When former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels' ugly, reactionary sentiments regarding the late historian Howard Zinn, voiced in numerous emails, became public under a Freedom of Information Act request, all hell broke loose at Purdue University and anywhere else teaching history is taken seriously in this country.
The current president of Purdue, Daniels had sought to have Zinn's A People's History of the United States banned from schools in Indiana back when he was governor. He attacked Zinn as "anti-American" and seemed genuinely pleased to hear of the the old professor's passing in 2011.
With no more Zinn to disrupt his myopic vision of America's past, Daniels rallied his underlings to attempt once again to wipe Zinn out of Indiana's secondary school curricula.
Since hearing of the emails Purdue's History Department and the American Historical Association have battled back.
Daniels has absurdly denied culpability regarding the emails, but he has shut up, about the best possible things he could do given his role as a supposedly modern US educator and the stupidity of his quest.
Round Bend Press liked this story so much when it broke earlier this summer Dooley and I put our heads together and decided there could not possibly be a better candidate than Daniels for the coveted RBP Idiot of the Week Award for that week.
It bears repeating, for we believe that the fight against idiocy truly does take an idiotic reward to succeed.
TS
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