HEY, KIDS, LET'S WATERBOARD TIMOTHY EGAN

New York Times columnist Timothy Egan certainly shouldn't object too harshly to being waterboarded because, in his zeal to defend Condoleezza Rice's inalienable right to earn $35,000 for a commencement speech over any and all objections from the graduating class being addressed, he writes this:

The foreign policy that Rice guided for George W. Bush -- two wars on the credit card, making torture a word associated with the United States -- was clearly a debacle. Contemporary assessments were not kind, and history will be brutal.

But if every speaker has to pass a test for benign mediocrity and politically correct sensitivity, commencement stages will be home to nothing but milquetoasts. You want torture? Try listening to the Stanford speech of 2009, when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy gave an interminable address on the intricacies of international law, under a broiling sun, with almost no mention of the graduates.

So go ahead and waterboard Egan, because he thinks it would be less painful than sitting in the California sun listening to a dull speech.

This appears in Egan's column -- titled "The Commencement Bigots" -- a few paragraphs after the following masterpiece of false equivalence:

Near as I can tell, the forces of intolerance objected to [Rice's] role in the Iraq war. O.K. And by shutting her down, the point is ... what? That extremism, whether in the climate-denial echo chamber of Republican Party elites or in the fragile zone of college faculty lounges, is the worst enemy of free speech.

Right -- objectors who prevented Rice from delivering one speech are analogous to Republicans who, on an ongoing basis, are blocking virtually all federal efforts to address a world-historic climate crisis. Yup, that makes sense.

Egan's remedy for all this commencement fascism?

Give me a brisk, strong, witty defense of something I disagree with over a tired replay of platitudes. It matters little if the speaker is a convict or a seminarian, a statesman or a comedian.

Yeah, there you go. Enough of this intellectual pabulum -- let's mix it up! Let's get some commencement speakers who'll really challenge these overprivileged snotnoses! Send Ted Nugent to Virginia Tech! Dispatch Donald Sterling to Howard University, or maybe George Zimmerman! And at Brandeis, in place of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, why not see if we can bail out Frazier Glenn Miller? It would be better than (ick! ptui!) political correctness, right?