There’s serious business afoot today, what with Democratic senator Chris Dodd trying desperately to deep-six Democratic senator Harry Reid’s early holiday present to the Bush administration. Anyone feeling serious should check in with Glenn Greenwald at Salon or the crew at Firedoglake for updates on Dodd’s filibuster of the Reid-powered FISA bill that would immunize telephone companies from any consequences of their law-breaking ways. UPDATE: Reid has pulled the bill; it won’t be debated again until next session. Chris Dodd did it. That vaults him to the top of my Democratic candidate list, not that the top is far from the bottom.

At the moment, I’m more concerned with imaginary threats to peace, justice and the American way than with the real one that Reid (did I mention he’s a powerful Democratic senator, the putative leader of the party in [theoretical] opposition to the Bush White House?) is fostering. For that more ethereal fix, we turn to Princeton University, where a young conservative lad is recovering from self-inflicted injuries that he initially claimed were rendered by black-clad chastity-hating leftist thugs (BCCHLTs)following up on dire emails and scribbled threats sent to the victim and other, like-minded souls, including a conservative and oft-ridiculed tenured Princeton professor, Robert George.

The short story is that for several weeks, Francisco Nava had been receiving emails and printed missives that escalated from bilious to threatening, culminating in a flurry of messages to him, other members of a conservative campus group, and the professor. Then, an ominous silence followed by the attack of the BCCCHLTs, which landed Nava in the hospital, followed by his confession that the whole saga was a hoax.

The real treat isn’t Nava, though; the story of a distrubed young man (or the occasional talk show host) who seeks to aggrandize himself through an artificial martydom is not exactly unique. More entertaining is the tale of Brandon McGinley, a columnist for the Princeton student newspaper who penned an impassioned editorial denouncing the school administration’s patent callousness in the face of the threat to Nava and his ilk, an effort that no doubt left the entire region awash in a deep purple glow. Let’s listen in.

Francisco Nava ‘09 returned to Princeton after the summer break feeling a new sense of intellectual liberation. He had resolved to a kind of political coming-out, deciding that he would, as he told me, “no longer mask my views on contemporary moral issues.”

And so he joined the Anscombe Society as an active member. He spoke up in class and precept in order to defend the beliefs that do not just belong to him — they define him and his faith. It was then that he was first faced with personal intimidation here at Princeton University. Anonymously scrawled on a piece of paper and laid hauntingly in his mailbox, Nava found the aggressive message: “YOU HAVE FOUND THE WRONG CAUSE.”

Though rendered a little “afraid and paranoid” by the malice behind such a threat, Francisco tried to let it slip from his mind. Mustering the courage to continue to speak out, he published a well-argued opinion piece in these pages entitled “Princeton’s Latex Lies.” Heralded by some and denounced by others, the article prompted campus-wide discussion of pertinent issues of health and morality.

Two days passed. Returning from Sunday morning church services, Nava discovered a new note written with the same ominous green and black ink as the first. It read, chillingly: “ONE MORE ARTICLE AND YOU WON’T LIVE TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY.”

He wrote to me: “For several days I lived in fear of saying, writing or even thinking anything controversial in class or informally among my friends.” Nava’s foray into intellectual openness came to an abrupt, horrible stop. And only a week later, a third threat with the same message was placed in his mailbox.

On the afternoon of the second threat, Public Safety dutifully arrived on the scene and collected the letter as evidence. Presumably a report was filed and, as Nava, an alternate RCA, informed me, all reports involving students are forwarded to the administration. Herein lies the most disturbing detail: The administration of Princeton University knows that a member of its student body has had his life threatened. And nothing happened.

After nearly a month of waiting, he received a two-line email from Public Safety. But from Butler College, from Nassau Hall, from West College, there was nothing.

It is instructive here to compare the treatment of Nava, the morally conservative Mormon student, with the administration’s swift and forceful reaction to another incident on Princeton’s campus.

Returning from Fall Break, some homosexual students found obscenities — apparently phalluses and other images — sketched on the blackboards outside their rooms. Within a few hours, Whitman College had RCAs, counselors and two deans to the scene. The LGBT Center sent out a notice about the event and encouraged students to mount pink triangles in their windows and doors to show solidarity.

On the afternoon of Sunday, Nov. 11, Nava sat alone in his room. There were no counselors. There were no deans. There was no University-sponsored center to raise awareness, offer support and encourage solidarity. There was just Francisco.

There was also the knowledge that Nava had fabricated a similar, though ideologically opposite, fraud while a student at the prestigious Groton School, something Nava shared with Princeton’s administration but not, until very lately, his fellow travelers among Princeton students and faculty.

Clearly, these people need to get hauntingly laid, whether in Nava’s mailbox or elsewhere.

The odds are good that sometime during the past 24 hours, as Nava’s story unraveled, McGinley entertained the thought that Nava recanted under duress because someone, probably a BCCHLT, got to him. The odds are better than good that soon McGinley or someone like him will make the point that the fact the events were entirely concocted doesn’t excuse the administration for not acting as though they weren’t, and that the fact that some people believed the story is proof that the threat of vengeful liberal ninjas is real.

Samples of the pre-exposé reaction:

“Perhaps Princeton could offer their students, administrators, and faculty seminars in which they explain how conservatives can be intimidated without actually beating them unconscious.”

“After Death Threats, Student Beat (sic) Unconscious for Traditional Views”

“I posted earlier today that the far left was on the verge of a violent emotional break down after the leaders in the Democrat party that set this mob off did not come through. It seems I was more prophetic than I wanted to be …” (updated to reflect the hoaxiness of the affair)

And an example of the “well, sure it was a hoax, but my point still stands …” theme.

UPDATE: Via David Neiwert, we learn that the fairly unbalanced Brit Hume led off one of his Fox News ruminations with a still-uncorrected report on the vicious beating of a conservative dude. FURTHER UPDATE: As of 12PM Pacific Tuesday, Hume’s story is finally updated on the web.

If you arrived here wanting to read about FISA and criminal telephone corporations but stayed for brunch, please take a moment to email or call Senator Dodd at (202) 224-2823 and thank him for standing by his promise and putting the brakes on Harry Reid and his accomodationist agenda. Well done, sir.

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