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We take you back now to Feb. 9, 1950, when Sen. Joe McCarthy gave a speech to the Republican womens club in Wheeling, W.Va., about the Communist menace. He whipped out a piece of paper and yelled, I have here in my hand a list of 205 people that were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party, and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.

The list was actually a group of employees who were being monitored for poor job performance. Even though there eventually proved to be Communists in the federal government, McCarthy was censured after failing to prove anything with his mostly misdirected tirades.

That right-wing dissemblers such as Ann Coulter have lately attempted to rehabilitate McCarthy demonstrates the poverty of modern discourse. How do you deal with people who think George Orwells 1984 is an instruction manual, not a satire?

Why, you accept their every word uncritically, if youre a member of Pennsylvanias General Assembly. The state House is setting up a committee to investigate whether professors at state universities are giving students unfair grades because of what a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story calls differing political ideologies.

Horrors! Evil liberal professors are trying to keep the next generation of Sean Hannitys from reaching their full blossom.

That its possible for students and professors to have ideological disagreements is not only obvious, its desirable it means the students are paying attention and the professors are engaging them.

I can even imagine the worst a political science professor who voted for Kerry downgrading an essay submitted by a Bush-supporting student. What I cant imagine is why the state Legislature needs to be involved in such a dispute.

Because once you start beating this particular gnat with that particular sledgehammer, youre going to end up with parades of D students giving testimony on the evils of liberal professors. What you wont hear a lot of them say is that the real reason for the bad grade is that they skipped a midterm to get an early start on spring break.

This campaign is being promoted here and in other states by Students for Academic Freedom. Its led by David Horowitz, who has made a career out of badgering the usual suspects: the socalled liberal media, liberal professors, liberal Hallmark cards, liberal Hummel figurines and so on.

I would like to point out that this David Horowitz is no relation to a man of the same name who had a consumer advocacy TV program in the 1970s. Although the Horowitz in question doesnt deliberately trade on this confusion, Ive noticed it works in his favor when hes peddling his papers to people who dont know him.

As to the matter at hand, accusations of instructors political bias affecting their work tend to be anecdotal at best and maliciously false at worst. Which side is represented by Horowitz and his group?

We can get a hint from another Horowitz endeavor, DiscoverTheNetwork.org. This is a website that purports to expose the vast leftwing conspiracy so that America can protect itself from this shady network that controls... what? The media, run by such socialists as Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner and Sumner Redstone? The federal government? The military? The weather? That would explain why only red states are being pummeled by Hurricane Dennis, anyway. (Its a joke, David.)

Click on Individuals when you reach this website and youre given a rogues gallery of mug shots implying unsavory

connections among Fidel Castro, George Clooney, Roger Ebert, John Kerry, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and Erica Jong. Now you know why I started this column by talking about McCarthyism.

Horowitz already has made a dry run in Pennsylvania by tangling with Michael Brub, a literature professor at Penn State. After challenging Brub to an e-mail debate on the topic Is the Left in Bed With Terrorists? for Horowitzs Front Page Magazine, its website cut responses by Brub that clearly topped Horowitzs assertions then accused Brub of not responding.

Eventually the site restored Brub s comments. Later, Brub received his very own individual page at DiscoverTheNetwork.org, which depicts him essentially doing the job the university pays him to do.

Im willing to concede Horowitzs main point there are lots of liberal college professors. So what? Does Horowitz want affirmative action for right-wingers in tweed blazers?

I could be persuaded that way if he could simultaneously make a similar arrangement for career fields in which liberals are not well represented. The CEO class is remarkably overrun with conservatives, for starters. Given todays CEO salaries, feel free to pick me as a leveling influence.

And I recently read that Democratic senators got 4 million more votes in 2004 as a group than did Republican senators. Sounds like some sort of a corrective is called for there as well.

I hold in my hand the names of 203 state representatives who need to do more research before they waste any taxpayer funds on the Horowitz crusade. 11 --> 12 --> 13 --> 14 --> 15 -->

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