Dear Everyone Who Cares About Facts and/or Higher Education: This Man Wants to Be Your Governor
Even though...
- the University of Missouri-Kansas City reviewed the full videos sliced by Andrew Breitbart's team of activists and pushed by St. Louis' Dana Loesch, and then determined that the videos as released "totally distorted" what actually happened in their class
- the University of Missouri-St. Louis reviewed their video archive and found that the excerpts posted by Breitbart's lackeys were "definitely taken out of context, with their meaning highly distorted through splicing and editing from different times within a class period and across multiple class periods"
- Anyone with an internet connect, 10 minutes and the desire can see extended excerpts that clearly show that the professors' comments were sliced up to make it look like they were advocating ideas they weren't advocating
...Peter Kinder is still standing by Loesch and Breitbart, and is still helping to push the smear. This is what Kinder's Twitter page looks like right now:
It's hard to wrap my head around how irresponsible these actions are, especially from a statewide public official who wants to be the governor of Missouri, including the oldest public university west of the Mississippi River, the University of Missouri system.
Kinder's initial decision to adopt the Breitbart/Loesch line demonstrated very poor judgment. Everything we know about their brand of activism should give a rational person pause before believing anything they say or attaching one's public reputation to their claims, especially when it comes to online videos.
Two weeks later, there's no excuse whatsoever for this kind of junk. University officials in Kansas City and St. Louis have reviewed the tapes. You and I and #PDK can watch extended tapes online, and I feel relatively confident that UMSL and UMKC would sit down with Kinder if he asked them to share with him more details what they know. But there's no evidence that Kinder has reached out to the universities, or even that he's attempted to gather information from outside the closed right-wing ecosystem.
At some point, Kinder's long list of unhinged and irrational acts has to lead to public conversations of judgment, maturity and the ability to lead in a complex world. We're way beyond a simple debate about competing policy views at this point.
