Submitted by Grover Furr, Nov 14, 2007 12:47

This article uncritically adopts the dishonest vocabulary of the far Right.

It's nonsense, for example, to call the Democratic Party "leftist" or "the Left". That's not what the Democratic Party calls itself.

It's as though IHE were to call the Republican Party not "conservative" but, say, "crypto-Fascist." A pretty accurate term!

Then the results of the studies cited here would be:

"Among college faculty Democrats outnumber supporters of crypto-Fascism by 8 to 1."

Is this formulation misleading? Far less misleading than saying "Leftists outnumber Rightists", when what is meant is "registered or declared Democrats outnumber registered or declared Republicans."

Now, if declared socialists and communists "outnumbered Rightists 8 to 1″, then it would be accurate to say "Leftists outnumber Rightists."

Furthermore, it would be a very good state of affairs! A goal to aim for, certainly.

For another thing, the article uncritically accepts the phony notion of "balance" as desirable. As though "balance" were somehow such a positive value in itself that "good" should be balanced out by "evil" whenever possible.

The Republican Party is evil if the term means anything at all. For example, it has long been the party of overt racism, eagerly assuming this role from the Democrats as a result of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. Reagan anointed it in this role by opening his campaign in Philadelphia, MS.

The "solid South", once racist Democrat, has long since become racist Republican. Without racism, Republicans could not be elected dogcatcher in most of the country.

Even if one accepts the notion that the USA is a democracy, it's clear that the Republican Party opposes democracy. In most industrial countries, and many others too — for example, Peru — voting is either compulsory, or far more widespread than in the USA.

Does the Republican Party support expanding voting? On the contrary! Most of those who do not vote, or who are legally disenfranchised, would never vote Republican. So the Republican Party supports restricting voting rights as much as possible. It's well known that the current Republican president would never have been elected otherwise.

And this is just one example of the moral evil of the Republican Party.

The Republican Party is a far greater danger to us Americans than all the Osama bin Laden-type terrorists in the world.

For example, the Republican Party has done virtually incalculable harm to the vast majority of Americans. Gutting our civil rights and the rights of working people, transferring the wealth of the working majority to fatuously rich exploiters, spending our treasure on mass murder imperialism in the Middle East while killing thousands of our young soldiers and making a great many of them into war criminals.

And that's just a sample. It's actually far worse than that. Who needs "balance" with a gang of thugs like this?

"Conservative" ideas are all wrong in any case. All of them, all the time.

They should be taught, of course — but for purposes of refutation only, to arm students against the lies that pass largely uncriticized in the narrow spectrum of political debate permitted in the American mass media.

We can never have too few Republicans, conservatives, "rightists," in universities — or anywhere else.

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