed without mercy anyone who dared to oppose even by oral protests this headlong rush toward disaster.
These people could "prove" their opinions by quoting any number of Americans and American newspapers and magazines. That they were able to quote such American sources proved just the opposite, namely that we do continue to enjoy free speech even to express arrant nonsense and unpopular opinion, escaped them completely.
The University of Massachusetts' Amherst campus is hosting a conference next October on "Rethinking Marxism." Indeed, anyone who has set foot on a college campuses in the past 30 years knows that communist ideas are commonplace, as one might expect in institutions that are sheltered from reality. The Mao yarn was never believable in the slightest for anyone except someone like Ted Kennedy, who is only strengthened in his prejudices when the evidence for them is discredited.
AS BENJAMIN FRANKLIN SAID: "THERE'S NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD FOOL"
But UMASS Amherst will make sure a whole new crop of young fools is being nurtured by the elite academics who have never had a real job in their life---just like Karl Marx, who lived off his prosperous in-laws except for ONE JOB---a reporter for the now defunct New York Herald Tribune as its London correspondent. Dontcha think the NYT would hire old Karl M. in a nanosecond if he were still around!
1 comment :
The New Bedford Standard-Times, as well as several other MSM outlets that have knowledge of the hoaxer's identity, are refusing to disclose his name, even though the crying little coward used them to disseminate what he knew all along was a bald-faced lie.
Imagine how bright would have been the floodlights bathing the liar's front lawn if his fantasy story had been one that supported a conservative viewpoint!
I thinks it's important that a name and face be attached to the lie.
Post a Comment