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Duke's Tenured Vigilantes (DukeLax)
The Weekly Standard ^ | Jan 20, 2007 | Charlotte Allen

Posted on 01/20/2007 2:52:54 AM PST by abb

Duke's Tenured Vigilantes The scandalous rush to judgment in the lacrosse "rape" case. by Charlotte Allen 01/29/2007, Volume 012, Issue 19

The Duke University "lacrosse rape case" is all but over. On Friday, January 12, the prosecutor, Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, petitioned the North Carolina attorney general's office to be recused from the case, and the office complied, appointing a pair of special prosecutors to take over. Nifong's recusal, it is widely assumed, paves the way for the dismissal of all remaining charges against the three defendants--suspended (but recently reinstated) Duke sophomores and lacrosse team members Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, and a team co-captain, David Evans, who graduated last year--owing to a complete lack of physical, forensic, and credible testimonial evidence linking the three to any sexual or other violent crimes.

Nifong's resignation from the case followed on the heels of two other events. One was an extended interview with the alleged victim conducted by one of Nifong's investigators on December 21--the first time anyone from the district attorney's office had talked to the accuser since Nifong announced he was personally taking over the case from the Durham police on Monday, March 27, 2006. That was exactly two weeks after the accuser, an African-American woman then 27, first said she had been sexually attacked by white members of the Duke men's lacrosse team at around midnight, the night of March 13-14.

During her December 21 interview with prosecutors, the accuser offered either the seventh or the twelfth (depending on how you count) significantly different version of the story she had been telling medical personnel, police officers, and news reporters about what happened after she, an employee of a Durham escort service, showed up at about 11:30 P.M. on March 13 to do some stripping and exotic dancing for a party at a Durham house rented by Evans and two other Duke lacrosse captains. This time around, the accuser, contradicting all her earlier accounts, said she could not remember whether she had actually been penetrated vaginally by the penis of any of the three lacrosse players whom she had identified as her assailants, which prompted Nifong to drop the rape charges the following day (charges of sexual assault, an equally grave felony, and kidnapping still stand against all three as of this writing). The accuser also altered her story about who had attacked her and when, now maintaining that Seligmann, then age 20, had merely held her leg and looked on while the other two, 19-year-old Finnerty and 23-year-old Evans, attacked her orally, anally, and vaginally in one of the house bathrooms. Earlier she had insisted that all three--or perhaps as many as four, five, or even 20 lacrosse players--had participated in the sexual assault as well as kicking, beating, and attempting to strangle her.

Her descriptions of her assailants' appearances also changed on December 21, apparently so as to accommodate the lanky, six-foot-three Finnerty; she had earlier described all three as chubby or heavyset and of medium height. Finally, she moved the time of the alleged assault a half-hour backwards, to around 11:30 on the night of March 13, which could get around Seligmann's airtight alibi of cell-phone, taxicab, and ATM records indicating he had left the house before the midnight hour at which she had previously maintained that the gang rape occurred.

The other event that undoubtedly inspired Nifong to withdraw from the case was a mid-December revelation under oath by Brian Meehan, head of a private testing laboratory under contract with the Durham district attorney's office. Meehan revealed that DNA samples from at least five different unidentified men had been collected from the underwear, pubic hair, and private parts of the accuser during a medical examination at Duke University's hospital shortly after the alleged gang assault, and that none of that DNA matched Seligmann, Finnerty, Evans, or any other previously tested member of the lacrosse team. Meehan testified--and also told 60 Minutes for their January 14 broadcast--that he, with some input from Nifong, had deliberately left these results out of a lab report issued on May 12, three and a half weeks after the April 17 indictment of Seligmann and Finnerty (Evans was indicted on May 15, the day after he graduated). A prosecutor's deliberate withholding of exculpatory evidence from a criminal defendant (in this case, evidence that would account for the mild swelling around her vagina that a nurse at the Duke hospital had reported, and would also impeach her statement that she had not had sexual relations for at least a week before the alleged assault) violates Durham and North Carolina procedural rules and possibly the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process in criminal cases.

