commencement speech follies

War has broken out at the Huffington Post over John McCain’s speech at the  New School, where he specifically sought to unite:

Let us exercise our responsibilities as free people. But let us remember, we are not enemies. We are compatriots defending ourselves from a real enemy. We have nothing to fear from each other. We are arguing over the means to better secure our freedom, promote the general welfare and defend our ideals. It should remain an argument among friends; each of us struggling to hear our conscience, and heed its demands; each of us, despite our differences, united in our great cause, and respectful of the goodness in each other.

He was heckled (and then he was trashed in print by the self-congragulatory chief heckler, who became very popular over at the Huff Post.

Only, Mark Salter, who is McCain’s speechwriter and close friend, roasted her alive in the comments.

She then attacked him some more.

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Paling in comparison is the infotainment blip of the day: Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of the New York Times, apologizes to graduates for not leaving them a perfect world:

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” Sulzberger said. “You weren’t supposed to be graduating in an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, be it the rights of immigrants to start a new life, the right of gays to marry or the rights of women to choose.”

Sulzberger added the graduates weren’t supposed to be let into a world “where oil still drives policy and environmentalists have to relentlessly fight for every gain.

“You weren’t. But you are and I am sorry for that,” Sulzberger said.