Librarians heart Osama, hate bush

Yes, it's true. Those sweet librarians, who will find you any information you want, lend you a pencil, paper clip or stapler, even a piece of paper--even whiteout, for God's sake!--disapprove of the criminal Bush.

The heretical librarian provides evidence:

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I]n the wake of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, librarianship as a profession no longer simply leans to the left; it has become openly politicized. By 2004, to work in a major American public or academic library was to find yourself in a left-wing echo chamber.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the situation is the way in which the supposedly nonpolitical American Library Association has become a platform for left-wing partisanship. The ALA's Council, its elected governing body, is dominated by left-wing activists who recently passed a resolution calling for the United States to leave Iraq.

It is, of course, the right of the vast majority of my colleagues to hold positions I disagree with. But it's a very different matter when the major professional association in librarianship takes openly political stands on issues that have no direct bearing on the field.

Proponents of the resolution on Iraq argue that abandoning the country to Al Qaeda would allow us to spend lots more money on libraries here at home. I believe that allowing radical Islam to run rampant in the Middle East would be utterly disastrous for libraries and intellectual freedom, both here and abroad. It is for individuals to choose between those positions; a professional organization like the ALA has no business adopting such a blatantly partisan resolution.
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The ALA's annual conferences have become akin to MoveOn.org meetings, where Bush bashing and liberal groupthink are the order of the day.

I dropped out of ALA when they first started Israel-bashing, back in the '90s. Then my employer thought it worth my while to rejoin, for professional reasons, and paid for my membership. But the group has gotten worse and worse, like a boat whose anchor is lost which continually drifts farther and farther from shore. In this case the drift has been leftward and away from reality.

Why I object to these policies:
1) They don't represent me politically;
2) These political activities have nothing to do with libraries, librarians, or library users;
3) While the ALA wastes their time (and our dues) advocating these issues, other, legitimate issues are not addressed. To name one: salaries.