Nifong may also face sanctions from the North Carolina State Bar for other ethically debatable conduct: obtaining a court order for all 46 white members of the 47-man Duke lacrosse team on March 23 to submit to DNA testing, even though he knew by then that the accuser had not been able to identify a single one of them as a suspect in two separate police photo lineups (the DNA tests exonerated all 46); for ordering a third photo lineup on April 4 after the first two had failed, which the accuser was told consisted only of pictures of lacrosse players (it was from this lineup that she picked out Seligmann, Finnerty, and Evans); and for publicly denouncing members of the lacrosse team as "hooligans," insisting--without bothering to interview his star witness--that "gang-like rape activity" had occurred, and urging those who had attended the party to "come forward" and break the "stone wall of silence" with which they were supposedly covering up a gross crime. Nifong seemed not to have read his own police reports, in which Kim Roberts, a second woman hired from the escort service that night (and who also changed her story several times), called the accuser's rape allegations "a crock."

Nifong, courting Durham's substantial black vote in a May 2 Democratic primary for reelection as district attorney (a primary that he won handily, as well as the election itself), also played the race card, pointing out that "racial slurs and general racial hostility" had accompanied the alleged attack. Indeed, there had been two racial epithets let loose that night, as the accuser and Roberts left the party after dancing for only a few minutes (according to Roberts) because the accuser, paid $400 in advance, declined to perform, whether because she was insulted by crude remarks made by the partygoers, because she was too drunk to dance when she got there, or because she had combined alcohol with a prescription muscle relaxant she had taken earlier in the day. As the two women departed, one lacrosse player shouted the n-word at Roberts and another yelled, "Hey, bitch, thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt!"--a riff on a Chris Rock routine that the shouter undoubtedly thought was funny. Everyone would agree that both remarks were unacceptable, but there is no evidence that either Finnerty or Evans made either of them, and Seligmann was already elsewhere, as electronic records showed.

Mike Nifong's handling of the case was clearly outrageous. But he would probably not have gone so far, indeed would not have dared to go so far, had he not been egged on by two other groups that rushed just as quickly to judge the three accused young men guilty of gross and racially motivated carnal violence. Despite the repeated attempts by the three to clear themselves, a substantial and vocal percentage--about one-fifth--of the Duke University arts and sciences faculty and nearly all of the mainstream print media in America quickly organized themselves into a hanging party. Throughout the spring of 2006 and indeed well into the late summer, Nifong had the nearly unanimous backing of this country's (and especially Duke's) intellectual elite as he explored his lurid theories of sexual predation and racist stonewalling.

"They fed off each other," said Steven Baldwin, a Duke chemistry professor who finally broke his faculty colleagues' own wall of silence on October 24, publishing a letter in the Duke student newspaper, the Chronicle, denouncing his fellow professors for what he called their "shameful" treatment of Seligmann and Finnerty and rebuking the Duke administration for having "disowned its lacrosse-playing student athletes." In April, Duke president and English professor Richard Brodhead had abruptly suspended not only Seligmann and Finnerty but also the remainder of the Duke lacrosse season, plus a third player, Ryan McFadyen (also recently reinstated), who had nothing to do with the alleged assault but had made the mistake of sending an email to his teammates on the early morning of March 14 describing a plan to "kill" and "skin" some "strippers" in his dorm room (like the "cotton shirt" remark, this was another tasteless joke, parodying Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho). That same day, April 5, Brodhead told the lacrosse team's coach, Michael Pressler, that he had until the end of the day to leave campus for good.

"The faculty enabled Nifong," Baldwin said in an interview. "He could say, 'Here's a significant portion of the arts and sciences faculty who feel this way, so I can go after these kids because these faculty agree with me.' It was a mutual attitude."

Indeed, it was the Duke faculty that could be said to have cooked up the ambient language that came to clothe virtually all media descriptions of the assault case--that boilerplate about "race, gender, and class" (or maybe "race, gender, sexuality, and class") and "privileged white males" that you could not read a news story about the assault case without encountering, whether in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Newsweek for example. The journalists channeled the academics.

Although outsiders know Duke mostly as an expensive preppie enclave that fields Division I athletic teams, the university's humanities and social sciences departments--literature, anthropology, and especially women's studies and African-American studies--foster exactly the opposite kind of culture. Those departments (and especially Duke's robustly "postmodern" English department, put in place by postmodernist celebrity Stanley Fish before his departure in 1998) are famous throughout academia as repositories of all that is trendy and hyper-politicized in today's ivy halls: angry feminism, ethnic victimology, dense, jargon-laden analyses of capitalism and "patriarchy," and "new historicism"--a kind of upgraded Marxism that analyzes art and literature in terms of efforts by powerful social elites to brainwash everybody else.

