Three Stooges and an alternate

It's terrible to talk about the University of Minnesota-Morris and stupidity in the same sentence, but recent national news places the two in uncomfortable proximity to each other.
Seriously, institutions cannot answer for the conduct of all those who exit with a diploma. And that's a good thing, because the bizarre behavior of a young man named Joseph Basel, and three associates, is hardly the type of thing that UMM would attach its name to.
"Room temperature IQs," was the disparaging way Professor Jonathan Turley dismissed the four alleged troublemakers in a Thursday cable TV news appearance. The jocular Turley went on to note that when individuals of this type sit down with a defense attorney, the attorney might well say "you're a disgrace to criminals (with such stupidity)."
The rimshots kept coming as Turley said of the four that "I'm surprised they were able to find the building."
One less perpetrator in this ruse and the whole thing would look like a rough draft for a Three Stooges script. Stumblebums in phony repairmen uniforms, plodding along as if no one would notice the charade. . .
"Why I oughtta. . ."
"Oh, wise guy! Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk."
The perpetrators would be lucky if they could now sell the whole episode as a lame comedy script. Very, very lucky. Because now UMM graduate Basel, whose father is a Lutheran minister in Mankato, is very much in trouble. Flirting with an extended stay at the crowbar motel. . .
Joe Basel and his accomplices were arrested for allegedly tampering with the phone system in the office of Democratic U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Basel is a rabid conservative. He was the prime mover behind the "Counterweight" publication getting born on the UMM campus.
I'm glad Tim Tebow was born but I wish the Counterweight had been aborted, as I have long expressed to various people before Mr. Basel got in trouble with the law.
UMM is a proud liberal arts institution and it ought to repel a Fox News equivalent like the Counterweight. Liberal arts adherents care about people - about the issues that can make their lives arduous.
While many colleges have gotten way carried away tilting to the left politically - I experienced this myself once - a slight tilt leftward ought to be viewed as natural in higher education. Just like a slight tilt leftward ought to be given a pass in the news media - an argument made by Scott McClellan in his expose on the George W. Bush administration: "What Happened."
McClellan argued that liberals, however debatable their political prescriptions might be, care about constituencies that can get overlooked in the political process. Politicians have their place in our society because they are custodians for the society in sum. Conservatives are over on one end of that spectrum, tending to reflexively say "you're on your own."
I had a close friend in college, a dormitory lounge friend of Finnish ancestry from Virginia, Minnesota, who said that it's hard arguing with conservatives on the basis of pure principle.
"But conservatives don't care about people," he said.
That has stuck with me. The reason that so-called liberals feel on the defensive so much is that they're in the position of defending an assertive, some might say intrusive, government - an instrument that often reveals human failings and shortcomings (like in a sausage-making process). That's why Mr. Basel and his cohorts can have a field day sometimes with their video equipment (like with the ACORN saga). Any time a lapse in judgment or a shortcoming gets into their viewfinders, they have struck gold which can be immediately carted to a salivating Fox News.
The scheming of the four, "Three Stooges and an alternate" I'll dub them, collapsed miserably in the little escapade at the senator's office. I'd laugh but these four young men could have their lives virtually ruined.
I had some contact with Mr. Basel when he was at UMM - he graduated in 2008 - and I was with the "dead tree" community newspaper. I noticed nothing unusual or troubling about him. He seemed like a genial chap, but one thing to keep in mind with young men under 25 is that they can obsess within narrow fields of interest.
Such zealotry, I would argue, is like dogs marking their territory by urinating. Somehow this analogy and references to Fox News seem appropriate in the same commentary piece.
Hopefully Basel's fall will cause UMM to re-think having the Counterweight on campus, and while we're at it, why don't we push for online-only student publications at UMM like has been done at the University of St. Thomas? The Counterweight would just get lost in the sea of online opinion that's out there.
Attention Chancellor Jacquie Johnson: Let's consider going in that direction.
- Brian Williams - Morris mn Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com