A Bed-Wetter Nation postscript

Via our friend Jonathan Schwartz [1], we learn that, "Wonderfully enough, on the very same day Columbia president Lee Bollinger was castigating Ahmadenijad, the dictator of Turkmenistan was speaking elsewhere at Columbia" [2]:

The NGO Freedom House [3] gives Iran a political rights score of six, a civil rights score of six and the status of "not free." Turkmenistan gets scores of seven, seven and "not free." So why all the protesters at Ahmadinejad's speech, but nary a peep about Berdymukhammedov? Could it be because no one is agitating for war with Turkmenistan, like they are with Iran?

Note a constitutive feature of our new national propensity to pants piddling [4]: a surrender to official authoritarianism. At Columbia, the determination of which leader who gets to be labeled a demon by the university president, and which leader gets off scot free, might as well have been made directly by the White House for all the independence of thought the administration exhibits. Meanwhile Turkmenistan's dictator, who acceded to the presidency extra-constitutionally when the former thug suddenly died, was asked at Columbia about the whereabouts of several cabinet members, allegedly disappeared by his predecessor, and rather self-implicatingly responded, "“I am positive that they are alive." Any comment, President Bollinger?