The Cole disaster.(Juan Cole)

ONE of the glories of the blogosphere is that it has enticed some of the titans of academia into the open. Until now, we've had to rely on the mainstream media to inform us of the goings-on in the scholarly groves. Unfortunately, given the ideological sympathies of the elite press, we couldn't appreciate the full range and quality of some academics' asininity. But the ability to indulge one's vanity on the Internet is irresistible to some, and so the delicate creatures of the ivory tower flit out into the bright sunlight--only to discover that the entire world is not populated by fawning undergrads and reverential left-wing journos.

Consider the delicate flower that is Juan Cole, to whom I devoted a couple of brief paragraphs in a recent column. He is a tenured professor at the University of Michigan and the president-elect of the Middle East Studies Association, an organization consumed with the sort of sophisticated, postmodern anti-Americanism we've come to expect from the groves. Cole had dismissed the stunning success of the Iraqi elections, saying he was "appalled" by the positive coverage they received, that the Iranian elections in 1997 were "much more democratic," and that Iraq's elections were really more like a "referendum" than anything else.

These, and other comments by Cole, induced cackles of laughter and derision among conservatives even as the professor became the dashboard saint of lefty Middle East experts. Cole's disingenuousness was thick on the page, er, screen, and was rapidly exposed. It turned out that the Iraqis' system of proportional representation was almost identical to the systems of countless other democratic nations, including South Africa, which in 1994 put Nelson Mandela in office. That the Iranian elections were "more democratic" is also laughable: The mullahs banned ...