too many Daves

Julian Sanchez documents the mix of intellectual laziness and intellectual dishonesty at the heart of some of the attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. His takedown of Michael Goldfarb is particularly satisfying. Goldfarb is the same fair-minded commentator who waited all of 22 minutes into the Obama administration to declare ”Obama has inherited victory in Iraq. … The victory in Iraq is Obama’s to lose.” I wrote about that bit of dipshit propaganda in a piece called “In Iraq: Forget Michael Goldfarb, Remember Inigo Montoya.”

On the current matter of Sotomayor, Julian Sanchez picks up on the following Goldfarb shortcoming:

Now, Goldfarb can’t even have clicked through his own link to read the press release from the 70s about the course. He would have discovered that when the course was launched, all students had for six years been allowed to propose a seminar on material not covered by the curriculum, and that 132 such seminars had been created under those rules. He would have learned that the course was, in fact, taught by a historian and Latin America expert Prof. Peter Winn. And as you watch these gross distortions pile up, you start coming away with the clear impression that they’re not just the result of simple sloppiness, but a deep background conviction that the achievements of Hispanics are always presumptively attributable to special preferences—and that there’s no need to double-check and see whether that’s supported by the facts in this case.  They just know she can’t have really earned it.

But if you go to Goldfarb’s piece now you will see that he has posted an update acknowledging the existence of the 1970s press release. You may experience, as I did, a brief moment of hope that Goldfarb has decided to correct the record and try a less damning tone. If so, you will be disappointed. Instead, Goldfarb just quotes an e-mail about the press release, which manages to absorb the new facts and then use conjecture to hurl something even more vapidly malicious than the original attack:

“… they did get an assistant professor of history to ‘teach’ the class, after they designed it. (Some academic freedom he had!) Presumably he handed out the grades, but since he was (conveniently) an untenured assistant professor running a little class with some experienced Mau-Maus, you could almost predict the A’s all around from day one.”

There’s that striking phrase: “experienced Mau-Maus.” Now, whatever “Mau-Mau” means I’m sure it’s a fairly neutral term, without judgment. But let’s look it up anyway. American Heritage Dictionary, what say you? “ETYMOLOGY: After the Mau Mau, a secret society of Kikuyu terrorists that led a rebellion against the ruling Europeans in Kenya in the 1950s, from Kikuyu mau-mau, sound of the voracious gobbling of a hyena.”

Classy.