The War on Yale

For some reason Yale University has moved into the sights of the Keyboard Kommandos. We'll skip the back history and jump to Yale's latest alleged outrage, a rumoured move to hire University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, who runs the valuable blog Informed Comment. Monday's Wall Street Journal carries an article by John Fund condemning the move, and his first quote of someone opposed is as follows:

Mr. Cole's appointment would be problematic on several fronts. First, his scholarship is largely on the 19th-century Middle East, not on contemporary issues. "He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary," says Michael Rubin, a Yale graduate and editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

Well, if we're going to talk about blogging as a parallel career that might crowd out the original one, let's put other parallel careers on the table as well. For instance, who is Michael Rubin, Yale graduate and editor of MEQ? He's also a recipient of Lincoln Public Relations cash -- the firm that was planting stories in the Iraqi media for the Pentagon. He also has superhuman powers that allow him to move around war-torn Baghdad without security, and to observe Iranian diplomats doing the same thing, as he told Fox News recently. Check out his CV at the American Enterprise Institute where he is a resident scholar and decide for yourself whether he's really qualified to be telling someone else that mere blogging might be diluting a chosen specialty.

One other thing. We see from the CV that one of his books is called Eternal Iran . It's a shame that title is taken, because it would be such a nice description of Republican administrations' foreign policy for the last 26 years.

UPDATE: Via James Wolcott, Justin Raimondo with more, much more, on John Fund's War on Cole.