Really?
by digby
I guess we're going to have to start collecting all the ridiculous wingnut Virginia Tech theories in order to fully understand the absurd "common sense" arguments that are going to come our way. (You'll notice that nobody on the right advances the one truly common sense argument: crazy people shouldn't be allowed to pack heat. But that would be infringing on their freedom of religion, so don't go there.)
Hilzoy made the unfortunate decision to visit Rush Limbaugh's web site and lo and behold we have yet another example of the right's amazing ability to blame Cho on some facet of their long standing liberal shibboleths, regardless of how utterly stupid it is. Yep: it's liberal academia that drove him to it:
I saw this headline: "Can Any Good Come from V Tech Horror?" followed by this blurb: "Maybe, just maybe, we'll face the hatred for American traditions and capitalism infesting our campuses." No, I thought. No, no, no. So I clicked the link. The transcript I found quoted at length from an article called "Was Cho Taught To Hate", by one James Lewis, published in the American Thinker (sic):
"Still, I wonder --- was Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes --- did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently --- was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?
And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho's English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half.
Hilzoy dispatches those lies --- and they are lies. Of course. But honestly, it's cognitively dissonant these days to hear these wingnuts lecture anyone about values such as respecting others, admiring the good things about this country, and discipline. Are we supposed to believe that Limbaugh is respectful, disciplined and admiring of the good things about this country --- like the constitution, for instance? Please.
Read her whole post to see just how far these people will go to blame liberals for the fact that a severely mentally ill person blithely walked into a store, bought a couple of guns and blew away 31 people. (I'm pretty sure it was that class on Truman Copote that did it --- or maybe that horrible bleeding heart liberal Baraka movie .)
*Oh, and let's not forget how the liberal elites have turned all those college boys who failed to throw themselves into a hail of bullets (as all the manly men at National Review would have done, by God!) into a bunch of pansified wimmin! I think most of them were engineering students, but I heard that a few of them were studying French. I rest my case.
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