2 posts mentioning D-Ho in a row?!

David Horowitz's pointless and baseless academic freedom jihad is going down in flames, which shouldn't surprise anybody.

Horowitz is so pleased with the committee’s work that he said in an interview Wednesday that he sees it as a model for what he will do in the next year. He no longer plans to get legislatures to adopt his “Bill of Rights,” which calls for a diversity of views in courses and in hiring...“I found in Pennsylvania a better way to go than [legislative] resolutions,” he said. His next move will be to work in two or three additional states to set up committees like the one in Pennsylvania to hold hearings and to issue reports on academic freedom. He said he already has the support of one state’s governor and legislative leaders, although he declined to name the state. “In any red state controlled by Republicans, I can get hearings,” he said. He’s keeping his plans secret for now because “if I tell you, all that will do is mobilize the AFT and AAUP.”

Think about this statement for a moment. "This all must be done in secret because I'm afraid of an argument." Marvelous. As for D-Ho's assertions of success? Yeah, not so much:

Where Horowitz sees victory, however, others see a rather dramatic defeat for his movement and its ideas. The final report of the committee is still being negotiated between Republican and Democratic members of the panel. But consensus already exists that problems with students being punished for political views are rare and that no legislation is needed. From the start of Horowitz’s movement, academic leaders have been saying just that.

“This committee spent a lot of time and a lot of money trying to find some shred of evidence of a real problem and they couldn’t find one because there is not one,” said Megan Fitzgerald, field director of the Center for Campus Free Speech.

Rep. Lawrence H. Curry, a Democrat who served on the committee, said that it was “nonsense” for Horowitz to say that the panel’s work had validated his ideas. Curry said that throughout the process, he kept hearing from Horowitz supporters about groups of students who had stories of being punished for their political views, and that Curry offered to meet with them — in public or private — and that the students never materialized. “I’m on the students’ side so if this was a problem, I wanted to know about it, but there never were these students,” Curry said, adding that Horowitz deserves “an A for vivid imagination.”

Some of the students who are named in the draft report also seem to challenge Horowitz’s contention that the prevalence of liberal professors somehow makes it difficult for conservative students to get an education. The draft quotes the president of the Millersville University Republicans talking about a professor who discussed his anti-Bush views during the 2004 presidential campaign, and at least once in class noted this student’s conservative leanings.

Apparently she survived, as the report goes on to quote her saying that she had signed up for another course with the same professor “because I find him to be a brilliant professor.”

Of course, D-Ho has his allies, and of course, they're just as pitiful and bush-league as he is:

Rep. Gib Armstrong, a Republican who was a leader of the panel, said that there are in fact many victims of political discrimination in Pennsylvania colleges — some of whom came forward to him, but whom he could not identify in any way.

He said many students feared that if they came forward, they would receive bad grades and be unable to graduate. Asked why he didn’t bring forward more recent graduates who — their degrees in hand — wouldn’t have been at risk, Armstrong cited the Temple University policy (and didn’t answer). He said the problem extended to professors, and described a female professor who felt she couldn’t participate in a debate about the war in Iraq (she favored the U.S. invasion) without putting her tenure vote at risk. Armstrong said he couldn’t identify her in any way.

I'm actually starting to feel sorry for these people. This is just sad and pathetic. Give it up--every time you try to prove something in this debate you fail. All you have is some lame anecdotes from a bunch of whiney (and anonymous and therefore possibly fictional) losers who can't hold their own in a classroom argument. It's embarrassing that you're even discussing this in a state legislature.