What It's Like to be a Conservative Professor

Robert Oscar Lopez  "You may ask, where are they? I can't tell you. The academic right simply doesn't exist. Conservative professors are frightened, invisible, and often embarrassed. Ideological exile is scary. It gets tiring when colleagues ask you to defend birthers, the Westboro Baptist Church, Rush Limbaugh, George Bush, George Zimmerman, and David Horowitz before you've even had your morning coffee, especially when they are going to vote on your tenure.  The ignorant asides about Fox News are usually thrown in during department meetings, somewhere between announcements of the latest conference about homosexuality and elections to the personnel review committee.  Hold your tongue and count to ten, then scream as you jog at dawn the next day.
...."The response from a right-wing Army wife: "Your thanks for being a teacher is your paycheck and your pension. Shut up and be grateful."

"Elsewhere, a retired Air Force officer wrote, "I detest people like you."

"That's what it's like to be a conservative professor."

Robert Oscar Lopez teaches American literature and Classics at CSU Northridge. His book, Colorful Conservative: American Conversations with the Ancients from Wheatley to Whitman, came out in 2011.



Prof Lopez wrote this follow-up a few days later: A gigantic thank you from a conservative professor  "In reality, the shopkeepers and petty bourgeois tradesmen who put Margaret Thatcher in power in the UK exist in a parallel form in the US, and they are not going to Harvard or even Berkeley. They are at state schools where teaching is more important than research. Conservatives must not overlook universities like mine - CSU Northridge - where there are veterans, home-schooled evangelicals, recent immigrants from socially conservative countries like South Korea and the Philippines. These will be the lifeblood of the next right that rises."

http://www.funnytimes.com/playground/cartoon.php?id=9241#.T7RHhUV5GSo

Sacrificial scams

Ann Coulter "When government employees mobbed the state capitol in Wisconsin last year, the upside was: They got to bully people. The downside: Voters finally found out what these public servants were being paid. 
"Their compensation included not only straight salary, but also lavish overtime benefits, pensions, health care plans, sick days and vacation time (most of which they spent protesting)." 

http://commonsenselogic.blogspot.com/2009/09/cartoon-of-day-find-government-worker.html

...."Former representative and amateur home pornographer Anthony Weiner was a member of Congress until he resigned last June in order to spend more time with his hard drive. He will probably end up collecting about a million dollars from his 80 percent taxpayer-funded government pension. 

"These are the "1 percent" deserving of the public's wrath: We're paying their salaries. We weren't taxed to pay Mitt Romney's salary at Bain Capital. We aren't taxed to pay the salaries of Jamie Dimon or Alex Rodriguez. Anthony Weiner? Him, we pay for. 

"Government employees expect to live like something out of the czar's court -- and then have us admire them as if they're Rosa Parks." 

President Me

Morning Bell  "Reflecting on his two terms in office, President George W. Bush said in 2010, “You realize you’re not it. You’re a part of something bigger than yourself.”

"This is a sentiment President Barack Obama did not inherit from his predecessor. Over the past month we have witnessed several displays of arrogant power emanating from our White House, emphasizing fealty to a person over the integrity of an American institution. Some are more serious than others. 

"First, this week it was discovered that White House staff had edited the biographies of many past presidents on whitehouse.gov to include a bullet point or two inserting President Obama into each historical narrative.

"For example, while President Calvin Coolidge had been the first president to make a public radio address, President Obama is on LinkedIn; and while Social Security was introduced by President Roosevelt, under President Obama it still exists. But in a far more egregious example, they incorrectly added to President Ronald Reagan’s biography:

“In a June 28, 1985 speech Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multi-millionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffett Rule.”

 http://terrellaftermath.com/

"Finally, President Obama insinuated yesterday that if you don’t support his policies, it’s not due to philosophical differences, but because of his name. Answering a question on The View about tight polls, he said: “When your name is Barack Obama, it’s always going to be tight. Barack 
Hussein Obama.”

"Any person selected to the highest office in the land is bound to indulge a small degree of narcissism. But when it permeates the entire attitude and culture of the executive branch, it begins to become a problem. No president is larger than the presidency."

 Thomas Lifson: Team Obama's latest exploding cigar

Imagine the emotional insecurities of a grown man who would have henchman find and gratuitously insert even the faintest link between this 44th president and almost every president back to Calvin Coolidge --"On Feb. 22, 1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people.....President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls."