The Duke University Press is the laughingstock of the publishing world, offering such titles as Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Phrases such as "race, gender, and class" and "privileged white males" come as second nature to the academics who do this kind of writing, which analyzes nearly all social phenomena in terms of race, gender, class, and white male privilege. A couple of months after the lacrosse party, Karla F.C. Holloway, a professor of English and African-American studies at Duke, published a reflection on the incident titled "Coda: Bodies of Evidence" in an online feminist journal sponsored by Barnard College. "Judgments about the issues of race and gender that the lacrosse team's sleazy conduct exposed cannot be left to the courtroom," Holloway wrote. "Despite the damaging logic that associates the credibility of a socio-cultural context to the outcome of the legal process, we will find that even as the accusations that might be legally processed are confined to a courtroom, the cultural and social issues excavated in this upheaval linger."

There was a fascinating irony in this. Postmodern theorists pride themselves in discerning what they call "metanarratives." They argue that such concepts as, say, Christianity or patriotism or the American legal system are no more than socially constructed tall tales that the postmodernists can then "deconstruct" to unmask the real purpose behind them, which is (say the postmodernists) to prop up societal structures of--yes, you guessed it--race, gender, class, and white male privilege. Nonetheless, in the Duke lacrosse case the theorists manufactured a metanarrative of their own, based upon the fact that Durham, North Carolina, is in the South, and the alleged assailants happened to be white males from families wealthy enough to afford Duke's tuition, while their alleged victim was an impoverished black woman who, as she told the Raleigh News and Observer in a credulous profile of her published on March 25, was stripping only to support her two children and to pay her tuition as a student at North Carolina Central University, a historically black state college in Durham that is considerably less prestigious than Duke. All the symbolic elements of a juicy race/gender/class/white-male-privilege yarn were present. The theorists went to town.

The metanarrative they came up with was three parts Mandingo and one part Josephine Baker: rich white plantation owners and their scions lusting after tawny-skinned beauties and concocting fantasies of their outsize sexual appetites so as to rape, abuse, and prostitute them with impunity. It mattered little that all three accused lacrosse players hailed from the Northeast, or that there have been few, if any, actual incidents of gang rapes of black women by wealthy white men during the last 40 years. Karla Holloway's online essay was replete with imagery derived from this lurid antebellum template. She described the accuser and her fellow stripper as "kneeling" in "service to" white male "presumption of privilege," and as "bodies available for taunt and tirade, whim and whisper" in "the subaltern spaces of university life and culture." On April 13, Wahneema Lubiano, a Duke literature professor, wrote in another online article, "I understand the impulse of those outraged and who see the alleged offenders as the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy, the politically dominant race and ethnicity, the dominant gender, the dominant sexuality, and the dominant social group on campus."

The academic-speak of Lubiano and Holloway was undoubtedly a bit arcane for the average reader, but there were plenty of news reporters and commentators to translate the pair's concepts into plain English. On April 22, Slate legal columnist Dahlia Lithwick penned what read like a pop version of Lubiano: "The Duke lacrosse team's rape scandal cuts too deeply into this country's most tender places: race and class and gender." Lithwick alluded to "[m]ounds and mounds of significant physical evidence" that a rape had occurred (this was after the meager results of the accuser's medical examination had been publicized as well as the negative DNA tests for the lacrosse team) and maintained that anyone who believed the players were innocent had a "creepy closet under the stairs" of his brain. Lithwick's position was that the facts of the case were essentially unknowable, as though this were Rashomon and not a matter of whether a grave felony had occurred that could send three young men to prison.

