Why do I not bet on things like this? In a truly “shocking” turn of events, an associate librarian at Yale has once again, compiled a list of top quotations of the year and they are, predictably, predominately unfriendly to conservatives. The only reason that Shapiro’s selections are of news value is because he trades on the past that is Yale’s name.

In 2010 the quotes were unfriendly to conservatives; for this 2011 list they are so almost entirely again. Shapiro christened Occupy Wall Street’s mathematically-challenged claim, “We are the 99%,” as the slogan de l’année and said this of the tea party:

Mr. Shapiro noted that the conservative tea party movement was prominent in last year’s quotes.

“The tea party quotes are very strongly anti-government,” Mr. Shapiro said. “The Occupy quotes and the other more liberal quotes that you see at the top of the list this year are directed more at Wall Street and the upper 1 percent economically of the country rather than focus squarely on government.”

The quotes Shapiro chose last year to represent the tea party were selected to paint the movement as anarchist hooligans–funny, because that’s exactly what we saw with OWS, but I digress. For Shapiro to say that the tea party is “strongly anti-government” either makes Shapiro deliberately or naturally obtuse.

There is a difference between a strong desire for limited government, which is what the tea party movement has always been about, and no government, which is what the anarchists at OWS are about. Shapiro must decide whether he’s attempting to present a bias of ignorance or malice–it is either one or the other.

And just what of those quotes? This is number one:

1.“We are the 99 percent.” — slogan of the Occupy movement.

Says the article:

The growing scrutiny of the rich dominated this year’s best quotes, according to a Yale University librarian who anointed the Occupy Wall Street protesters’ slogan — “We are the 99 percent” — as the year’s best.

“Growing scrutiny” or Marxist propaganda from a minority?

I’m further shocked that these memorable quotes, from our Commander-in-Chief no less, don’t appear to have made any previous Shapiro lists. Please correct me in the comments if I am wrong.

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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has ranked Yale University as among the worst violators of free speech on U.S. campuses.

Alum Michael Rubin, writing at Commentary, provides examples:

In 2009, Yale College Dean Mary Miller censored the Freshman Class Council’s traditional t-shirt before the Yale-Harvard game because it sported an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote containing the oh-so-incendiary word – sissies.”

Yale also garnered international headlines when a chief administrator pressured the allegedly autonomous Yale University Press to censor a scholarly view of the Danish cartoon controversy. And, oh, the intervention happened to coincide with Yale President Richard Levin’s courting of Persian Gulf donors.

Also, when Levin was on the trail of Chinese money, he restricted protests outside the campus venue in which Chinese President Hu Jintao, the university’s guest of honor, would hold forth.

Such trampling of free speech is par for the course on campuses throughout the nation. But what magnifies the usual hypocrisy and arrogance in Yale’s case is the high-level responsibility of journalists in rubber-stamping the transgressions.

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William Buckley achieved notoriety, if not celebrity, with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951. The book was asuccès de scandale. In it Buckley attacked the undergraduate education on offer at Yale for its hostility to Christianity and its adulation of collectivism; he also sought to dispel the indifference of Yale alumni to their supervisory responsibility. In 1955 Buckley founded National Review as the voice of the conservative movement. Recall, as John Judis does in his biography of Buckley, that the fortunes of the American Right had never appeared dimmer; the principal right-wing organizations were anti-Semitic and neo-isolationist throwbacks to the thirties and forties. Recall also that in the Publisher’s Statement of National Review’s first issue, Buckley defined conservatism as the willingness to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who do.” He was an outrageous character.

Dartmouth English Professor and long-time National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart captured Buckley in his glory at the moment National Review was about to make its debut:

A debate had been announced, to take place in Harvard’s Lamont Library, between Buckley and James Wechsler, the diamond-pure liberal editor of The New York Post… What happened on the appointed night in an auditorium at Lamont Library gave a preliminary indication of at least one of the many qualities that would render Buckley famous and National Review successful: Buckley’s bravura… At the podium, after thanking the host for his introduction, Buckley observed, with an elfin grin (soon a signature feature), that he was very pleased to see Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., there in the audience. Then he added, “His many books would be dangerous if they weren’t so boring…”

Whatever sober points Wechsler might have made, he was obliterated by the stylistic contrast and, ink-stained wretch that he obviously was, slunk back to the then-liberal New York Post. Right there, I saw the conservative movement being born, and liberalism made otiose. Right there was the esprit that caught the attention of early National Review readers — especially the young. This was no stuffed-shirt or classroom policy wonk. This had nothing to do with the dismal science and its green eye-shades. This was great theater.

Considering his esprit as well as well as the splash of his Web sites, it seems to me that Andrew Breitbart may be the Wililam Buckley of the Internet Age — part journalist, part showman, part conservative visionary and ideological entrepreneur. He has an instinctive understanding of the media environment that is the base of the left’s cultural monopoly and he means to do his best to overthrow it. (more…)

Back when George W. “Miss Me Yet?” Bush was President, liberals exercised their right of free speech ad naseum to complain about how Bush was taking away their right of free speech. So you might expect that a liberal or two would express at least a little concern when freedom of expression in the western world is threatened in reality, instead of in theory. After all it’s happened just across the border in Canada and it’s happening right now, just across the pond in the Netherlands.

Try searching MSNBC or the Daily Kos for information about the Geert Wilders trial. Find anything? Me neither. Democratic Undergound, to their credit, did run a version of the story, although the fact that it was Al Jazeera’s version is disappointing, if predictable. A commenter or two even dared to suggest that perhaps Wilders should be free to criticize any religion he wants, including Islam. That kind of heresy was, of course, quickly slapped down with replies like this one:

It’s informative that your ideological hostility, towards major religions, leads you to sympathize with this rightwing European xenophobe: the fact, however, that you can patch his anti-Islamic rants into your own simplistic worldview, does not really qualify as evidence that Wilders is “on trial for telling the truth.” He is on trial because a court decided his remarks might violate the criminal law against incitement to hatred. (more…)

The Chicago media is having trouble picking a winner out of the line-up of likely suspects for the Machine’s chosen candidate for Barack Obama’s old, hardly even used U.S. Senate seat.  The dragnet doesn’t include anyone with an impressive rap sheet of accomplishments. So what’s up? Is the Machine sputtering?

The Illinois primary election for U.S. Senator is February 2. Senator Roland Burris isn’t running. No money. No support. No surprise.  After what the disgraced Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s hand-picked seat warmer had to go through just to get credentialed, it’s no wonder he just wants to pack up and go home to his monuments.

And the recent victory by Scott Brown in the Massachusetts special election for the U.S. Senate certainly has put the fear of God into party hacks from sea to shining sea. So, who’s the Machine’s candidate among the leading suspects? Here’s the line-up. (more…)