Naturally Neal Boortz has an opinion on all this: Our narcissist in chief  "Do you remember the sound bite I’ve played on the air many time?  “I directed, I made the decision, I instructed, I, I, I …”  He’s a man who named his own dog after himself: BO!  He coined the latest youth generation that thrust him into the White House as Gen 44, as in the 44^th president.  The list goes on and on. 

"But the latest news takes this love of self from the ridiculous to the asinine."

Back and to the Left: The L.A. Times Analyzes a Police Shooting

JACK DUNPHY    "Imagine working in an occupation in which your most important decisions were evaluated by people who have never performed your job.  Imagine further that your very life depended on those decisions and that you had to make them in the blink of an eye.  And finally imagine that others could take months to come to a conclusion about what you had done, mulling it over with the aid of reports, photographs, and a 3-D animation of what had occurred.

CafePress; shame on them

"Such is the situation facing officers in the Los Angeles Police Department today."

...."And Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa makes appointments to his commissions, most especially such a high-profile one as the police commission, not with an eye toward expertise but rather with an emphasis on “diversity” as the word is currently understood.  In the case of Detective Gamboa, the commission voted 3-2 to rule the shooting out of policy."

...."Gamboa will likely receive some minor punishment for the tactical deficiencies that led up to the shooting, but he is alive today and the man who tried to kill him is not.  I would ask the three commissioners who ruled the shooting out of policy this question: Would you have preferred to see the outcome reversed?"

“Jack Dunphy” is the pseudonym of an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.

Obama, Clinton, Carter: A Tradition of Appeasement

Lt. Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa -  I was there when Carter appeased Ceausescu; Chen Guangcheng is the latest Democratic pawn 

"Three months later, I was granted political asylum in the United States, and I informed President Carter that he was praising the wrong man. In fact, Ceausescu was an international terrorist and arms smuggler who was also selling off Romanian Jews and Germans for Western currency. The result?

"Carter alleged that the KGB had staged my defection in order to destroy his excellent relations with Ceausescu, and he ordered that I be deported back to Romania."

"If only…we could sit down at a table with the Germans and run through all their complaints and claims with a pencil, this would greatly relieve all tension."Chamberlain, speaking unoffficially to Anthony Eden in 1937. No, wait; wasn't that Ron Paul speaking of the Iranians?

...."When Ronald Reagan became president, the U.S. was being treated with contempt by most petty tyrants around the world. The Soviet Union was on the march in Angola, Cuba, Ethiopia, Syria, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, and, of course, Afghanistan. Reagan reversed all these trends, and his successor, George H. W. Bush, was credited with winning the Cold War and demolishing the Soviet empire."
...."The same thing seems to be true of the current leaders of the Democratic Party. Let’s hope that next November the United States will get a White House and a Congress able to tell the difference between wild rabbits and dangerous foreign despots."
Lt. Gen (r) Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking official ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. He is currently writing a book on disinformation together with Prof. Ronald Rychlak.

MSNBC panel agrees media will be in the bag for Obama at the debates

Hot Air:  "Consider this balance for MSNBC.  After the Morning Joe panel openly scoffed at the Barack Obama campaign’s attack ad on Bain Capital yesterday, Hardball came to Obama’s rescue in the evening.  Chris Matthews chatted with David Corn and Time’s Mark Halperin about how difficult it will be for Mitt Romney to defend his years at Bain … all the while with a strange little graphic in the lower left corner that shows Romney with the phrase, “You’re so Bain.”  Mark Halperin then issued this moment of honesty about what we can expect from the media during the final weeks of the general election:"

 "According to Halperin, the press will be just fine if Obama “bumper-sticker[s] it,” but Romney will have to present an overwhelmingly compelling argument in order to get the media to acknowledge it.  As it happens, I agree with Halperin on this point, because Obama’s been “bumper-stickering it” for the last five years, and the media still hasn’t called him on it.  But shouldn’t that be, y’know, a little embarrassing for Halperin to admit?  Essentially, Halperin predicts that the media will fawn all over Obama at the debates regardless of whether he says anything intelligent or not, perhaps particularly if he doesn’t say anything intelligent … and that seems to be OK with Halperin."