Liberals worth ridiculing

There are three items in Monday's Western Herald worthy of ridicule. First, in a letter to the editor (which is apparently not available online) a liberal claims that Ann Coulter compared Bush to Stalin. It took me a while to figure out what he was referring to. Of course, he completely mixed up what Coulter actually said. She contrasted liberals' support for Stalin's revolution, despite its obvious failure, to their opposition to Bush's revolution in Iraq. The key point here is that liberals are traitors. They supported Stalin because he opposed America, and they oppose Bush because he doesn't.

The second item is a letter from everyone's favorite Physics Department chairman, Paul Pancella. He makes the usual complaints that she is not "thoughtful" enough. This would have been slightly more credible if he hadn't tried to ask a "gotcha" question about College Republicans in the military, which Coulter easily shot down. Apparently, his idea of thoughtful commentary is a cartoon posted on his office door implying that Americans want to kill our troops to steal Iraq's oil.

Pancella then presumes to apologize on our behalf to everyone who didn't like our event. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize on his behalf to anyone who has ever had to read anything he wrote. He just can't stand the idea that conservatives might actually get to have an event on campus. Someone who cancelled his subscription to the Gazette because it was too conservative might not be the best judge of what is mainstream in the real world.

Finally, he complains about our flyers. Strangely, he has yet to write a letter about the attacks on free speech by liberals who tore down thousands of our flyers. I guess that one got lost in the mail. He is outraged by the idea that we posted more than one flyer per bulletin board.

That leads us to item number three, an unintentionally hilarious article about an experimental "writing" class. An excerpt:

"Some English experimental writing students at Western Michigan University believe bad weather is responsible for knocking down their speech bubble projects, which were hung on trees outside Brown Hall, Miller Auditorium and Waldo Library for the past couple of weeks. ... There were at least eight of the speech bubbles hanging from the trees, Wicker said, adding that some students replaced their old speech bubbles with new ones before the break in the hope that the messages of their experiment in writing would not be lost."

So apparently, hanging speech bubbles from trees gets you college credit in "experimental" "writing," but posting more than one flyer per bulletin board is too much free speech. Where are the environmentalists when you need them?