Our friend Paul at PunSalad (the first blog to ever link to GraniteGrok, for which we will be eternally grateful) has an excellent post discussing an article found at Inside Higher Ed about unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and the support he is enjoying from his fellow higher-education denizens.
…the Ayers story also reflects on the judgment, character, and ideology of his current employer, the University of Illinois at Chicago. And Northwestern, the employer of his equally odious wife, Bernadine Dohrn. And, by extension, the entire higher education establishment, which probably does not want to be perceived as a kind of an employer of last resort for ex-terrorists who find that their job skills and life experiences are unappreciated by the private sector. In full Governor LaPetomaine mode, the cry goes out: "We have to protect our phony baloney jobs here, gentlemen!"
Hence, the article’s main point is to publicize the efforts of those educators who are protesting the "demonization" of Ayers. (Translation into normal English: "demonization" means "fact-finding and publicizing".) The article points its readers to http://www.supportbillayers.org/ which (as I type) has 3247 "signatures" on a petition that, "to support our colleague Professor William Ayers"
Except there’s one thing: not all of the signatures are real. After discovering a phony signer attributed to his employer (UNH) Paul writes,
I wonder if the other signatures on the website were equally well verified? Perhaps ACORN has been given the job of getting people to sign up?
Heh! I think Paul’s onto something. After I found NRO’s Ramesh Ponuru on the list of Ayers supporters and alerted him, he added an update to his post acknowledging my discovery and further added,
And (now that I look more carefully), there’s also:
1181 Jack Meoff University of West Kentucky … I’ve seen his name on a lot of petitions.
I’ve looked over the list again, and, surprisingly, nobody got Dick Hertz or Mike Hunt to sign as of yet. I’ll check again tomorrow…