Following just behind Lithwick was Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post on April 25. "[I]t's impossible to avoid thinking of all the black women who were violated by drunken white men in the American South over the centuries," Robinson wrote. He continued: "The master-slave relationship, the tradition of droit du seigneur, the use of sexual possession as an instrument of domination--all this ugliness floods the mind, unbidden, and refuses to leave." He characterized Duke as a hotbed of "preppy privilege" and referred to the accuser as "the victim," whose main mistake had been choosing outcall stripping as a profession. On May 24, another Washington Post writer, Lynne Duke, weighed in with yet more Robinson-style rhetoric: "In the sordid but contested details of the case, African-American women have heard echoes of a history of some white men sexually abusing black women--and a stereotype of black women as hypersexual beings and thus fair game." Like Lithwick, Lynne Duke placed great stock in the supposed results of the accuser's medical examination, which even then were known to be ambiguous.

This race/gender/class/white-male-privilege scenario that the press so eagerly bought into was supplemented by another animus that plagued several key Duke faculty members: a deep antipathy to the school's athletic programs--especially the lacrosse program, typically peopled by the graduates of exclusive prep schools who exemplify "white privilege" to the program's critics--and to the student-athletes who participate in them. The News & Observer article of March 25 that featured the uncritical interview with the accuser ("Dancer Gives Details of Ordeal") also quoted Paul Haagen, a Duke sports-law professor, stating that athletes who participated in "helmet sports" such as football, hockey, and lacrosse ("sports of violence" was Haagen's other term) were highly prone to violence against women. A Duke English professor, Houston Baker (who has since moved on to Vanderbilt), picked up the theme in a March 29 public letter to Duke's provost, Peter Lange: "How many more people of color must fall victim to violent, white, male, athletic privilege?" Calling for the immediate dismissal from the university of the entire lacrosse team and its coaches, Baker characterized the events of March 13-14 as "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us." On March 31, Duke history professor William Chafe wrote an op-ed in the Chronicle declaring that "sex and race have always interacted in a vicious chemistry of power, privilege, and control" and comparing the behavior of the lacrosse team to the 1955 lynching in Mississippi of Emmett Till, a visiting black teenager from Chicago who might have whistled at a white woman.

Another Duke historian, Peter Wood, and Orin Starn, a professor of cultural anthropology, began expressing hope that Duke would drop its preppie-ridden lacrosse program permanently and perhaps even withdraw from Division I competition altogether, according to a story by Peter Boyer in the September 4 New Yorker. In a June interview with an alternative newspaper, Wood characterized Duke's lacrosse players as "cynical, arrogant, callous, dismissive--you could almost say openly hostile." According to Boyer, when Wood had received a negative evaluation from a student for a course he taught in 2004, he concluded that it had to have come from one of the ten lacrosse players taking the course. Wood also confided to Boyer salacious details of a booze-fueled and indisputably vulgar campus "hook-up" culture of casual sex and freewheeling parties among Duke's athletes and fraternity jocks that could have been torn from the pages of Tom Wolfe's Duke roman à clef I Am Charlotte Simmons. That novel had been pooh-poohed by most of the intellectual elite as the voyeuristic fantasies of an un-hip old man when it was published in 2004, but by 2006 many members of the Duke faculty, including Wood, were parroting its observations. As in Wolfe's novel, the good-looking Duke co-eds who attached themselves to lacrosse players (their campus nickname was "lacrosstitutes") were at the very apex of the Duke female hierarchy.

Karla Holloway's online article similarly called for unspecified curtailments in the Duke athletic programs. "[S]ports reinforces exactly those behaviors of entitlement which have been and can be so abusive to women and girls and those 'othered' by their sports' history of membership," she wrote. Holloway also scolded the Duke women's lacrosse team for showing solidarity with the accused men by wearing their jersey numbers on their sweatbands during a playoff game.

As might be expected, the press took up the anti-lacrosse meme as well, showering hostile attention on what had been previously regarded as a niche sport. On March 30, Baltimore Sun sports columnist David Steele described lacrosse as "a sport of privilege played by children of privilege and supported by families of privilege" and hinted that the Duke team ought to apologize en masse to the stripper-accuser. In a March 31 piece titled "Bonded in Barbarity," New York Times sports columnist Selena Roberts wrote: "At the intersection of entitlement and enablement, there is Duke University, virtuous on the outside, debauched on the inside. . . . The season is over, but the paradox lives on in Duke's lacrosse team, a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings." Roberts accused the team members of maintaining a "code of silence" to cover up the alleged crime.

