This piece by Michael Scherer goes out of its way to protray Mackinac Island and the Grand Hotel as a racist private preserve of Republicans.

But wait. Wasn't that Governor Bill Clinton and wife Hillary who presided over the National Governors' Convention there?

This is illustrative:

http://info.detnews.com/history/story/index.cfm?id=212&category=locations

As for Mitt Romney's history of spending time on the Island when he was a boy, it is true. Why? Because the official Michigan Governor's summer home, property donated to the state, is there. Mitt Romney's father was the Governor of Michigan. We should presume that current Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm's children have been spending some time on Mackinac Island as well.

Michael Sherer, caught speeding in the propaganda speed-trap.

...but yes, one would naturally presume that Bollinger caved to right-wing pressure. And not just right-wing pressure, but the enormous sense of offense, across the country, that Ahmadinejad had been invited to use Columbia's podium.

I particularly think that Bollinger was not so much stung by the far-right punditocracy; hell, Bollinger has made a career out of more or less deliberately offending that sector of American life, and doing so unapologetically.

Rather, I think Bollinger was probably stung more by William Kristol's having pointed out the rank hypocrisy in Iran's institutionalized homophobia, as Kristol who compared it to Columbia's treatment of ROTC status and military employers on campus. There was no good answer, no academic answer, to that little problem. So the best Bollinger could do in the wake of having made the mistake of inviting Ahmadinejad, was to have the Academic equivalent of a show trial, however deserving Ahmadinejd may have been. (Indeed, a real trial may be what Ahmadinejad deserves.)

A lot of those questions could be aksed, on a daily basis, in Salon, and not just on a one-time basis for Iran's pariah president.

What about Iran's role in attacks on U.S. troops?

It appears that the Salonistas really do hate the President of the United States more than the President of Iran.

"Pathological" would seem to be the appropriate description.

When Lee Bollinger and Columbia University are regarded as a tools of the right, you are talking about some seriously wigged-out angry-left ideology.

...would be if it forced President Bollinger to revisit the odious decision to bar the ROTC and military employment interviewers from the campus. (Surely the hypocrisy of banning the ROTC for the military's supposed anti-homosexual policies, and yet inviting the deleriously homophobic Ahmadinejad to speak was one of the forces driving Bollinger to preface Ahmadinejad's remarks with his own persoanl preaching.)

You know, in protection and furtherance of those pesky things like freedom of speech and association.

That list of 10 questions put to Lee Bollinger... that was from The Onion, right?

A Salon letter-writer:

I was surprised in 2004 (and continue to be) that no one has ever brought up the notion that perhaps the memos provided to CBS were SUPPOSED to be revealed as fake, therefore changing the story from Bush's National Guard absence to the validity of the memos themselves.

I know that sounds a little conspiracy theorist. But, doesn't it sound exactly like something Rove and company would do to throw the lazy mainstream media off the scent?

No, it sounds exactly like somehting that the Rove-obsessed Bush-hating Angry Left would fantasize about...

Clearly, what Captain Ahab -er, I mean, Dan Rather wants to do now is to re-broadcast a 'second cut' of his original anti-Bush story in the guise of a civil lawsuit. Sure, it is a nutty thing to do, but Rather has nothing to lose now.

The real revelation here, as the political right already knew, was the depth of the Bush animus among the principals in the CBS reporting. Recall that Dan Rather knew practically nothing about the story. A CBS producer, Mary Mapes, worked it all up for a Dan Rather voice-over and introduction. Here is Mapes, a card-carrying opponent of President Bush in addition to being a news 'producer':

"In September 2004, anyone who had the audacity to even ask impertinent questions about the president was certain to be figuratively kicked in the head by the usual suspects.

What was different in our case was the brand new and bruising power of the conservative blogosphere, particularly the extremists among them. They formed a tightly knit community of keyboard assault artists who saw themselves as avenging angels of the right, determined to root out and decimate anything they believed to be disruptive to their worldview.

To them, the fact that the president wimped out on his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War--and then covered it up--was no big deal. Our having the temerity to say it on national TV was unforgivable and we had to be destroyed. They organized, with the help of longtime well-connected Republican activists, and began their assault."

That's the kind of thing that you'd expect to see on the Huffington Post, which is where Mapes in fact published her anti-Bush rant. It's also the kind of thing that you'd expect from someone writing at far left outlets like Salon, or FireDogLake, or DalyKos, etc. And, it's the kind of bias that organizations like CBS, CNN, NPR, and the New York Times deny among their ranks. But we know better, and Mapes proves the point. CBS is no doubt a better news organization for having fired Rather and Mapes, et al. But the broader problem remains. Rather is of course free to say any idiotic thing he wants to. He can ask Kenneth, "What's the frequency?" And he can file any stupid frivolous lawsuit his heart desires; I particularly welcome this one if it rips the cover off of all or the liberal Rathers in the mainstream media.

That'll be good. Nothing in the history of U.S. journjalism will be so revealing as to the true nature of the left-learning anti-Republican animus in network news.

Ol' Dan's shpincter'll be tighter than the lug nuts on a '55 Chevy...