I come down with Ruthie H. on this one. In an ideal world, the best outcome would be for the Senate to vote to revoke the MoveOn condemnation and agree to stop trying to censure free speech.

There was an interesting opinion piece in yesterday's Gainesville Sun. Political Science Professor Richard Scher wrote on the proper role of a university in the exchange of public ideas:

The university remains, probably, the only existing social institution where ideas, no matter who articulates them or how outrageous and unacceptable they may strike some, can float unimpaired but subject to scrutiny and examination through the ether.

What other institutions shoulder this role? Banks? Newspapers? Fox News or CNN? Houses of religious worship? The White House? State legislatures? Local school boards? Libraries might come closest, but given how often they are attacked by one or another outraged groups, it is not surprising that generally they cower from serving as havens for the out-of-step.

No, harboring the dissident, the freethinker, the iconoclast is the special responsibility of the university. And it comes at huge cost, because sometimes what is said or written is offensive to someone somewhere somehow.

At these times universities are attacked - as within the last few days the Hoover Institute at Stanford has been for inviting Donald Rumsfeld to serve as a visiting scholar; or Columbia for providing a forum for the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But if universities don't do this - if Stanford or Columbia backs down - then the whole concept of democratic expression, not just free speech, erodes, even evaporates. There is no other social institution extant to take up the slack.

Link:http://www.gainesvillesun.com/article/20070928/OPINION03/709280303

It seems prescient that Scher mentioned Fox News in posing his question just as they come to the front of this debate. I would suggest, however, that Scher missed a major contributor in this free marketplace of ideas.

Blogs are serving a vital role in this exchange of ideas. Yes, most are highly partisan, and people primarily hang out on the blogs that espouse the ideas they support. However, if you look at the exchange on the previous thread, Shooter242 relies on blogs for his support of Rush Limbaugh and the local residents here rely on a number of other blogs for their counter-arguments. In both cases, however, there is an actual attempt by the blogs referenced and by the posters to work from primary sources and provide verifiable evidence to support their assertions.

This, to me, is symbolic of a move to a democratization of a portion of the academic experience. More people can participate in internet discussions than in college education. Of course, the rigor of an extended, organized pursuit of a college degree is not approached by the experience of participating in an internet discussion, but the key concept of stating a position and searching for objective facts with which to back it up is a healthy sign of a functioning society.

Hunt, Limbaugh, O'Reilly and the like deserve the chance to put out their ridiculous drivel and many of us take great joy in poking it full of holes. MoveOn, for those who cared enough to investigate, provided a web page with many references to back up their assertions of Petraeus' move into the political world and his manipulation of facts on the ground.

Right now, the noise from the Right is a bit louder, but voices such as Glenn, Digby, DailyKos and others are pounding away at the beast that they have built. With truth and evidence on their side, I cling to the belief that they will prevail and the Right Wing Noise Machine will break down. My only question is what state our country will be in before balance is truly restored.

What Congress can't do is try to stop free speech. The Constitution doesn't say that the government won't criticize something. It says that the government won't censor it. It's not Orwellian to have the government saying something is wrong. It is quite Orwellian to have the government controlling the flow of information about Iraq and using common forms of communication to spy on us and kidnapping people to torture them in other nations. There are so many bad things happening right now. It really, really pisses me off that we are still focused on a newspaper ad and the right-wing reaction to it. It's typical, though. The right wing wanted to distract us from the content of Petraeus's report, and they succeeded.

Much has changed since My Lai.

But one aspect of civilian massacres in Iraq, and civilian massacres in Vietnam appears to remain the same. Some E-3s and E-4s can't get over what they saw and did. No matter how they try to push it down into their subconscious, it keeps bubbling up and haunting them. I suppose some others in the military would call this a defect that should have been caught during the enlistment screening.

In fact, there is a pilot program underway right now initiated by the DoD to formulate a mental aptitude test for incoming recruits that would pre-screen them to determine if they would have more of a propensity to develop PTSD after exposure to combat. Those who "fail" this screening could then be directed away from the infantry and combat related jobs into non-combat MOSs like cooks and clerks. This, according to a recent story in The Army Times about two months ago.

I suppose it's little salve for the injury of those who were murdered at My Lai, and those Iraqi civilians who are now murdered randomly, like swatted flies, as they try to maintain normal ordinary lives in the midst of the hell we have created in Iraq, but this fact is worth mentioning.

The killing at My Lai was stopped by one warrant officer flying a Huey who observed Calley's company lining civilians up at a ditch and murdering them. This one man, would not "go along to get along" as we used to say. He put his chopper down and told the soldiers to stop killing. He ordered his door gunners to fire on their fellow American troops if they didn't stop the massacre. He didn't have to do that. He could have looked the other way.

(Ironically, it was young Colin Powell, a junior staffer at Americal Div. H.Q. who wrote the cover-up report for My Lai.)

The reason why we are hearing anything at all about the atrocities some of our soldiers commit, whether by direct order, or because some of them were let into the military under such lowered standards that they should have been rejected in the first place, is because other soldiers and Marines have that same "defect" of compassion and a deep-rooted sense of right and wrong. Some, in fact most, of the men and women in the military will not tolerate it and they will report it.

Today, in Iraq, it's quite possible that the actions of that warrant officer at My Lai would have resulted in a court marshal and some hard time in the brig. There are hundreds of little My Lais going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. And back here at home there are thousands of E-3s and E-4s who are trying as hard as they can to push down into their subconscious, those terrible feelings of guilt and remorse. It's percolating up in their minds. It might take months or even years to come out and manifest in "delayed onset PTSD." But it must and will come out.

When these guys start to break, it's going to be like shells going off in all kinds of small towns and cities in the U.S. How they break and what they do when they break, whether it's domestic violence, or suicide, or murder, or just sinking down into a pill or a bottle, will depend on how we catch them and treat them when they come home.