The John Hopkins University

What a piece of shit.

Fouad Ajami, a professor (and he has won prizes! They love to give each other prizes!) at the esteemed university I once thought seriously of attending, has written a piece for the Wall Street Journal attracting some attention in which he says of Bush's approach to morality: "the one defining mark of [his] moral outlook is the distinction [he is able to make(?)] between friend and foe," which really only illuminates how difficult it is to find something nice to say about Bush. Being able to tell the difference between friend and foe is something we expect of our five year olds, something we hope our presidents have managed long ago. As well, the action of marking friend and foe is only the beginning of a process to determine proper action and context of action for the self. In the Bush presidency, marking friend and marking foe involves a process that has typically led to great corruption and great heartache. We are not talking about Churchill here. Instead we are talking of roses for politically connected corporations and endless ache for others.

Now Ajami was writing this piece earlier and calling for Bush to pardon Libby. His piece, pedantic, insipid and superficial, went beyond straining the bonds of credulity however and entered the realms of the insultingly delusional. He wrote:

In "The Soldier's Creed," there is a particularly compelling principle: "I will never leave a fallen comrade." This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.

How does one have the audacity or just the sheer stupidity to compare Scooter Libby to a soldier right now? How is he comparable? When soldiers in Iraq fall are they wearing custom tailored suits while being advised on their movements by lawyers who bill thousands of dollars an hour? Is the consequence of their falling an easy stretch in a minimum security jail? In another tack, was it a war that the White House was fighting in order to convince the American public that attacking a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 or any terrorism directed against the United States was the right move to make even as we invaded another more culpable foe? If it was then war, then are we accusing the Bush presidency, by application of this logic, of bringing civil war to the United States? An odd and idiotic defense of the indefensible.

Getting caught up in this part of his article is to miss the point elsewhere that this fool who has a koosh job in a comfortable university (a university started in much more a spirit of challenging established authorities when it was begun about 130 years ago which has clearly lost its way on that score) believes that Libby has sacrificed something out of a nobility of spirit in choosing to reveal the identity of a secret United States agent and obstruct the justice of the United States in the pursuit of a flawed and tragic policy that has not revealed anything of any nobility at all, but has just allowed the rotten fruits of this administration to smell more strongly in the light of the larger stage of war than they would have if Bush was simply giving the environment away (another thing he excels at).

Why do we suffer these fools so docilely?

How does Professor Ajami have a job when he so publicly reveals not just his ignorance, but an appalling lack of reason, intelligence or any sense whatsoever of a political philosophy that contains insight, distinction or foresight? He is an apologist. A flunky. Increasingly, our system of higher education rewards morons like this while the more original thinkers are included out of a process out of fear that those more original thinkers will reveal these flunkies for what they are: dangerous fools with no more right to pontificate and teach than the dogs they resemble.

So a big "Go Fuck Yourself" to The John Hopkins University and the lapdogs they hire for this pathetic and dangerous administration.