Warner Todd Huston blogs over at The Next Right that Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania is full of dirty hippies not only because they offer credit for a “gap year” (when one takes a year off between high school and college) but because some of that credit can be gained by volunteering with the Obama campaign:

So, not only are we failing our children in high school, NOW we are teaching them that they deserve a break from the nothing that is their high school “education”! On top of that we are telling them that working for Obama is good for college credit but not bothering with the Republican side of the aisle. Not too partisan there, eh?

His post is erred on all points.

I’ll start on the gap year as it’s one thing that hits closest to home.  Not everyone goes to college off the bat.  Your’s truly took plenty of time off in order to work in the real world a bit.  I finally finished that degree and while having gotten it years ago might have been nice, I don’t regret the experiences I’ve had through the years or the resume I’ve been able to build and am now able to use to back up my degree.

I am not alone in this.  Nor is Franklin & Marshall alone in recognizing that people sometimes need to take time off or can use such time to build character and do things that they can apply to life.  Many a university offers “life credits” that take into consideration your resume when awarding a degree.

Maybe Mr. Huston thinks many of our fine men and women in the armed forces are wasting their time or being lazy when they decide not to go to college right away.  But I digress.

Secondly, just because the Obama campaign has approached universities about offering internships with the campaign for credit does not reveal a bias in that school.  If they deny the same to McCain, then, yes, there’s a clear bias.  But the majority of internships are not proposed by the university but by organizations who approach the school in search of free labor.  That Obama has done this and not McCain says more about Obama than it does about the university in question.

Both of these points, the very basis of the blog post, are easily refuted by basic research consisting of opening one’s window and shouting a couple simple questions to a passer by or two.

Now, maybe there’s a legitimate argument of liberal bias at universities and colleges in America rooted in Mr. Huston’s reasoning.  I could get behind a well reasoned argument that displays that, hey, could make one of my own while I’m at it.  But when you go so far off the reservation in an effort to make a point you really lose a lot of people and turn some would be allies into skeptics.  You’re seeing conspiracies where they don’t exist, man, and you’re just going to go crazy.  Stick to the facts, fight the good fight, that’s how you’ll win.

Doug over at Below the Beltway has a good roundup of what’s really going on with the Associated Press’s “attack” on blogs and fair use.