Obama to Rutgers students: You should have let Condoleezza Rice speak in 2014

I've got to be honest with you, I originally approached this story trying to find an angle that showed Obama to be less than magnanimous here. Yeah, come on, the guy who constantly benefits from the left's shutting down of conservative speech is suddenly so concerned about conservatives having the right to be heard? But the truth is I can't see an angle. Not that it excuses him for the decisions he made that turned the Iraq victory into an apparent defeat, and not that it excuses his constant trashing of the Constitution or his imputing of bad motives to his opponents. But in this instance, I can't find a reason to believe Obama doesn't mean what he says.

---

Maybe Obama is so supremely confident of his own abilities to win arguments with conservatives, it bothers him that other liberals are not and he wants to see them stop acting so scared of viewpoints other than their own. Maybe Obama the vain ideologue is in conflict with Obama the black community icon, who can't help but pay at least a cursory tip of the hat to a black woman work worked her way up through the ranks to become Secretary of State. Whatever the reason, he's 100 percent right, and it surely had a lot more power coming from him than it would coming from anyone on the right. I seriously wonder if many on the left realizing how soft a generation they're raising up - and I mean intellectually soft - that absolutely can't stand in the sight of anyone who dares to offer a contrary point of view. Two generations ago, liberals were just as wrong as they are today, but at least they were sort of cool insofar as they had the temerity to express unpopular points of view and take the heat for it. Today's liberals run screaming for their "safe spaces" any time someone dares utter fighting words like "supply-side economics" or "Milton Friedman." I don't know if they really think silencing the opposition is the right thing to do or if they've seriously bought into the idiocy that all conservative thought is "hate" or whatever - but how does little precious ever expect to make it in a world that contains people who . . . horrors . . . don't think like they do?

---

---

I actually think liberalism would benefit if they took Obama's advice on this. On a massive scale, though, I don't think they will. The left is too invested in its ability to scream, jeer and shout down any conservative who dares to show up on what they think is their turf, which certainly includes every college campus in America not named Hillsdale or containing the word "Christian" somewhere in the title. They think this is a righteous sport, and that there's no one better than them at playing it - the second part of which is no doubt true. Even so, kudos to the president for saying the right things for - as far as I can see - the right reasons. Maybe Rutgers can book Condoleezza Rice for next year. Surely no one would object now. Right?

---