Batfink's Beep -- 03-8-06

It's not "Devil's Advocate" if you believe it

March 8, 2006

As I wrote previously, Colorado high school 'teacher'Jay Bennish's official defense, if you want to call it that, against his potential firing for turning his classroom into a left-wing indoctrination camp is that he has a first amendment right to politically indoctrinate his students rather than teach them geography, if he wants to.

But different battlefields call for different tactics, and his defense before the court of public opinion is not the one he has made a federal case out of.

Mr. Bennish, his rasta hairstyle freshly shorn for the cameras (he's playing for regular people now, not hopefully arch-leftist federal judges), has been all over the liberal media lately, peddling the idea that he doesn't necessarily believe the anti-American nonsense that he ranted on the infamous tape; he was just playing devil's advocate to foster a broad discussion in his classroom. As he told the Today Show Tuesday morning, it is his responsibility to expose the kiddies to different ideas, you see.

Now -- putting aside the matter of whether fostering a broad discussion in politics is his job as a geography teacher, this dog won't hunt, either. For one thing, there is the evident passion of his taped diatribe. The student who taped it reports that Mr. Bennish was often known to get so worked up in his rants that he pounded his fists on the desk. The defense that he is being hung in the court of public opinion for merely playing devil's advocate too well is, to put it bluntly, nonsense.

Devil's advocate is a rhetorical technique where someone argues a position that is assumed to be wrong, just to run it up the flagpole, as it were, and see how it actually flies out in the open. So I suppose Bennish is trying to convince us that he is actually just a very competent actor; that the heat with which he presented his left-wing cant ought not be taken for actual conviction on his part. But if that were true, wouldn't there be cases where he gave a right-wing rant, as a devil's advocate exercise? He says his classrooms offer 'balanced' views... can't he bring in one of those students that walked out of class in his defense, to say that he once offered a passionate, desk-pounding defense of, say, Israel, that would surely convince any Democrat that he was a right-wing kook if played for the public?

This guy is full of it. The tape speaks for itself, and the fact that nobody reports ever hearing a non-leftwing rant from him does as well. The fact that he saves his rants for impressionable, beholden-to-him-for-a-passing-grade schoolkids, and complains and files federal cases when someone reveals his views to the general public, shows that he is also a coward of the first order. If he wants to discuss politics, let him grow a pair and get a talk show. I'm sure Air America, if they're still in business, would give him a job. But get him the hell out of the classroom. Our kids deserve better than that.

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