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There's diversity at Harvard?

"Cello," part of "Chamber Orchestra" series of concert-instrument interiors by Studio Mierswa-Kluska, featured in the Boston Society of Architects' Architecture Boston.

"There's diversity at Harvard? Where are the conservatives?" asks a skeptical bflat879 in the comments of Harvard graduating economics concentrator Shreya Maheshwari's myopic Harvard Crimson essay "The Social News Network," a touchingly naive take on the narratives that be:   

It’s great to use Facebook to filter through our personal and commercial interests. But when this filter extends to our intellectual life, it can trap us in an online echo chamber by gradually minimizing our interaction with opposing thoughts and cutting off our engagement with the broader world …

Even students at Harvard, with all its emphasis on diversity, aren’t immune to default social and intellectual collusion."

EVEN students at Harvard? Emphasis on diversity? If you want diversity, see Senator Scott Brown challenger, Harvard Law School's "first woman of color," lily-white Elizabeth Warren (0% Cherokee, 100% Bullshit). Who needs Maheshwari's "online echo chamber" when you've got the politically correct mindset of academia itself? Michael Barone explains in "Life in a cocoon dulls political responses":

But cocooning has an asymmetrical effect on liberals and conservatives. Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama administration.

They're made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own responses.

We've been there forever, of course. As we wrote a few years back in "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open'":

Leftists have become soft and flabby in their thinking over the last 20, 30 or more years because their fellow travelers in the mainstream media — supposed to be keeping them honest — have been giving them a free ride, even as thinkers of the right, not enjoying such reflexive support, have been honing our debating and intellectual survival skills. That leaves the left soft and lazy and the right battle ready.  Enter the bloggers, stage right.  As paleontologist Dr. Vermeij might say, "It isn't going to be pretty." Googling the good doctor, we were thrilled to see his field studies of animal evolution had led him to very much the same place Thomas Sowell has come to in his studies of economics …

The leftist utopian dream was doomed from the start because it denied the economic logic of nature and human nature. The long-repressed voices of opposition in a free society, now ringing loud and clear through talk radio, cable TV and — of course — the blogosphere, will force the left to rethink its arguments or go extinct.

Update: Doug Ross is on the same wavelength:

Old media is literally committing suicide in front of our very eyes. In its desperate rush to see Barack Obama reelected, they are ignoring bigger and bigger stories. People have the Internet. They read The Drudge Report. They listen to talk radio. They read blogs. And in spite of all of these different access points, old media is ignoring blockbuster story after blockbuster story.

Update II: Heh. Instalanche! Thank you, Professor Reynolds.

Update III: Doug Ross links.

Crossposted at Riehl World View.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Rom?

"Actually, Mitt is a very funny guy," a warm and engaging Ann Romney told "E.T" host Nancy O'Dell the other night, explaining "He doesn't comb his hair when we're, you know, not going places. It's like all over the place … Maybe we need to take a picture of what he really looks like when he's not working." Mrs. Romney won our heart and mind three weeks back with her decisive victory in the Democrats' faux "War on Women." Like Sarah Palin, she "fights like a girl." Click here to watch full interview.

“The fact that he didn’t talk about his campaign I thought was very touching to me," newly promoted Greenland, NH Police Chief Tara Laurent told ABC News, describing her unexpectedly emotional response to Mitt Romney's "secret trip" — reporters had not been notified — to the town's police department yesterday. The Republican presidential candidate had come to offer his condolences for the loss of veteran Police Chief Michael Maloney, killed three weeks ago while serving an arrest warrant:

Everyone here is in the grieving process, and anyone who is willing to come in and acknowledge that and make the officers and everyone feel good is welcome …

It seemed genuine, he wasn’t here to tell us to vote for him.

"This is what exhausted looks like (pic of nate coming home other night)," twittered Romney son Matt the other day, doing his part in the family-wide effort to humanize Mitt Romney in the hearts and minds of a skeptical electorate.

"It seemed genuine." The chief's sentiment recalled another Granite Stater's words half a decade ago when then Senator Barack Obama visited neighboring Portsmouth, NH with pandering promises of hope and change:

“I don’t think he came here with a political speech. He came out to celebrate New Hampshire, and we Democrats have been waiting so long for this,” said Andrea Goldberg, a longtime activist and state human service worker.

“I think he was genuine, charismatic …"

As we commented at the time in our prescient post "Did Obama just call me a racist?":

There's no question Obama knows how to pour on the charm and make Democrats "feel good about themselves"…

Swept up in the locals' devotional hysteria, however, the media didn't seem to notice. Folks hear what they want to hear.

“Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” quipped candidate Romney yesterday in response to his opponent's craven attempt to "hog credit" — a disgusted Navy Seal's words — for last year's Osama bin Laden raid. Above, campaigning yesterday with running-mate longshot Sen. Kelly Ayotte in Portsmouth: "Campaigns enjoy generating 'veepstakes' speculation because it provides an extra dose of local and regional media coverage in battleground states such as NH," explains Seacost Online's Michael McCord. This small-government Tea Partier liked what Romney was saying: "Regulators are multiplying like 'proverbial rabbits' under Obama’s administration, and small business owners, such as commercial fishermen, are suffering from strict government regulations and rising fuel costs." (Rich Beauchesne photo)

Is that what's happening to us now? Among the walking wounded emerging from our Republican-primary foxhole to look around at what's still standing, are we hearing what we want to hear from the Romney campaign now that we've given up the ghost of our preferred candidate? As we twittered through the continuing fog of battle yesterday:

Slow to warm up, I'm appreciating @MittRomney more each day as he becomes the voice of sanity in the madness that is #Obamaworld.

Crossposted at Riehl World View.