On April 23, Fox News columnist Susan Estrich, a law professor at the University of Southern California, wrote an article titled "Why Would Accuser in Duke Rape Case Lie?" Seeming to channel Nifong (and also Jesse Jackson, who had entered the fray to offer the accuser a full scholarship to continue her studies at North Carolina Central), Estrich harped on the theme of stonewalling and wondered why no lacrosse parent had said to her son, "you go in there and tell the police the truth about what happened." It is hard to believe that Estrich was not aware by that date of Seligmann's airtight alibi, the procedurally flawed April 4 photo lineup, the negative DNA results for the 46 players (those were released on April 10), and repeated efforts by lawyers for the accused to present Nifong with evidence of their clients' innocence, including an April 18 meeting with Seligmann's attorney that Nifong curtly cut short. Instead, Estrich, taking an odd stance for a professor whose specialty is criminal law, castigated the three young men for having the audacity to "hire . . . lawyers." The purpose of this exercise of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel was "to trash the victim and the prosecutor," she declared.

Newsweek had this to say about the lacrosse team in a May 1 story: "Strutting lacrosse players are a distinctive and familiar breed on elite campuses along the Eastern Seaboard. Because the game until recently was played mostly at prep schools and in upper-middle-class communities on New York's Long Island and outside Baltimore, the players tend to be at once macho and entitled, a sometimes unfortunate combination."

One likely reason for the speed and enthusiasm with which members of the Duke faculty and the media produced their morality play that simultaneously demonized lacrosse, wealth, the white race, the South, and the male sex was that it offered something otherwise missing in Nifong's case: a motive for the players, whose time-dated photographs at the March 13-14 party show them sitting torpidly on couches in the house living room, to rise suddenly in a state of power-drunk frenzy and commit gruesome acts of sexual violence. Means and opportunity were presumably there that night, but why would these "macho and entitled" young athletes who could have any Duke "lacrosstitute" of their choice free of charge, or, given their parents' money, pay for a real prostitute if they wanted to, bother with rape?

The race/gender/class/male privilege scenario also absolved its promulgators of having to consider the fact that the evidence of the players' guilt was flimsy from the outset and grew flimsier as each day passed. Indeed, Lubiano, in her online article, dismissed the whole idea of evidence--and thus legal guilt or innocence--as just another set of socially constructed "narratives" to be deconstructed by her. The accused were apparently guilty by reason of their "dominant" social position, which made them "perfect offenders" in Lubiano's eyes.

Not surprisingly then, some 88 Duke faculty members, including Holloway, Baker, and Chafe, signed a full-page advertisement drafted by Lubiano and published in the Chronicle on April 6. The "listening statement," as they called it, did not exactly endorse Nifong's confident assertions of criminal activity and guilt. What the ad did endorse was a series of campus demonstrations in late March and early April at which Duke students, outside groups such as the New Black Panthers, and (reportedly) some members of the Duke faculty had shouted "rapists" and "time to confess," hurled death threats, banged on pots outside lacrosse players' residences at early-morning hours, and distributed "Wanted" posters bearing the photographs of all 46 white lacrosse players. "To the students speaking individually and to the protestors making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard," the ad read. It also stated: "These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and to themselves." That suggested the 88 signers believed the accuser's story.

The faculty ad, together with such other faculty phenomena as Baker's letter and Chafe's op-ed, undoubtedly contributed to Duke president Richard Brodhead's impulsive and abrupt treatment of everyone at the university who might have had anything to do with either lacrosse or the March 13-14 party: firing the coach, canceling the season, suspending McFadyen over his vile email, suspending Seligmann and Finnerty after their indictments without meeting with either, and seeming to disbelieve the word of the lacrosse captains (including Evans), who had met with him on March 28 and assured him that they had fully cooperated with the police and that no sexual assault had taken place at the party. As former Harvard president Larry Summers learned to his chagrin in 2005, a college president courts big trouble by trying to buck a radicalized arts and sciences faculty. Furthermore, Brodhead seemed to be rewarding the "Group of 88" for its "thank you" ad in the Chronicle, setting up a "Campus Culture Initiative" to investigate racism and sexism at Duke on May 5 and appointing two of the ad's signers, Karla Holloway and anthropology professor Anne Allison, to chair two of its four committees and Peter Wood to chair a third.

