As I assumed it would, the uproar over the three college presidents’ embarrassing testimony regarding anti-Semitism has continued, and presumably will continue for quite a while. I want to highlight a few developments that I came upon after writing the earlier post.

• Harvard president Claudine Gay issued a mewling apology to her campus.“I am sorry,” Gay said in an interview with The Crimson.“Words matter. When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret.” Yes, she really talks like this.

  “I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay went on to say in the interview. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged. Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth.”

I’ve been writing a few posts lately examining my biases. One bias I don’t intend to overcome is the strong wave of nausea I experience when anyone talks about their “truth.” The rhetoric smacks of ethics relativism, and, in the immortal words of the iconic New Yorker cartoon, “I say it’s spinach, and I say to hell with it.”

• Predictably, the logic-challenged New York Times propagandist Michelle Goldberg made excuses for the three presidents, claiming they were “trapped.” She writes,

“[W]hen Stefanik again started questioning Gay, Kornbluth and Magill about whether it was permissible for students to call for the genocide of the Jews, she was referring, it seemed clear, to common pro-Palestinian rhetoric and trying to get the university presidents to commit to disciplining those who use it. Doing so would be an egregious violation of free speech. After all, even if you’re disgusted by slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” their meaning is contested in a way that, say, “Gas the Jews” is not. Finding themselves in a no-win situation, the university presidents resorted to bloodless bureaucratic contortions, and walked into a public relations disaster.”

Contested? Who contests what “from the river to the sea” means who isn’t lying? All you have to do is look at a map! Yes, Rep. Tlaib tried to doubletalk critics into buying her risible claim that the chant is “aspirational,” when in this case “aspirational” means aspiring to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. Goldberg, as usual, is throwing metaphorical sand in the eyes of readers. What if one of the Squad claimed “Gas the Jews” was, oh, I don’t know, “satirical”? Would that mean it was OK to chant it in Harvard Yard? Goldberg’s argument is that threatening, harassing, racist rhetoric is OK if it’s sufficiently coded.

Yes, I suppose I’m biased against Michelle Goldberg too. I promise, though, if she ever writes an objective, non-partisan column that isn’t clearly designed to prop up a progressive villain or to smear a conservative, I’ll give her credit for it.

• As evidence that I’m serious, I will now salute another progressive hack pundit who has a damning dossier on Ethics Alarms, Michael Tomasky. (Here, for example, I noted that the then-Daily Beast pundit had called retiring SCOTUS Justice Kennedy, who was over 80, a “disgrace to America” because he didn’t try to hold on, postpone a well-deserved retirement and keep his seat on the Court until Donald Trump was out of the White House.) Like the proverbial stopped clock, Tomasky gets something right in “The Real Problem With Those College Presidents? Gross Incompetence.” He writes in part,

“As the president of Harvard, Penn, or MIT, you are by definition one of America’s leading representatives of the liberal values of inquiry, critical thinking, science, anti-superstition, and, yes, free speech. On your home turf, you are confronted from time to time, or maybe more frequently than that, with situations in which some of these values come into conflict with each other, and you have to make a difficult decision. The national media, especially the right-wing media, is monitoring every move you make, every syllable you utter. You exist, that is, at the center of an ideological tornado. You know this, or should. And you show up to Capitol Hill so unspeakably ill prepared that you—and your coterie of almost-certainly overpaid handlers—haven’t prepped for exactly the line of questioning that Stefanik pressed upon you? Indefensible.”

Bingo.