Thursday, August 15, 2013

Jean Bethke Elshtain, RIP

She was a very influential and admired professor at UMass when I was an undergrad there in the late 70s... I think generally considered a person of the left, but definitely an independent thinker. She was my advisor on an independent study project, and I'm very proud that she liked my work.

On the other hand, she was one of those folks whose moral compass wandered a bit after 9/11. “I get very irritated when people say Bush lied,” Dr. Elshtain said in a 2010 interview with The University of Chicago Magazine. “These are very dense, thick issues.” Er, no, not really. Bush lied. She was certainly entitled to think that ridding the world of Saddam was worth the chaos and loss of life. But she was not entitled to rewrite history.

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