MICHAEL GORDON: THE NEWER REPUBLIC

For the second quarter in a row, I am taking a class from self-described "moderate Democrat" Michael Gordon. That link takes you to his rather long-winded weblog, "The Buggy Professor". He has an extensive blogroll, totalling exactly zero (used to be one link, to Drezner, but that's it), but that's beside the point.

For a self-described "moderate Democrat", he sure assigns a lot of material your average moderate Democrat wouldn't touch. Highlights of the reading syllabus for "PolSci 129 - The War on Terrorism and its Far-flung Implications:

Colin Powell (2)
Ralph Peters
Victor Davis Hanson (3)
Charles Krauthammer (2)
Christopher Hitchens
David Brooks (2)
American Enterprise Institute
James Woolsey
Douglas Feith (2)
Bernard Lewis (5)
Robert Spencer
3 Frontpage symposiums
Robert Kagan
Bill Kristol
Jeff Jacoby
Fred Barnes
Max Boot

But of course, Gordon goes to every length to create some level of balance to the class. He even has a section devoted to "American and foreign critics" of Bush's foreign policy, including a total of... four short articles. And there are two more problems: 1) Two deal exclusively with Noam Chomsky, and 2) They are written by critics of Chomsky. So by this standard, can I start a class called "the Evolving American Family", including a section in the syllabus called "critics of the liberal family view", where all the readings are critiques of the words of Reverend Fred Phelps?

There are two more extra tasty crispy bonus offenses from Gordon's syllabus that deserve mentioning. In dealing with Iraq, he suggests that his students read Iraq The Model, a righty favorite of blogs from within Iraq, offering only one perspective from inside the country, neverminding that other perspectives might be useful.

The other tasty morsel from Gordon's syllabus is that he wants his students to read . . . a FreeRepublic thread. Apparently Michael Gordon thinks comments like these are useful for gaining a full understanding of the War on Terrorism and its Implications:

To: jalisco555
The only decent "lefts" that I know of are the ones located on the NASCAR tracks.

2 posted on 03/14/2002 5:47:53 AM PST by Howie66

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To: Howie66
Joe Frazier used to throw a "wicked" left.

3 posted on 03/14/2002 5:49:47 AM PST by sinclair

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To: jalisco555
There can be decent "lefts" if they stay out of the government so they can't keep giving away our money to shiftless welfare bums.

4 posted on 03/14/2002 6:03:40 AM PST by ThinkLikeWaterAndReeds

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Also, the unfortunate implication of this is that Gordon, again a self-described "moderate Democrat", spends his evenings sifting through FreeRepublic. Or maybe he googled around for the article posted at the thread, hopefully. But I wouldn't be surprised if the former were true.