Middle East scholar Juan Cole is a national treasure. His strong, mearsured, and reasoned voice has been essential in trying to understand the great Iraqi food fight.Since he is an expert, and since he brings great intellectual might to bear against Bush's Middle East policy, one naturally expected that soon enough, Cole would come under attack by the Brown Shirts.
Wasn't that one of the ideas expressed between the lines in Mein Kampf ?
That intellectuals must first be discredited?
Then and only then could they some day be driven away--if not killed:
"Accordingly the State which is grounded on the racial idea must start with the principle that a person whose formal education in the sciences is relatively small but who is physically sound and robust, of a steadfast and honest character, ready and able to make decisions and endowed with strength of will, is a more useful member of the national community than a weakling who is scholarly and refined."
Juan Cole, bless his heart, isn't taking the discrediting like one of Hitler's so called "peaceful aesthetes and physical degenerates."
Cole is not going to sit down in his own defense.
Like an action hero he is actively taking on the goons.
But not with brickbats.
Rather he has thrown a sharp blog post, like a dagger, at the throats of his adversaries.
And in so doing-- he has fatally wounded his attackers.
How?
By showing exactly how the brown shirts attempted to discredit him.
His recent post on GoogleSmearing is phenomenal.
For perhaps the first time in history, the intellectual has a way of fighting back. The web has made this possible. Cole and friends are able to keep an eye on the attacks, and having blogs, parry the slanders.
This is all remarkable drama.
One literally sees goons defrauded line by line in nearly real time.
Remarkable.
Phenomenal.
Heroic.
Go have a read.
And God Bless Juan Cole!
Asides:
1) Why does a search on google for GoogleSmear not return a single hit? That fact stinks on ice.
2) I wish Juan would run an online open enrollment class for any one his various college offerings. Wouldn't that be super-duper swell?
3) The first link for this post uses "google print." It should open to page 432 of Mein Kampf. On that page you should find another anti-intellectual quote. I hope the link behaves as intended.
Update: 3/30 GoogleSmear now returns 4 pages of links. Wish I had saved the original totally blank slate.
Sort of like what happened to 
And because a young Alan Greenspan looks so much like Kissinger, I'd like to suggest a third definition: 
Mr. Greenspan's thesis, which is not accepted by all traditional economists, is that increases in personal wealth and the growing sophistication of financial markets have allowed Americans — individually and as a nation — to borrow much more today than might have seemed manageable 20 years ago.
Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned on Wednesday that the federal budget deficits were "unsustainable," and he urged Congress to scrutinize both spending and taxes to solve the problem.