The Culture Wars Caught on Video
Caleb Howe
The first and, arguably, most offensive video comes from the halls of academia (try to withstand the shock). As Mark Hyman at The American Spectator puts it, "move over Janet Napolitano":
Pennsylvania State University has joined the Napolitano school of thought in warning against the dangers presented by military veterans. The university's Division of Student Affairs produced a series of vignettes under the category of "Worrisome Student Behavior." According to the Penn State website, the "vignettes demonstrate common situations where faculty or staff are attempting to help students." One of the vignettes featured an Iraq war veteran who displayed aggressive behavior toward his instructor. In an office meeting with her department chair, the instructor characterized the veteran as dimwitted, poorly-educated, inattentive to instruction, argumentative and threatening.
There is little room for error when interpreting the message of that video. The student vet is portrayed as unstable, violent, threatening, vengeful and, above all, stupid. A tall young white male with close-cropped hair threatening a young, pleasant-looking anti-war academic, who seeks assistance from a fatherly African-American man who tells her to run for help if "the veteran" gets out of hand. Plenty of subtext there. Anyone who has witnessed academics and students verbally assaulting recruiters knows that the charges of racism and rape are at least as ubiquitous as baby-killer. It would be, to say the least, difficult to imagine that the connotations of this video were innocently overlooked by Penn State. Whether a malicious attack on veterans or simply the product of the inherent contempt and hatred among our institutions of learning for those who choose to serve, the video is vile in both implication and in what it says about where we are in America today. Under Obama's "post-partisan" reign, one might hasten to add.
Although certainly the worst, the vet vid is not the only culture war snippet caught on "tape" today.
Joshua Treviño has a story up today featuring a California School Board Member who has determined tea partiers are responsible for bad grades. I know, California? The education system? Surely not! This time, the video is not a fictional drama with scripts and actors, though there is plenty of scenery-chewing to be had nonetheless.
It's for the children!!! There's really very little you can add to this overwrought rant. The presumption that all things come from the state, and that to the state all things must go is as apparent here as in much of the rest of the left side of the aisle, it's just delivered with a little more hissy in the fit this time.
The last video in this trifecta of tragedy features another CNN reporter on a mission. You'll recall tea parties were the catalyst for the last activist CNN "reporter' to get her left on. This time the topic is Miss California. Or gay marriage. Or ... divorce. Well anyway, something has him riled up. Maybe Miss California should have advised him to visit the learning center? Via Greg Hengler at Townhall.com:
Hey, he said who he voted for in the campaign.
In Obama's post-partisan America, one thing that is becoming so routine as to become commonplace is the public ridicule of conservatives, Christians, and veterans. From Janeane Garofalo on the top liberal political show Countdown with Keith Olbermann, to Huffington Post front pager Frank Schaeffer; from DNC billboards to, yeah, HuffPo sign talk; and even from pop celebrities Meghan McCain and Barack Obama, the message couldn't be more clear: it's open season in the culture war.
And what would you expect? It's the only war Democrats and Barack Obama seem to have the will to fight. Just remember to call it a "Post-partisan human-caused cultural reassignment exploratory contingency plan."