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Yes I almost forgot about that - this is almost the same story told to the Senate panel just now its 7 men instead of 5. And that they said this attack was part of a ritual initiation process that occurs every year just makes it all the more incredible. Who can really believe that a group of random kids who really barely know each other (they were new to the fraternity so they couldn’t have known each other for more than 2 or 3 months) join in on a violent sexual assault against a woman just to join a social club? Not one of the kids tries to stop it, or calls the cops, or tells a friend, or tells his mother or father, or even talks to any one of the other 133 kids in the fraternity about it? And this happens year after year?

What goes on in the minds of the writer, editor, the publisher and everyone involved in the publication that they can believed that this was true? Well maybe the writer wanted it to be true, since she passed on several other stories with more corroboration because this one is more sensational and would get more notoriety. So she surrendered all journalistic ethics to get the scoop (and the source apparently demanded that she not check on the facts, terms to which the writer seems to have agreed). The Columbia university review of Rolling Stone suggested that maybe the other staff didn’t want to push back on the facts lest they appear “insensitive”, so they deferred their judgement on account of the fact that they were not women. Which kind of tells you why and how this whole story broke down. They were all hoisted on their on own PC petards. I thought PC had run amok a long time ago but clearly not. Maybe this is the nadir of PC and we can put an end to this forced idiocy and start to reaffirm our natural human intellectual capacity.

Yes that is something else very troubling about politics; creating situations to advance an agenda. I suppose this tactic was always there. “You supply the pictures and I’ll supply the war” but its just one more reason to distrust government and to insist on maintaining a strict limit to its size and scope. That some hacks would think nothing of slandering (or worse) innocent people to advance what in this case is really a quit small and wrong headed change in procedure shows us all that some people will go to any lengths to advance their ideals. I seem to find this more on the left but I’m sure left and right both do it. Here, some people created a fiction (and others ran with it in print) in the effort to change the way rape is reported and adjudicated on campus. And we saw also the reporter in Ohio who went to scores of restaurants and suppliers asking if they would cater her gay wedding until she finally found one who would say no so she could write a story about it. But maybe its always been that way. NBC blew up trucks with dynamite to claim they had faulty gas tanks, and CBS practically invented letters out of whole cloth to accuse Bush of dodging his duty, and I know there are many other examples. Can’t trust politicians and can’t trust the press, either. All the more reason to keep them small and out of our lives as much as possible.