Communist Terrorists at U. Mass. Dartmouth! Feds Are on the Case . . . Or Not

Update: Life is unfair. Bostonist wanted a regional or local story that would give us an excuse to gripe about the President, and we thought we'd found it (see below). Turns out, it was a hoax. So everything reported below about the U. Mass. student is not true. But President Bush is definitely still a disaster.
Bostonist, like the Governor, has lately been checking out of local affairs and focusing on the presidency. But in our case, it's because we're apoplectic about revelations that George Bush ordered the violation of federal law. It's not that we really expected anything else from this president (who favors torturing foreigners and jailing American citizens indefinitely without charges, after all), it's just so unbelievably brazen ("Yeah, I did it") and his justification ("I can break any law to protect us from terrorism") is so far-fetched. Because of this, we've been casting about for some local connection that will give us a pretext to vent about how awful the President and his ever-more-dictatorial war on terror are. Luckily, the good folks at the Department of Homeland Security came through a few days ago at U. Mass. Dartmouth, sending agents to question a student who requested an interlibrary loan of Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book." Not surprisingly, the student was a little intimidated, and it wouldn't stun us if other students thought twice about trying to take possibly "dangerous" books out of the library. (BTW, Bostonist has all those communist classics at home, so if you really want to read one without Big Brother taking notice, e-mail askbostonist(@)gmail.com and ask how to transfer from the red line to the blue line without taking another train.) But whatever chilling effect the government's policy may have on academic and intellectual inquiry is worth it, right? Because no cost is too great to protect our nation from the scourge of communism terrorism, and nothing puts us at risk like long, boring passages about dangerous topics like dialectical materialism.

Image: This Chinese propaganda poster reads, "Chairman Mao is the Red Sun of Our Hearts." Hopefully, including this phrase here will draw the attention of federal law enforcement officials, which means more traffic for Bostonist!