Fight for Your Right To Party

Back when we had to walk ten miles to school in the snow in underwear made out of wood, the Philadelphia politician Budd Dwyer blew his brains out on live television. Within what seemed like a couple hours, a local club had plastered flyers all over the grounds of dear old Rutgers, featuring a closeup of Dwyer with the gun in his mouth and the caption, "If you don't go to the Minutemen concert, I'll kill myself!" (I don't think it was the famous Minutemen.) The Scarlet Knights, every man-jack of us, had a good laugh.

How thin-skinned colleges have become since then. The University of Texas's Zeta Psi fraternity held a "Bombs Over Baghdad" party recently, and is now being investigated by the all-powerful "Interfraternity Council Judicial Board," which will determine whether the party "violated the IFC code of conduct by intentionally engaging in a form of harassment." The head of the fraternity claims they are being framed:

Flyers for the party distributed on campus showed photographs of a crying child spattered in blood, a man clutching a child's lifeless body and a mutilated dead man. The caption read, "Come party, and celebrate what we stand for."

De la Garza, a biology senior, said the fraternity had nothing to do with the flyers. He said a student came to the fraternity house claiming he created the flyers and distributed them after seeing a billboard in the fraternity house's front yard advertising the party. The student was not available for comment Monday.

"In my opinion, it was mostly an anti-war flyer," said Zeta Psi President Thomas Madaelil. "They made it, because they thought the intent of the party theme was to promote innocent people dying, which was not our intent at all."

[Thanks to Drudge for the link]