Today’s hot doc is this somewhat gutless statement from the CU Dems on the Elliot Spitzer mess. Why they felt a need to comment is a little beyond me (I mean, they aren’t gonna comment on this, are they?), but they did and have and must subsequently suffer the consequences, namely the upbraiding that I’m about to give them (some concequences, huh?).

Here’s how the statement should have read: “The prostitution scandal is one of the mainstays of American politics. Barney Frank weathered one proudly–Larry Craig not so much. But hey, remember when Alan Hevesi was caught embezzling a quarter-million dollars of taxpayer money and still got reelected? Hell, remember when Jeanine Pirro used Bernard Kerik’s mafia-backed security company to bug her husband’s boat? Care to guess how many people went to jail for that one?

As far as ethics flaps go, this was a relatively minor one–indeed, this year’s other scandal involving pols and prostitutes makes the Spitzer affair look like bedtime reading. More importantly, it had no apparent influence on or interference with Spitzer’s actions or decisions as governor. To reflexively grab your torches and run this man off the plank would be a grave disservice to a state that’s set the bar pretty low to begin with. Please, Columbians–keep an open mind.”

And speaking of Bwog, Gawker got the wrong kind of attention for attempting to give Columbia’s hackwars some national or at least regional relevance. Bwog is not an opinion blog, and cannot condescendingly speculate as to what the hell Rebecca Aronauer was thinking. Thankfully this isan opinion blog, and it happens to be edited by an obsessive campus media wonk (one who, full disclosure, has held editorial positions at Bwog and the Current). So let’s speculate.

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One of the top videos on YouTube today is a Web 2.0 masterpiece entitled Cat of a Thousand Faces, the first of a presumably 1000-part series in which various cats make various faces. Now, I’m not one of those people who anxiously reloads The Plank every five minutes, nor am I one who didn’t spend countless hundreds of hours on this websitein middle and high school (and yes, college too, jackasses). But for proof that that the Internet really is just an inextricable race to the bottom, I urge you to go to our sidebar, click on “IvyGate,” and wonder at this website’s pathetic existence.

As best I can tell (being the all-too frequent IvyGate reader than I am), IvyGate is one big backfired joke. At its best, it was (yes, was) a send-up of the self-hating, hyper-intelligent, hyper-loaded East Coast set, and a chance for Joe Ivy Leaguer to remind himself that he’s perfectly normal. It was self-therapy at the expense of others, particularly for those of us chilling out in the Ivy League’s bottom half–Columbia ain’t Yale, but it also doesn’t have flag-burners or pathological assholesof the Aleksey Vayner stripe. And Dartmouth ain’t Columbia, but at least its drinking problem puts ours to shame–and at least it didn’t have to put up with this guy, or these guys (or, in case you’ve forgotten about them, these guys).

In a sense, the IvyGate reader was (and I guess is) like the closet dittoheadstealing a few segments of Rush during his lunch break. Both thrive off of a shared sense of condescension, out of the kind of superiority complex that can only be spun from one’s deepest insecurities–not that Savage and company were quite up to Limbaugh’s level, but the Gate did offer the self-loathing Ivy Leaguer a much-needed chance to wallow in the intellectual gutter. Of course, now the joke’s gotten old, and the site’s trademark embitterment now says more about its producers than its consumers.

Yes, one recoils at O’Connor and Savage and their ilk–I can almost imagine them waking up in the morning, scanning the Ivy rags for some sophomore columnist to hurl shit at, and then going to work as if they weren’t spending hours every day obsessing over shower sexor Harvard student government or shower sex, salvaging whatever fleeting joy can be derived from flaming people four or five years younger than them. These people are such assholes that even Bwog is probably a little intimidated. Of course, Bwog is another organization that thrives off of a self-appointed sense of exceptionality, and, like IvyGate, it haughtily positions itself above the neurotic madness that its coverage has ironically come to typify. But while Bwog traffics in more or less substantive journalism, IvyGate does not. It traffics in public humiliation and little else.

So while this postdid save me the trouble of trashing Anthony Kelly’s article myself, the fact that IvyGate even caresabout this kind of thing speaks to everything I hate about the website. I care about what’s in today’s Crimson about as much as the Crimson’s opinion blog editor cares about what’s in today’s Spectator. Only when the editors of IvyGate feel like watching the sublimated bitterness of a few dozen disaffected Ivy Leaguers play itself out is the opinion page of a college paper a couple hundred miles away even distantly relevant to anyone or anything. Then again, the joke isn’t really on us anymore.

And then again, I’m no less loyal an IvyGate reader now than I was two days ago. Which is to say I probably read it a lot more than you do. Trust me.

Power to the sheeple. Fake scandal swept through campus today, as Bwog and the paper of record fronted a CCSC meeting about a website called Juicycampus.com, which is by all accounts a less enlightened ripoff of Columbia’s own Bored at network.  GSCC had more important things to worry about, since a pissant off-campus website is piddling in comparison to the non-traditional school’s housing situation (while the Spec article doesn’t mention GSSC’s involvement, communications VP Brody Berg’s email cryptically referred to it as a “GSSC Housing Hearing at the University Senate.” It’s a semantic point, although it highlights just how different the student councils’ priorities have been…). Columbia can hardly house 350 students in 81 buildings in varying states of deterioration. But this is heartening compared to GS Dean of Students Dominic Stellini’s all-too-philisophical assessment of things:

GS is experiencing a “dearth of housing,” according to Stellini, who explained that this is a common problem in Columbia schools across the board. “Our housing allocation numbers don’t meet our needs—I am not sure that they meet any school’s needs.”

