In Front Page Magazine, Matthew Vadum writes, "A young speechwriter may be responsible for concocting the official lies about last September's deadly terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya." ("Obama's Benghazi Propagandist") The speechwriter Ben Rhodes's qualifications for being Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting" are a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing!
Rhodes also is credited with writing Obama's Cairo speech, in which fiction was substituted for historical fact, something historian Brian Birdnow and I analyzed in the first Dissident Prof title, a guidebook for students who are assigned this speech in composition classes. Vadum quotes from the book, 'A New Beginning, Or a Revised Past? Barack Obama's Cairo Speech, to illustrate the creative license with history that Obama shamefully displayed and that is now being taught to students. The politically well-connected creative writer, Rhodes, Vadum points out, also had Obama's ear on Libya and managed to convince him to reverse the U.S. decades old policy of supporting Mubarak. Dissident Prof, the English teacher, notes the irony. Sadly, the Keystone Cops quality of those in the White House is leading to limitless tragedies. Vadum continues to skillfully demolish the narrative about an "intellectual" and "eloquent" president.
Speaking of terrorism, we turn now to the apologists in the academy.
Cinnamon Stillwell has a good run-down in Front Page Magazine. These academics have joined the New York Times in wondering, why, why, why did such a nice rap-music-listening, pot-smoking American boy turn to jihad?
Tweets also give a clue. In her Chronicle of Higher Education column on language and writing in academe, professor Lucy Ferris analyzes those of the younger terrorist:
the use of lol boils down to Buzzfeed’s No. 8, “I am uncomfortable with my feelings and expressing them.” Isn’t sarcasm often a smokescreen for this very discomfort? Don’t other interjections often convey—albeit without a leftover reference to laughing—the speaker’s feelings of awkwardness or ambivalence? Such avoidance is understandable among young adults; one student described lol as “a comforting word between awkward teens who don’t understand emotion in text.” But even those of us who have never typed lol in social communications have been known to spring for irony as a mask.
Which brings me back to the pathetic spectacle of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. We don’t know much about him, and his texts and tweets are unlikely to paint a full picture of his psyche. But however “chilling,” “cold-blooded,” or “dark” that picture ends up being, one thing seems clear from the lols sprinkled through his social communications: he was distancing himself from emotions he might otherwise have felt or expressed. His last tweet, “I’m a stress free kind of guy,” takes such ironic distancing to its limit.
Well, perhaps, he should have just gotten in touch with his feelings?
That's what Morgan State thinks will prevent future shooters, as this title in the same publication that led Dissident Prof to SOL (Snort Out Loud) indicates, "After Shootings, Morgan State U. Trains Students in Conflict Resolution."
We may reach a day when job candidates will put on their curriculum vitaes such things as "former leader of a domestic terrorist group, skilled in conflict resolution," as would be appropriate for Bill Ayers (who nonetheless does not mention such things in his speeches before teachers and students). He did not when he gave the speech at the anniversary remembrance of the Kent State shootings (double irony alert, SOL).
Do you want to hear what Bill Ayers is really like and what the Weatherman were like? Then come to our presentations in Florida with Larry Grathwohl, Weatherman informant and author of the reissued memoir, Bringing Down America. I'll be talking about the newest Dissident Prof Press release, Bill Ayers: Teaching Revolution.
Ayers is still spreading his poison to innocent children, but now being aided and abetted by the Department of Education and non-profits that are presenting him to school children as an anti-Vietnam War protestor and civil rights activist.
Talk about fiction! SOL
My other publications this week, in case you missed them: in PJ Media about Better Georgia's efforts with false charges of racism to make the state Democratic and in Front Page Magazine about leftist, sexually explicity Common Core "Exemplars."
Read also fellow panelist Bruce Thornton's essay on the Obama Doctrine, which originates on our campuses.
And don't miss the Dissident Prof with Larry Grathwohl and Tina Trent tonight at Waldemere Fire Station, Sarasota: More information here.
