The hits just keep coming, don’t they? This piece is a bit of a recapitulation—aka I’ve been lying down on the job—but Harvard, fair Harvard, whom I’ve booted around before in the past two weeks with no mean gusto—is back in the news, and not in a good way.
First, and most ghastly, is the universally derided decision by Harvard to revoke its acceptance of Michelle Jones into its doctoral program in history, a shameful decision delineated in withering detail by Eli Hager, a staff writer with the Marshall Project. Fortunately, Jones was accepted as a doctoral student by New York University, which had the nerve to believe that people can change.
A more ludicrous, and therefore more entertaining pratfall—a series of three or four, depending on how you’re counting—occurred in the course of the announcement from Harvard’s Kennedy School of this year’s “fellows” program, which an unwary reader might confuse with the “Jump the Shark” edition of Dancing With The Stars, because the list included such intellectual nonentities as Trumpsters Corey Lewandowski and Sean Spicer, along with, of course, the confused and confusing, tormented and tedious Chelsea Manning.
Reason’s Mike Riggs ably disposes of Corey and Sean thusly: “I can’t take seriously any academic institution that believes Corey Lewandowski (whose neighbors allege in legal filings that he cut off their electricity and threatened them while wielding a baseball bat) and Sean Spicer (a throne-sniffing yes-man) ‘fulfill the values of public service to which we aspire’.“ But they do bring the buzz, don’t they?
Yes, Harvard went for the buzz, but quickly backed down when confronted by the wrath of the CIA, revoking Chelsea’s invite when Former acting CIA Director Michael J. Morell angrily withdrew his fellowship at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and current CIA director Mike Pompeo wrathfully pulled out of a Harvard forum.
Who’s more morally contemptible, the obviously fucked up and pathetically attention seeking Chelsea Manning, who leaked massive amounts of classified information, “putting lives at risk,” so we are told, and giving aid and comfort to our enemies,1 or Mike Morell, who consistently defended the CIA’s “totally not torture and even if it was so what it worked” policy, and Pompeo, probably an even bigger fan of torture than Morell.2
Manning released significant information about U.S. war crimes in Iraq. Perhaps most significantly, she showed the U.S. military, though it claimed not to keep records of civilian deaths in Iraq, in fact did keep records: “one cable showed that 66,081 non-combatant deaths had been logged out of a total of 109,000 fatalities between 2004 and 2009”. We just didn’t want people to know how many innocent Iraqis were murdered during the course of “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Manning paid the price for the crimes she committed. Those who committed the crimes she exposed did not.
And One More
Yeah, I’m not done. The guilty here is not Harvard itself, but a son of Harvard, or rather of Harvard Law, former Harvard Law Review Editor Barack Hussein Obama. As you probably know, our former prez is pulling a Hillary, hitting the Wall Street lecture circuit at $400,000 a pop. Sorry, Barack, this is totally obscene. You are already a very wealthy man. You could play this game if you were donating the money to “charity”, though even that’s questionable, because the ability to hand out millions to charity is in itself quite valuable. The “Davos lifestyle”, one in which money is literally no object—basically, when you can’t remember how many houses you own—will be the death of us yet. Of course, the American people—well, some of them—“solved” this problem by “electing” Donald Trump president. That’s the one thing in this post that I’m not blaming on Harvard.
- The impact of Manning’s crimes has been variously interpreted. Slate’s Fred Kaplan, whom I sometimes find too hawkish, says ”[Morell] and Pompeo exaggerated when they said Manning’s leaks put American troops in danger; a few senior military-intelligence officers have admitted to me that the leaks were embarrassing but not really damaging to national security.“ Furthermore, Manning’s guilt was pre-judged by her commander in chief ("Look, he broke the law,” said C-in-C Barack, before then Bradley Manning’s court martial), who refused to intervene on Manning’s behalf despite ample evidence that Manning suffered severe mistreatment while in prison awaiting trial. Way to kiss the military’s ass, Barack. ↩︎
- Pompeo is also enthusiastic about loosening rules for the use of killer drones and re-opening America’s very own private Hell Hole, the Guantanamo prison. ↩︎