"There just wasn't anything clear in Brodhead's statements that we were going to believe our own students," said Michael Gustafson, a Duke engineering professor who has criticized the university's handling of the March 13-14 incident. "There was obviously conduct with which Duke did not agree--parties with underage consumption of alcohol, hiring strippers, and if that was the whole story, then Brodhead was absolutely right to condemn it. The problem comes into play when there's a rape allegation. There was never a clear distinction drawn between those incidents and rape, so there was never a clear sense that the students were innocent until proven guilty."

As the summer progressed, evidence of that innocence mounted: Witnesses attested to the accuser's erratic behavior before and after the alleged crime, and her history of never-proven accusations of violence and gang rape. In June a faculty committee commissioned by Brodhead to investigate the lacrosse team and headed by Duke law professor James Coleman issued its report. The 25-page document found no evidence of racism or sexism on the part of team members and found both their academic performance and their off-campus behavior to be generally exemplary (Wood turned out to be the only one of ten surveyed pro fessors who had a problem with lacrosse players). "By all accounts, the lacrosse players are a cohesive, hard working, disciplined, and respectful athletic team," the report stated. What problems there were that had resulted in disciplinary citations by Duke centered around alcohol: underage drinking, booze in dorm rooms, noise, public urination, and on one occasion, stealing a pizza--but in that respect, the report found that lacrosse players were indistinguishable from the Duke undergraduate population in general. On June 13, Coleman, a criminal-law specialist, called for a special prosecutor to replace Nifong on the case. "It's unusual [for a prosecutor early in an investigation] to state that a crime occurred and that a group of people was responsible for it," Coleman told me. "That led to the assumption by a lot of people that a rape had occurred and that the accused were not cooperating with the police. That's why I was so outraged."

Nonetheless, news articles and columns continued to flow from the mainstream media dissecting the accused players' "privileged" backgrounds and the lush green lawns in front of their parents' suburban houses. Finnerty and two former prep-school classmates had previously been arrested for simple assault in a November 5, 2005, brawl outside a Washington, D.C., bar. It was the kind of first-time offense that usually results in a quick guilty plea plus community service (that was how his friends' cases were resolved), but because of his indictment in North Carolina, Finnerty was obliged to stand trial in order to be convicted (and placed on supervised probation). In a July 13 column, the Washington Post's Marc Fisher mocked the "battalions of lawyers" hired by Finnerty's family and the "upstanding young gentlemen in their blue blazers and pressed khakis" who stood as character witnesses for him. Fisher suggested that the bar fight "does open a window onto a larger truth" about Finnerty's propensity to "find fun in tormenting the innocent." (In a telephone interview, Fisher denied that he had been referring to the Duke sexual assault case.)

On June 27, washingtonpost.com law columnist Andrew Cohen excoriated some of his fellow journalists for reporting criticisms of Nifong's handling of the case (Newsweek by then had done an about-face and was openly skeptical of the rape charges). "I suspect race and money and access to the media have a lot to do with it," Cohen wrote. As late as August 25, the New York Times carried a front-page story parroting an ex post facto memorandum prepared by a Durham police officer at Nifong's request that detailed numerous injuries allegedly inflicted on the accuser that contradicted the contemporaneous reports of medical personnel and other police. That story was ripped to shreds a few days later in Slate by Stuart Taylor Jr. of the National Journal. Taylor, along with Rush Limbaugh and a handful of bloggers--notably Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson and La Shawn Barber, an African-American woman--were nearly the only members of the media to express skepticism about the accuser's story from the outset.

Eventually, and especially after an October 15 episode of 60 Minutes showed a video of the accuser pole-dancing at a club a week after her supposed trauma, a handful of news commentators admitted they had rushed to judgment. On December 18, after Nifong dismissed the rape charges, Susan Estrich reversed herself and called for his removal from the case. Suddenly, it would seem, Estrich had discovered that the April 4 photo lineup procedures had been "unduly suggestive" and that the decision to indict the three players had been made before the results of the DNA tests on the victim's person were in. In an email, Estrich blamed Nifong for misleading outsiders and taking advantage of a disturbed woman who, "liar though she may be, is also a victim."

