THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

SHOOTING AT THE FLAG | 2004-03-06

Wouldn't you love to be a general who discovered that your opposite number, the enemy general, only shot at your flag?

In other words, wherever you put your flag up, that is the only place the enemy directs his bombers, his artillery, and his ground assaults?

You could store your munitions in one place, have your air bases in another, mobilize your ground forces in another place, and put your flag miles away from all of them.

That is how the battle between the left and right is waged today. Conservatives send frantic newsletters to each other about how Clinton lies, about how Bush lies, about how the latest liberal demands are insane. They fire frantically at whatever the liberals put up.

Meanwhile, the liberal base is ignored. Their base is the universities. We give them our children and we give them our money to recruit and mobilize with on every campus. Every now and then somebody complains about how biased the universities are, but nobody fires directly at them.

"Why Johnny Can't Think" is a call for a total assault on the enemy BASE. It is not just a criticism, it is a call for revolution. It discredits all the present social sciences and calls for academia to be "defrocked and defunded."

"Why Johnny Can't Think" says that the cry of "academic freedom" is used by today's leftist professors in exactly thee same way monopolists used "free enterprise" in 1900 to defend their right to fix prices.

One chapter is called, "And When Do We Want It? NOW!"

Not only must "social scientists" be fired, the universities must make reparations for their crimes.

No book has ever attacked the enemy base this way.

On the other hand, how would you like to be in the army where your general only fired at the flag?

You would be dead meat, right?

That's where those who oppose the left are today.