An amusing video spoof is going around the Internet that purports to show Der Furher going all Hannibal Lecter on his bunker staff because Scott Brown was elected in Massachusetts. At first I thought I was reading a similarly humorous farce with that column by Arizona assistant professor Roberto Rodriguez. [Vol. 29 No. 34]

Then it became all too evident that Dr. Rodriguez actually imagines that he is for real.

Rodriguez follows the boiler-plate journalist line on natural disasters like the Haiti earthquake. First he presumes that it is absolutely crucial that he impress his distorted vision of the disaster upon us, lest it escape our merely mortal minds that a massive earthquake in a heavily populated, poverty-stricken region is a tragedy. Eureka.

Then Rodriguez retrogrades to the next nauseatingly predictable phase of “journalism” about such events, the one where the incompetent, insensitive U.S. is atrociously inefficient, slow to the rescue, and shamefully parsimonious with the hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars it consistently pours on such sad calamities. One is given to believe that Rodriguez must be an experienced authority on such rescue; ergo he knows some wondrously speedy way to render harmless the impact of an epic natural disaster. Woe that he did not elaborate.

But Rodriguez is not content to reflex-savage the America that provides him freedom to perversely abuse our First Amendment. He further misappropriates the Haitian tragedy as a forum for spleen-venting his wrath about the “bloated” American military which shelters him as he squanders oxygen, and about Sheriff Joe Arpaio, one of the officials remaining in America who remembers his oath to uphold the law. The other official is on vacation.

I was astonished to learn from Dr. Rodriguez that war is “Wrong!” with an exclamation point. My, how were we to know? Now if Rodriguez can just share with us his workable alternative solutions to the human conflicts that generate wars after the most astute diplomats have failed, we’ll be able to neatly dispense with the horrors of both natural disaster and war.

Rodriguez seems to lack the most elementary understanding of the difference between the gruesomely difficult tasks of war fighting and disaster rescue, thus somehow presuming both to be in the same job description. Perhaps if he’d ever tried either, he’d know they can only be equated about as sensibly as karate with ballet.

Since the 1960s, a crippling political incest has stunted American academia. Radical leftist jingoism has thus largely displaced diversity of thought on campus. We did not need Dr. Rodriguez to remind us of this, but he certainly did a bang-up job of it.

-William Slusher
Combat veteran and retired police/medevac pilot
Okanogan, Wash.