Tuesday, June 27, 2006
KOS ‘N’ COLE
A fellow named Markos Moulitsas Zúniga declares:
I wouldn’t want to be a senator or congressman. I’m able to influence politics much more effectively doing what I do. Now I can shape the national political debate. The only way I could exert more influence would be if I were president.
He’s already more powerful than Cheney! More powerful than Rove! Markos may even wield greater influence than Juan Cole, who—according to University of Oklahoma academic Joshua Landis—is known to all:
Juan Cole has done something that no other Middle East academic has done since Bernard Lewis, who is 90 years old: He has become a household word. He has educated a nation. For the last thirty years every academic search for a professor of Middle East history at an Ivy League university has elicited the same complaint: ‘There are no longer any Bernard Lewises. Where do you find someone really big with expertise on many subjects who is at home in both the ivory tower and inside the Beltway?’ Today, Juan Cole is that academic.
These people are out of their minds.
UPDATE. Hitchens turns Cole to slaw: “Professor Cole has completely missed or omitted the first reference in last October’s speech, skipped to the second one, and flatly misunderstood the third.”