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• Tuesday, September 25, 2007 07:50 AM

  Appalling . . .

  Not Bollinger's speech, but the response here by Salon letter writers. I opened the news today and was happy to hear about Bollinger's performance and turned to the internet today to see how others would praise him and retract all of the criticism that he had faced leading up to the event. Instead, his performance is criticized here as "pandering." What kind of a debate would you want Bollinger to have had with Ahmadinejad? Do you think the Iranian president would be worth engaging on the evidence? He is a political performer above all and the only worry I have is that being spoken to like this might give him sympathy back home. But I won't for a second condemn Bollinger for saying to his face what the American people think.

  I am in the academic world, and apparently we can never win. Invite Ahmadinejad and be skewered by the right for giving him a forum and a sense of legitimacy; immediately reject that legitimacy at the event and get pilloried by the left for not respecting true free speech. I truly hope that the Democratic nominees continue not to cave in to the portion of the left represented by all the Bollinger-bashing here, because there is no way that nominee will be elected when his supporters criticize talking tough to a dictator on our soil. And we wonder why the left is continually marginalized in a country where the ruling party has the lowest approval ratings in history.

  —D Holt Read D Holt's other letters
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