College Republicans: Where Would My Focus Be Without You?

Proving once again that the College Republicans are the collegiate group to join if you want to perfect your skills at hysterical invective and fallacious non sequiturs, I offer this dispatch from Penn State.

Apparently the CRs ran a 9/11 Memorial last week commemorating the fifth anniversary of the attacks and are now facing possible disciplinary action because they used "amplified sound" in their memorial. Not normally a problem, it would seem, except that such dazzling displays are prohibited between 8:00am and 5:00pm in order not to disrupt the surrounding classrooms. The memorial presentation (please please please tell me that there were lasers somewhere) started at 8:00 and lasted for just over an hour, taking the audience through the exact time of the event in 2001.

Now, I'll grant you - this would seem like a petty little thing to get worked up over, but that was before I found the tiniest little epic of a passage describing the university's reprimand and the president of the CR's response, provided here:

Stan Latta, director of unions and student activities, wrote a letter to College Republicans President Seth Bender last week to alert him of the administration's displeasure over the situation.

"I am very disappointed that you and the other members of the College Republicans chose to ignore the prohibition on amplified sound, even after discussions with the Vice President for Student Affairs, the Office of University Relations and me," Latta wrote.

Bender said the memorial was successful. "When this is all said and done, everyone will realize that the College Republicans did not break any university policy," he said. "The real focus of all this needs to be the fact that 3,000 men, women and children died five years ago. We need to still remember that."

Yes. The focus obviously needs to be shifted off of a pandering memorial on a college campus that broke a penny-ante rule put out by the university and onto the standard Republican talking point of the decade. Is there no shame left in these guys that they're going to use dead people to justify why they should be able to break silly rules on college campuses now?

Also, clearly a memorial of taste and class needed to have amplified sound. Yup. Sounds dignified to me.