Lacrosse is now back at Duke, a group of Duke economics professors have signed a statement supporting Brodhead's decision to rescind the suspensions of Finnerty and Seligmann (the university had quietly changed those suspensions to less opprobrious administrative leaves at the end of the summer), and a D.C. judge vacated Finnerty's assault conviction right after Nifong dropped the rape charges. Neither Finnerty nor Seligmann is back on campus, however, and one very large issue still lurks: an angry and unrepentant Group of 88 on the Duke arts and sciences faculty.

Karla Holloway resigned her position as chairman of the Campus Culture Initiative's race committee to protest the re-admission of the two players. One of the signers, Duke English professor Cathy N. Davidson, published an op-ed in the News & Observer on January 5 that was sharply critical of that convenient scapegoat, Mike Nifong, but she mostly blamed "right-wing 'blog hooligans'" for trying to make her and the other signers look as though they had prejudged the lacrosse players. Tossing in a few red herrings, Davidson complained that the real "social disaster" in the Duke case was that "18 percent of the American population lives below the poverty line" and "women's salaries for similar jobs are substantially less than men's." Plus, we don't have "national health care or affordable childcare," Davidson wrote.

Other signers of the ad may be more worried. One of them, political science visiting professor Kim Curtis, has been sued by Kyle Dowd, a 2006 Duke graduate who alleges he got an F in her class after she discovered he was a lacrosse player (the university later upped the grade to a D, claiming a calculation error; Curtis did not respond to an email requesting a comment). Another signer, Duke philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg, explained in news interviews that he had signed the ad only to protest underage drinking at Duke and the hiring of strippers by students "when they could get as much hookup as they wanted from rich and attractive Duke coeds." Yet on January 17, several members of the Group of 88 published an open letter on the Internet, a defiant je ne regrette rien: "There have been public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologize for it, as well as calls for action against them and attacks on their character. We reject all of these."

The week before, Brodhead had issued a "letter to the Duke community" that seemed to attempt to mollify the university's critics (including many alumni) who had criticized his peremptory actions against Finnerty and Seligmann. He described suspension as "not a disciplinary measure." Yet the letter seemed even more intent on placating the arts and sciences faculty, whom he described as victims of "blogs and emails" that attacked them "in highly repugnant and vicious terms." Brodhead described the sexual-assault allegations as having raised "troubling questions about sexual violence and racial subjugation." It was back to business as usual at Duke, back to the business of metanarratives.

Charlotte Allen is the author, most recently, of The Human Christ.


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: abb; duke; dukelax; durham; nifong
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This week's cover story
1 posted on 01/20/2007 2:52:59 AM PST by abb
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To: abner; Alia; AmishDude; AntiGuv; beyondashadow; Bitter Bierce; bjc; Bogeygolfer; BossLady; ...

Ping. Will be posting the rest of today's new stuff shortly.


2 posted on 01/20/2007 2:54:08 AM PST by abb (The Dinosaur Media: A One-Way Medium in a Two-Way World)
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To: abb

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti...007/CUSTOMPUB21

Tom Ehrich
Duke scandal is a lens into troubling flaws of our society
January 20, 2007


DURHAM, N.C. -- Now that our local district attorney has asked a state prosecutor to take over assault charges against three Duke University lacrosse players, it seems an even chance that the case will simply go away.
Many want exactly that. The alleged victim would lose her day in court. The alleged assailants would carry into adulthood and every job interview unanswered questions about their actions and character.
No one would have to listen to detailed accounts of an attack, lacrosse team parties, racist slurs, assaults on women or arrogant attitudes among the privileged. No witnesses would describe a university's hard- partying culture.
Better, they seem to think, to let unanswered questions haunt accuser, accused, the university and the community than to hear unflattering testimony about life as it is.
Certainly, if criminal charges are unfounded, they should be dropped. But it would be a tragic outcome to an important series of events if the whole matter vanished as well. For the "Duke lacrosse rape scandal" has never been just about rape, lacrosse or even Duke.
The firestorm that erupted last March revealed deep fissures in our city, disturbing questions about our largest employer and far-reaching questions about our society: out-of-control drinking, attitudes of entitlement, helicopter parenting, racist attitudes among tomorrow's leaders, boorish behavior toward women and market-minded leaders who seemed reluctant to probe for deeper meanings.

snip


3 posted on 01/20/2007 2:54:39 AM PST by abb (The Dinosaur Media: A One-Way Medium in a Two-Way World)
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To: abb

http://www.thedurhamnews.com/101/story/29056.html

Published: Jan 20, 2007 12:30 AM
Modified: Jan 20, 2007 03:44 AM

Duke campus conversation centers on race relations
Stanley B. Chambers Jr., Staff Writer

Many students at Duke University say race relations on campus are usually shaped by three issues: skin color, birthplace and personal experience.
That prompts many students to associate almost exclusively with their own race, which, in some measure, helped fuel the perception of racial division that came to light with the lacrosse team incident last year.

