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Brit Hume Plucks the Sour Frisch From the Grapevine (VIDEO)

July 12th, 2006 at 08:05 by MsUnderestimated

HA! This idiot lunatic-left lib professor from University of Arizona, Debbie Frisch, tangled with the wrong guy, Jeff Goldstein, of Protein Wisdom. She sure told us “rabid, crazy, right-wing nutcases,” now didn’t she? No, we have NOT stalked her, but we HAVE told on her (to the world), and she’s now been outed on one of the most-watched and finest newscasts on television - Special Report with Brit Hume. Brit made her a “picking” for his Political Grapevine… probably because of her sour grapes. He also exposes that even though she “apologized” to Jeff Goldstein, he aptly quoted her exact words to “Inside Higher Education” about us rabid, crazy, right-wing nutcases who have “stalked me, told on me, reacted totally out of proportion to a joke in bad taste.” Bad taste? That’s just what you’ve left in all of our mouths.

I’m going to post the article from “Inside Higher Education” here just in case it disappears like all the rest of the U of A and other sites about her:

July 10

Crossing a Line

“I enjoy writing things that inflame, mock and infuriate the right,” Deborah Frisch said in an e-mail interview Sunday in response to a question about her online activities. By any measure, she’s achieving her goals — and she’s also out of a job.

Frisch posted a comment last week on Protein Wisdom, a Web site known for its no holding back conservative commentary, frequently with considerable mocking of liberal academics and ideas. Frisch, an adjunct lecturer at the University of Arizona until this weekend, said in the posting that she would not be sad if the 2-year old child of the site’s founder, Jeff Goldstein, was “Jon Benet Ramseyed,” and she reportedly posted other questions of the sort a Ramsey-inspired attacker might ask. (Goldstein lives in Colorado, where Ramsey was killed.)

Although Frisch apologized for the remark, which she called “nasty,” numerous conservative Web sites over the weekend traded stories about Frisch, saying that she had physically threatened Goldstein and his child (she denies this and says that however inappropriate her comments were, they weren’t threatening); that Frisch is Churchillian, as in Ward, not Winston (she agrees on some counts and has defended the notorious “little Eichmanns” remark); and that Frisch organized an online attack on Protein Wisdom (she denies this). They called on Arizona administrators to fire her (e-mail addresses were provided).

On Saturday, Frisch — a cognitive psychologist who has taught at Arizona since 2003 — quit her adjunct position, and university officials quickly accepted her resignation. “I felt really bad that these right-wing nuts had dragged my boss into it,” she said. “I thought that if I backed down and showed them they’d drawn blood by getting me fired, they’d move on to something else.”

So far, no one is moving on, and Frisch said she continues to receive harassing and threatening e-mail messages, and the conservative blogosphere continues to denounce her. Michelle Malkin, for instance, is now calling Frisch the “unhinged academic of the year.”

In writing on her blog and elsewhere, Frisch is outspoken. For example, after the Ward Churchill controversy broke last year, she published an article in Counterpunch in which she asserted that Churchill’s reference to the “little Eichmanns” who died in the World Trade Center was a legitimate application of the theories of Hannah Arendt.

Unlike many academics who express their political views online largely on Web sites they support, Frisch is known for going on conservative sites she abhors and engaging in debate. On Goldstein’s site, she said, when she posted comments, others made “sexually disparaging and graphic comments about me.”

“I said I found it creepy and inappropriate but it continued,” she said. “I wanted Jeff to understand how disgusting and creepy it felt when people went from arguing about ideas to commenting on your anatomy. So I made extremely distasteful comments about his child, to whom he referred in the original post, in order to make Jeff feel the way I felt when his cronies made sexual references to me. My goal was to hurt Jeff’s feelings, to make him feel disgusted and verbally assaulted the way I felt when his friends made sexual references to me.”

Frisch acknowledged that the tone of her comments — even if they had nothing to do with her teaching — make her a target. “I play a dangerous game by being a professor and also having a very rabid left-wing blog and also posting nasty inflammatory comments on other people’s blogs,” she said. “The issue is how these rabid, crazy, right-wing nutcases have stalked me, told on me, reacted totally out of proportion to a joke in bad taste I posted on a blog. They are treating me the way they treated Ward Churchill — a lunatic lefty in academia who deserves to be verbally attacked, abused and mocked.”

Goldstein could not be reached for comment. But he posted details of Frisch’s comments and his reaction to them on his Web site.

A University of Arizona spokesman said he could confirm Frisch’s resignation, but not comment on the dispute.

— Scott Jaschik

Non-apology not accepted, Frisch. Lovely woman, isn’t she? So prim, proper and dignified… *sigh*

Michelle Malkin is ALL over this! Check out her posts. Oh, and here’s one of Frisch’s most pre-eminent articles in defense of Ward Churchill.

Watch the video from Special Report here.

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Gribbit's Word
July 16, 2006 at 12:40 am

Deborah Frisch The Psycho Continues…... Deborah Frisch until a little over a week ago was an un-known non-entity in the blogosphere. ...