For news junkies, those of us addicted to the daily push and pull of national and international politics, our State Department's spokespersons, Marie Harf and Jen Psaki, provide the same brand of entertainment for conservatives that Saturday Night Live does for liberals.  Each of these women gives comically imbecilic non-answers to whoever is asking her questions, whether they are asked by the WH press corps or television news anchors.  Both seem to have been scooped up from some snooty private high school where they bullied all the girls not of their self-perceived superior status; they are both naturally rude and condescending.  Neither one of them speaks as if she has been to university, although both most certainly have.  Clearly neither of them has ever taken a public speaking course.  Neither is remotely articulate, savvy, or quick-witted.  They are both fools the press corps and news anchors must suffer in silence.  They are also typical of the caliber of people who populate the Obama administration: incompetent.

But both women certainly attended school when leftist indoctrination was, as it is still, de rigueur.  They were not taught any meaningful history that would help them put current crises in context.  They learned at the feet of anti-American professors how racist this country is, along with all the people in it except for their own privileged, exalted pseudo-intellectual class.  They were inculcated and infected with the dreadful disease of political correctness, that other scourge that destroys brain cells, that obliterates the ability to think critically and the facility to speak honestly.    

The disease makes one especially vulnerable to threats of misspeaking.  For example, neither one (nor any other member of the administration) is verbally capable of putting together the words radical, Islamic, and terrorism!  They have been rendered mute on that score.  So mute that one cannot help but wonder with what they have been threatened if they were slip and happen to say "Islamic terrorism."  After their refusals to utter such words together, their eyes glaze over, literally,  and they launch into their prepared scolds about Islam being a religion of peace, all religions have violent extremists, we must be "accurate," etc.  This administration's refusal to call Islamic terrorism by its name would be laughable if it were not so grievously dangerous.

Sadly, Harf-Psaki disease affects far too many of the young people graduating from our universities.  Too many have been similarly mind-numbed.  The finer the reputation of the university, the more deeply indoctrinated the graduate.  How else do we explain the moral inversion that has given rise to the vicious anti-Semitism on nearly all college campuses?  Students who actually believe that Israel, the single democracy in the Middle East, is an oppressor nation?  Students who stage "die-ins" over the deaths of criminal thugs like Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and shout down pro-life activists with profanity that would make sailors blush?  Women who fear "micro-aggressions" like, let me see, certain words, even if in great literature?  Students are taught that, contrary to the hopes of MLK, only the color of skin matters these days.  White men should be called on last in class because of their "white privilege."  Today's graduates from prestigious college campuses no longer believe in free speech if it hurts someone's, anyone's, feelings.  They are quick to blame Charlie Hebdo and the Jews, not the terrorists, for the terrorist attacks in Paris.

This phenomenon is a disease all right – our toxic societal disease, cultivated and disseminated in the 1960s by tenured radicals with social agendas.  John M. Ellis wrote about it in 1997 (Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities).  Indeed,  much of great literature, as well as decency itself, has been forsaken on the altar of moral relativism and political correctness.  The result is the scurrilous spread of Harf-Psaki disease.  That we are expected to hear these women as honest brokers of the news is a sad commentary on this blundering administration, as well as on the deplorable state of the education of our young.  As Dennis Prager wrote the other day after debating at Oxford, do not send your children to university if you want them to learn to revere our Founders and the Constitution and to retain the moral code you brought them up to live by.  Unless they are truly vaccinated, they may well be infected by Harf-Psaki disease.