"Look, people, you're becoming a cliched joke."

Academic Elephant has the last word and the best round up on the UMASS Dartmouth student who make up a story about being visited by jackbooted thugs after requesting Mao's "little red book" at the library. The story sounded suspiciously like a variation on the old "My dog ate my homework:" excuse for not getting an assignment done, except to his professor.

[H]ow gullible do you have to be to believe that Homeland Security agents would track down an undergraduate over this particular book? Might you wait to go to the papers before you verified the story? Or would you immediately assume it's true because it confirms your firmly-held assumption, let's call it your "instinct," about the Bush administration? . . .

At my school, on most days anyone with a driver's license can gain access to the open stacks and read this book to their subversive, communist heart's content and no one would know. Heck, anyone sitting at an internet cafe can read it. How on earth would Homeland Security track down and "tame" interest in such a book? Persecuting a lone UMASS student seems foolish and paranoid in the extreme.

But it's exactly the kind of thing these leftover '60s radicals would fall for. Her final paragraph is a classic of fisking:

Look, people, you're becoming a cliched joke. Do you think students such as this one will respect your concerns for their civil liberties? No. They will despise you as a gullible dupe and laugh all the way to the registrar with that A. Consider for a moment what this student really learned from Professor Pontbriand's class. Perhaps he consulted that original text by P.T. Barnum? Or was that David Hannum?