A Further Demonstration of "Liberal Open-mindedness"

McCain Gets Cantankerous Reception at Commencement

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK (AP) -- Senator John McCain of Arizona received a cantankerous reception during his appearance at the New School commencement Friday, where dozens of faculty members and students turned their backs and raised signs in protest and a distinguished student speaker pointedly mocked him as he sat silently nearby.

The historically liberal university has been roiled in controversy in recent weeks over the selection of McCain, a conservative Republican and likely 2008 presidential candidate, to deliver the commencement address.

Some 1,200 students and faculty signed petitions asking the university president, former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, to rescind the invitation. Petitioners said McCain's support for the Iraq war and opposition to gay rights and legal abortion do not keep with the prevailing views on campus.

Kerrey, a Democrat who served in the Senate with McCain and, like McCain, is a decorated Vietnam War veteran, addressed the controversy almost immediately after the 2,700 graduates and thousands of other parents and friends filed into Madison Square Garden for the ceremony.

"Sen. McCain, you have much to teach us," Kerrey said to a smattering of boos and hisses. He urged students to exercise the open-mindedness he said was at the heart of the university's progressive history.

But Kerrey's remarks were immediately overshadowed by those of Jean Sara Rohe, one of two distinguished seniors invited by the university's deans to address the graduates.

Beginning by singing a wistful folk tune calling for world peace, Rohe announced she had thrown out her prepared remarks to address the McCain controversy directly.

"The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded," Rohe proclaimed to loud cheers, with McCain sitting just a few feet away.

She added that she knew what McCain would be saying to the graduates since he had promised to deliver the same speech he gave at Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University last weekend and Columbia University on Tuesday.

"He will tell us we are young and too naive to have valid opinions," Rohe said. "I am young and though I don't possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that pre-emptive war is dangerous. And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction."

Once more we see here an example of the closed Liberal mindset. They are incapable of entertaining differing points of view. Their beliefs are built upon such tenuous supports that to allow any opposing view to be heard threatens to destroy their carefully constructed beliefs.

They claim to be Liberals in the tradition of the dictionary definition, but they are the complete antithesis of the openess and fair mindedness they try to claim. It is very rare to see this kind of behavior from Conservative audiences. In truth, the openmindedness they seek to claim lies clearly in the bailiwick of the Conservative rather than the Liberal. They are the antithesis of every thing they claim to be.

Even sadder then this hypocrisy is their absolute inability to see the folly of their own behavior. Their actions betray their intolerance, closed mindedness, and hatred.

Full Story: Intolerance from the Left

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