Poor Juan Cole. The University of Michigan professor never had a chance against the vast powers arrayed against him over the last several years. It seems the academic was the target of a conspiracy, engineered by the Bush administration, with the connivance of the intelligence community and that other pillar of the military industrial complex devoted to ensuring the hegemony of the right wing thought machine, Yale University.

Cole first won notoriety sometime after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His blog, Informed Comment, became a must read for anyone who believed that Bush was a war criminal and that Operation Iraqi Freedom was the handiwork of a neoconservative cabal in Washington whose primary loyalty was to Israel. Cole himself had never been to Iraq, and even to date has yet to set foot in a country regarding which he claims expertise.  But of course expertise is the last reason why journalists sought him out for quotations or TV producers wanted to put him on the air. It was precisely his paranoia and narrow-minded focus on a president the left loved to hate that won him the attention and admiration of the media. Cole was effectively a character actor, cast in the role of the angry professor, and it made little difference that he was clueless—and he had that University of Michigan affiliation.