COLLEGE CALUMNY: Matt Welch (who dubbed this blog "fine" yesterday; thanks, Matt!) shares memories of a politically correct witch hunt at his college newspaper. Surely John Leo wrote about this somewhere.

We never had anything nearly that goofy happen at my college paper (it was a small school and had a small, twice-weekly rag) but I do remember one semi-outrageous incident. In my junior year, the editor of the paper was a flaming Chomskyite leftist. At the time I considered myself a solid liberal and generally agreed with some of his views, but then he went off the deep end. In the last paper of the year he penned a long, angry screed on the editorial page titled "Why I Hate America." It was the typical stuff: slavery, racism, sexism, military-industrial complex, CIA, blah, blah, blah. The photo that accompanied the column showed this guy wrapped in an American flag, beams of pure hate emanating from his creepy gray eyes. We read and re-read the column. Surely this is a joke, right? There's some kind of sophisticated satire in here that we're just not getting, right?. But no, there was no punch line. And here's the really screwed-up part: This guy, who was graduating, ran the column in the paper's final edition of the school year. No one could possibly respond to it until the fall. But by then, it was pretty much forgotten.