But it doesn’t matter if they meet other school’s needs. GS is not GSAS–it’s an undergraduate school serving students who are pursuing four-year degrees, and who spend several hours on campus four to five days a week.  Who cares if GS’s housing situation is on par with the the graduate schools’? What about the 5,000 CC and SEAS undergrads who recieve four years of guaranteed housing that isn’t neglected in the University’s phantom, two-decade capital improvement plan?

It’s a travesty that the University won’t be bothered to adequately house the modest fraction of GS students who feel they need to be closer to classes, friends, and everything else that makes campus life better than living off the Myrtle Avenue J. But one can understand why they won’t be bothered when they have the likes of Dean Stellini bothering them.

And now to the hackwars. Without campus radicals of hair-brained administrators to offend popular sensitivities, Columbia’s press corps has let its raging id roam free–by offending each other, that is. First we had this mocking bit of lecture hackery from no less illustrious a figure than Blue and White editor Anna Philips. The situation further escalated when el participante revealed a disturbing pattern of Zionist bias at the campus paper of record. Philips’ gripe seemed to be with the Spectator’s continued faith in the print medium, which is a little bizarre coming from the editor of a print publication. Meanwhile, ep is irked that Spec is slightly to the right of Al Ahram as far its Middle East coverage goes.

So have the campus hacktivists grown so disaffected with the student body that they’d rather take pot shots at each other’s expense than wage a legitimate battle of ideas? God I hope so, since it would make this blog about a thousand times more interesting to read. I also hope that Spectator brings back unregistered commenting, since it would allow critics of Spec’s news coverage to take it up on the message boards rather than having to drag an infant opinion blog into the hackwars fray. I think unregistered commenting would probably mean a huge bounce in Spec web traffic–after all, it wasn’t that long ago that an unassuming Spec message board touched off a blogospheric free-for-all. What say you, Tom?

Admittedly, I wasn’t at Governor Dean’s speech yesterday. But Bwog was, and it reports the following:

Calling McCain a hypocrite that the young people today can see right through, Dean said that they should rename the bill that McCain supposedly violated the “Feingold Bill.”

Now wait a second: the head of the Democratic National Committee didn’t just flippantly accuse John McCain of violating federal law, now did he? I mean, heads of major political parties don’t give stump speeches on the assumption that a specific member of the opposition is guilty of massive, unsubstantiated breaches of federal statutes. That’s mud not even a party chair would sling. Right, Spectator?

“The very bill that he sponsored he is now violating,” Dean said.

My God. Pretty unequivocal, huh? Either this is one of the most crass political smears on record, or Campaign ‘08 is going to conclude with the mother of all campaign finance controversies. Leave it to our politically oblivious campus media not to bother with either possibility.

CODA: Granted, Dean was kinda sorta right, in a way. Although this strikes me as a bit of a non-story, and pretty low on the ol’ potential campaign finance law abuse-o-meter–if indeed an abuse took place.

THIS MEANS WAR! Only no it doesn’t. Sure, this could have to do with the Blue and White’s inferiority complex vis a vis Spectator, while this very post’s existence (the one you’re reading right now, that is) could have to do with the Spectator’s inferiority complex vis a vis the Blue and White. Fair interpretations both, but surely there’s a more condescending explanation for the presumed inter-publication bitterness. And the explanation is this:

The B&W and Spec are now at the point where they don’t need to get along and where their product is greatly improved by their not getting along. Consider this a micro-level manifestation of Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”–the two pubs often define themselves in opposition to their rival, and scamper after whatever journalistic territory their opponent hasn’t siezed. Both publications have been relatively good at this: the Bwog is a more zeitgeist-y, more accessible version of Spec, while the Eye is a more topical version of the Blue and White’s print wing.

Implicit in Philip’s writeup is that the B&W has already conquered the online frontier–that the Spec would never invite Dahlia Lithwick to speak, because the Spec will never break out of its increasingly-constricting formal limitations, or the mindset that goes along with it. There’s the mocking suggestion that Lithwick doesn’t have anything to say to a publication as tone-deaf as Spec. Maybe I’m reading too much into this. Or maybe the cycle of “creative destruction”–which, I’d suggest, is good for both rags–is as healthy as ever.

THIS MEANS WAR! At least, insomuch as a “blockade” of an “enemy territory” constitutes “war.” David Judd seems to think so, and he might not be wrong about that. But he’s wrong about a number of other things.

Forgetting, for a moment, that Judd strategically leaves out the fact that Israel was invaded by ten Arab nations after the Arab rejection of the partition plan, or that his phrasing suggests that Israel was the military aggressor in 1948–even forget that the referenced massacre of Palestinian civilians on a Gazan beach might have been Hamas’s fault–why the repetition of the transparently misleading “collective punishment” canard?

UNRWA’s own New York representative confirmed that there is rampant weapons smuggling into Gaza; meanwhile, Israel’s 2006 incursions into Gaza came after militants tunneled into Israel and kidnapped an IDF corporal. Those who have been following the Gaza crisis from the beginning also know that it’s internecine fighting between Palestinians–and not rocket attacks on the home front–that are the most cause for anxiety on the Israeli side.

Israel’s Gaza policy is unduly harsh, and the decision not to give the Palestinians a seaport and an airport after the disengagement has proven disastrous. But it’s foolhardy to treat Israeli actions as completely morally exculpatory, no matter how misguided they might be. Gaza–and the Middle East in general–is more complex than Judd’s factually selective, post-colonial black-and-white treatment gives it credit for.