Don't Try An' Dig What We All Say

The Wall Street Journal, taking the required biweekly swing at anti-war lefties, makes a self-defeating argument in an unsigned editorial.

Rude college kids and left-wing professors are hardly a new story. But the ugliness of the New School crowd toward Mr. McCain reveals the peculiar rage that now animates so many on the political left. Dozens of faculty and students turned their back on the Senator, others booed and heckled, and a senior invited to speak threw out her prepared remarks and mocked their invited guest as he sat nearby. Some 1,200 had signed petitions asking that Mr. McCain be disinvited.

Iraq War backers should probably think twice about equating angry college students with "modern politics" on the left or the right. It was just three years ago that New York Times reporter Chris Hedges was heckled, his microphone unplugged, as he gave a commencement speech at Rockford College. A year later, E.L. Doctorow was booed when he made anti-war, anti-Bush remarks in a Hofstra University address. Neither event inspired any hand-wringing about the crazed student right or the implications for the pro-war movement. And you could argue Hedges' and Doctorow's speeches were, by their nature, less objectionable. Unlike those authors, McCain had actually voted to start and prolong the Iraq war—and unlike them, he was using the speech to test out themes for a presidential run. You can guess why they might be pissed.

UPDATE: Blogger Gateway Pundit notes that Rep. William "Lacy Clay" made anti-war remarks in a commencement speech this weekend, and was heckled and shouted down by angry students. This is proof, says the blogger, of—of course!—the depravity of the anti-war movement. Hate the heckled, love the hecklers.