Former University of Colorado president Elizabeth Hoffman gave a whiny speech recently, in which she blamed LGF for spreading “rumors” about Ward Churchill, thereby creating a “perfect storm” that led to her resignation. She’s a victim, you see.

My response to Hoffman is in David Harsanyi’s column for today’s Denver Post: Hoffman has excuses, not answers.

“The real problem was I had a lot of really tough decisions to make in this perfect storm,” Hoffman went on to explain in her speech to the Denver Forum.

No, the real problem is that the former head of a major university finds the concentrated flow of information annoying.

This “perfect storm” - meaning unruly talk radio hosts, pajama-clad bloggers and scalawag commentators - was simply throwing facts at Hoffman.

And I thought it was all about freedom of expression? Or is that reserved for creative CU professors?

Hoffman singled out a blog called little green footballs (lgf).

Lgf averages around 85,000 daily hits and provides a constant stream of acerbic political posts. Lgf broke the Dan Rather forgery story and reported on Ward Churchill’s charming essay about the culpability of innocent Americans for all the troubles in the world.

“Hoffman is right,” explained Charles Johnson in an e-mail from lgf. “It’s much harder to get away with dirty little secrets like Ward Churchill - who apparently gamed the CU system for years - in the era of the blogosphere, when facts (not rumors) can be instantly reported. If I had simply published rumors, the story would never have caught on like it did.”

As president, Hoffman found time to complain about imaginary McCarthyism - the “state” in state university, you see, only means “state” money - when she should have been thanking the perfect storm for bringing CU’s absurd professor to Colorado’s attention.