More Signs of the Decline of Western Civilization (5/26/06 Version)

Christine M. Flowers | NOT FIT TO SHINE McCAIN'S BOOTS

JOHN McCAIN IS, without a doubt, heroic.

Disagree with his politics, mistrust his shifting political alliances, but no one who's benefited from the tortured sacrifices he made at the Hanoi Hilton should question his integrity. How can we, whole in body and strangers to the hell he experienced, challenge this patriot? To do so indicates a fundamental inhumanity.

That aptly describes the young woman who stood up last week and ridiculed the senator from Arizona. Jean Sara Rohe, a graduating senior at the New School in New York, introduced McCain before he delivered his commencement address.

Ms. Rohe took the opportunity to attack McCain because he supports the war in Iraq, making him a proxy for the president she and her ilk so obviously detest. Her words, dripping with the elite disdain perfected by liberals, is an example of how the pampered progeny of the boomers are always demanding rights without acknowledging prior debts.

(snip)

The disrespect didn't stop there. At one point, the school's president, Bob Kerrey, admonished the crowd to let McCain speak, dryly noting that it takes courage to stand at a lectern but none to scream from the crowd.

The response? Kerrey, who left part of his own leg on a battlefield in Vietnam and who received the Medal of Honor, was called a "war criminal." Given the caliber of the accuser, this is actually high praise.


The TrekMedic seethes:

This is just another example of the liberal indoctrination that passes for education in our universities. It would be easy to blow off Ms. Rohe's remarks if she acted alone and in a fit of pique. But as Ms. Flowers points out, her views were echoed by the student body of the school.

If that isn't enough, the "usual suspects" have rallied around this miscreant. Arianna Huffington calls her act "A New (School) Role Model of Fearlessness."

God, does it ever stop?