THE BOOLA BOOLAH MULLAH: Really, Yale’s judgment in admitting this guy was pretty bad. (Pro-Yale speculation: Could the U.S. government have quietly arranged this as part of the negotiation that went along with the Taliban’s collapse? Problem with this speculation: No actual evidence to support it.)

John Fund also has another piece in the Wall Street Journal today, but it’s subscription-only. Here’s an excerpt:

Given his record as a Taliban apologist, Mr. Hashemi has told friends he is stunned Yale didn’t look more closely into his curriculum vitae. “I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay,” he told the New York Times. So how did he end up in the Ivy League? Questions start at the State Department’s door. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s border security panel, has asked the State Department and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to explain exactly how Mr. Hashemi got an F-1 student visa. Yale’s decision tree is clearer. Richard Shaw, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions until he took the same post at Stanford last year, told the New York Times that Yale had another foreigner of Mr. Hashemi’s caliber apply but “we lost him to Harvard” and “I didn’t want that to happen again.” Mr. Shaw won’t return phone calls now, but emails he’s exchanged with others offer insights into his thinking. . . .

There is a line beyond which tolerance and political correctness become willful blindness. Eli Muller, a reporter for the Yale Daily News, was stunned back in 2000 when the lies of another Taliban spokesman who visited Yale “went nearly unchallenged.” He concluded that the “moral overconfidence of Yale students makes them subject to manipulation by people who are genuinely evil.” Today, you can say that about more than just some naïve students. You can add the administrators who abdicated their moral responsibility and admitted Mr. Hashemi.

I really don’t know what they were thinking, and it’s looking as if they weren’t thinking at all.

UPDATE: Fund’s story is now available subscription-free here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Yeah, I’ve wondered about this, too: “Ok, its bad enough and an amazing showing of a lack of critical thinking skills among academia that Yale took in ‘Mr. Taliban’ as a special student. But, the interesting question is who was the other ‘foreigner of Mr. Hashemi’s caliber’ that Yale lost to Harvard?”

Maybe we’ve been looking for Zarqawi in the wrong place. . . .