Elrod has a post on Harding University Democrats getting organized, or rather, a post on the Democrat club’s splash in local and national media.

According to Searcy’s Daily Citizen, “Harding’s newest political club held their first social event” last week, drawing 10 people, including three students who identified themselves as Democrats. The club isn’t actually new, the Citizen continues, explaining that the club charter had been filed years ago and that the membership had simply lapsed at some point along the way.

Isn’t it great how the Citizen has become head cheerleader for every Democrat and liberal in town, from Jack Shock, to the anti-Coulter crowd, to Mike Beebe, and now this. I fully expect each of these ten people to be given a weekly column by year’s end.

USA Today adds this: “Some of those attending the weekend event said they attended because they wanted to hear an alternate political voice, not because they were actually Democrats.”

Quoted in the Citizen, Elrod opines, “The best [the club] can aspire to accomplish is to be the voice of a loyal opposition. What they can do is say ‘here we are.’”

Loyal opposition, you say? Fat chance. Says Wikipedia:

In the United States, the most common application of the term is to refer to the major political party (Democratic or Republican) which does not hold the office of President during time of war (most notably the Republican Party during World War II), implying an obligation for said party to cooperate fully and without reservation in the war effort. It is rarely if ever used in that country during peacetime.

It should come as no surprise, however, that Elrod’s two blog entries immediately preceding and following this one include such reservations (the second being implied by his observance of a rounded number of American causalties of the war, bad news which is being celebrated by his fellow liberal bloggers, the liberal news media and of course Al Qaida).

So who came to the function?

For one, there was junior Karyn Kiser, our old friend who was last found writing in the student newspaper about walking into chapel “wearing a shirt [she] had made, which read “I love my country, not my president.”

The Citizen describes Kiser as an “English major who is often a dissenting voice at Harding,” then dedicates the entire second half of the article to her. Here’s a clip:

Kiser’s views have in the past drawn the attention of both the university’s administration and her peers.

During her freshman year, Kiser said that she removed from her window an “Impeach Bush” sign and an American flag which she had hung upside down, following a request from her dorm mother. Her political statements have also, at times, been more subtle. In a speech she once asked students to refrain from saying “pro-choice” instead of “pro-death” when describing those who believe a woman has a right to an abortion.

I could quote even more interesting things from her blog, but that’s just too easy, and her blog is basically a personal journal anyway. If you’re really that interested, you won’t have a hard time finding it on your own.

I wouldn’t have wanted people to judge me now based on what I said and did while I was a (relatively liberal) English major at Harding.

Kiser complains about her car being “covered in college republican club fliers” (probably a result of the fact that, as she writes in her column, “I have a few bumper stickers on my car” - and we can imagine what that means); hey Karyn, try having your mock “Harding Young Communists” poster defaced and ripped off the wall, then get back to me.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I feel a kinship with young Karyn. I was never involved in politics at Harding, but I did write for the Bison, and I was generally unhappy about the administration’s overly-conservative attitude. True, I obtained a Harding Young Republicans t-shirt while I was there, but I bought it because it was cold and I needed something that was clean and had long sleeves. For all I know, it was probably James Wiser who knocked on my door and sold it to me for $10. I rarely wore it anywhere around campus without another t-shirt on top to cover the idiotic message on the back: “HU Republicans — we’re not snobs, we’re just right.”

A few years later I was walking to the cafeteria when a group of guys started yelling at me because of another t-shirt I got, this one as a gift from my mom: it was Bill Clinton as James Dean with the words, “Rebel Without a Congress.”

I yelled back, “what’s wrong with being a rebel?”

Pretty clever, I thought, but the dodge didn’t work. They kept yelling at me.

So, we do have some things in common, and if I’ve pulled out the world’s tiniest violin for Karyn and her two oppressed liberal friends, now you know why.

Perhaps one reason why the Democrats only attract a crowd of 10 and a true membership of three is that so many of their spokesmen and allies are bitter, flag-burning, elitist, Christian-bashing insult machines.

Or some mixture of those.

Here’s Hermit Greg, writing about the temporary retreat of the Kendall-Ball blog (last discussed here):

guessing what our readers want or expect is part of what writing is about. Writers will choose to fulfill, challenge but confirm, or reject outright readers’ expectations for what they produce. What they choose will please some readers and it will alienate others, and that is one of the few certainties there is about writing.

But sometimes writers forget that this is the case. I wondered today if something of the sort is happening to Greg Kendall-Ball, whose blog has this year attracted a pretty remarkable readership among wired a capella-ist Christians. To be sure, that he is a graduate student doesn’t help his focus as a blogger, but I wonder if perhaps he hasn’t met an angst that is at root writerly: where Greg wishes to be a voice of conciliation, he nevertheless found himself cast as a polemicist too often to be comfortable. He’s discovered another certainty about writing: there is no such thing as nuance in polemics, and while not naturally a polemicist himself, many of his newfound readers (or “readers,” with apropos scare quotes, as the peanut gallery may be) couldn’t discover subtlety even with a map, a compass, and a good New England fisherman sitting shotgun saying, “Yawp. It’s just around dat bend over dere.”

You see, GK-B merely “found himself cast” in a role he found uncomfortable, probably forced into it by all (three?) of the ignorant, conservative fools who dared question his eminence. GK-B had no choice in the matter — it was either write shrill, anti-American screeds or stop writing altogether.

And just when I start to feel guilty for my part in his self-mandated silence, here’s Kendall-Ball writing in Elrod’s comments:

Now, most “conservatives” I know think that disrupting the status quo is tantamount to denying the existence of God. You aren’t supposed to question. You merely learn what those good and intelligent teachers hand down to you. You absorb it uncritically because they realyl have your best interests at heart, and wouldn’t want you to stray from the beaten path.

Now, to hear someone decry the number of liberals at institutions of higher ed is like someone saying it’s unfair that all the people at the bank are so numbers-oriented. Or saying that all the baseball players on a team are too athletic.

The reason there aren’t more conservatives in most (again, notice I did not say all) higher ed. institutions is that they feel out of place in that context.

Me no understand big words. Me best leave it to stad-is-ko. Me not be-long here, with all these word books. Me not understand “subtlety.”

*

Let’s end on a funny note, and there’s so much to work with here, but this has to be among the best.

This is Kile, explaining how he entered Harding as a dumb conservative dittohead and left an enlightened liberal.

But then second semester rolled around and Prof. Elrod got a hold of my fragile little brain (it was crazy fragile after that first semester). Then I took every class offered by Prof. Elrod. Now I am a liberal.

I blame the drugs.

I blame the subtlety-blind, status quo-bound rightwingers.