Bush degrades Medal of Freedom with award to Shalala

This is the kind of thing that happens when a presidential administration is at the end of the rope, nobody is keeping an eye on the store and decisions are made without proper review. President Bush today gave the nation's highest civilian award to a list of highly distinguished and deserving Americans, including Gen. Peter Pace of the Marines (ret.) and Dr. Benjamin Carson of Johns Hopkins University Medical School.

But there among the honorees is former Clinton administration HHS secretary Donna Shalala. Giving this woman any medal - much less the Medal of Freedom - is preposterous, not because of her tenure working for Slick Willie, but because in the years before and since, when she proved herself to be a devoted enemy of  freedom of speech and intellect on the American campus.

I would go on, but I am simply dumbfounded that the Bush people have allowed this award to be made. Win Myers at Democracy Project explains why this award simply defies justification:

Of all the educators in the country to choose from, including those who have suffered under the type of politically correct regimes that Shalala has built up and overseen, the choice of Donna Shalala to receive our nation's highest civilian award is beyond puzzling; it is obscene.

Shalala was architect of the infamous speech code at Wisconsin which, before it was declared unconstitutional in 1991, was among the most draconian in the nation. She also crafted the "Madison Plan" at UW, through which she mandated quotas for hiring minority professors, doubling the number of minority undergraduates, passed an ethnic studies requirement, and opened a multicultural center.

And Powerline's Scott Johnson notes two scholars - Professors Thomas Sowell and Harry Jaffa - who have long deserved the kind of recognition this fading, failing administration now so carelessly showers on an opponent of freedom.