Although the moderator of a recent discussion on race relations at Duke said the forum wasn't influenced by the case, the incident has sparked similar discussions across the country.

The event, "Race Relations at Duke: Student Leaders Speak Out," drew a standing-room-only crowd. The gathering was part of Duke's "Freedom School," a series of sessions associated with the school's Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. Participants spoke about personal experiences of perceived racism on campus.


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4 posted on 01/20/2007 2:55:00 AM PST by abb (The Dinosaur Media: A One-Way Medium in a Two-Way World)
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To: abb

http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellit...s=1037645509099

Saturday, January 20, 2007
When a lawyer needs a lawyer
Partners make career of representing colleagues charged with misconduct

By Titan Barksdale
JOURNAL REPORTER

For lawyers who have been formally charged with professional misconduct, chances are the names David Freedman and Dudley Witt sound familiar.

During their 18 years as partners in Winston-Salem, Freedman and Witt have defended lawyers, public officials, teachers and law-enforcement officers. Their most recent clients that have drawn state and national attention are Mike Nifong, the district attorney for Durham County, and Mike Decker, a former state representative.

Freedman also represents Zack Bynum, a former lawyer in Forsyth County who faces charges of embezzling millions of dollars, and has represented Gary Thomas, the former Forsyth County clerk of court who pleaded guilty to embezzlement. And Freedman won acquittal for state Rep. Larry Womble, who was charged with extortion while he was an alderman.

About 15 years ago, the two Winston-Salem lawyers started defending other lawyers against charges of misconduct before the N.C. State Bar. That work paved the way for them to become the go-to guys for lawyers in trouble across the state, they said.

"When you represent attorneys who are peers or older than you, there's a certain deference you pay because they are older than you and people who you've learned from," Freedman said.

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5 posted on 01/20/2007 2:55:33 AM PST by abb (The Dinosaur Media: A One-Way Medium in a Two-Way World)
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To: abb

http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/bal-te.sp.duke20jan20,0,5096854.story?coll=bal-sports-headlines
From the Baltimore Sun

Players' parents turn anger at Duke
Lacrosse team supporters say university misled them, abandoned team members



By Jeff Barker
Sun reporter

January 20, 2007



For months, Duke lacrosse families have directed their anger largely at the prosecutor who brought what they consider a baseless sexual assault case against three players.

But District Attorney Michael B. Nifong, who recused himself from the case last week, isn't the only object of their rage. Parents of team members say the university abandoned the 46 players, buckling under pressure by faculty and demonstrators to take action against the team when an African-American stripper's rape allegation surfaced last March.

In a series of interviews, parents and lacrosse team supporters say Duke officials misled them about the university's position, privately assuring them that they believed players' claims of innocence but undercutting the team publicly by making critical comments and forfeiting games. The school's handling of the case has also alienated some alumni.

"Let's face it, a college community is a diverse environment, and there was sensitivity to the notion of white, privileged athletes beating up on a black woman. But in the consideration of an absolutely false notion, three Duke students and their families got lost," said Duke parent Sally Fogarty of Chevy Chase.

She is the mother of Gibbs Fogarty, a sophomore Duke lacrosse player who is not among the players charged.

Prosecutors dropped rape charges against the three accused players last month, although other charges remain.

Duke says it honored the players' presumption of innocence but had to let the legal system run its course. It would not have helped the players if Duke had tried to improperly influence the outcome of such a high-profile court case by becoming a legal advocate, said John Burness, a Duke senior vice president.

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6 posted on 01/20/2007 2:56:07 AM PST by abb (The Dinosaur Media: A One-Way Medium in a Two-Way World)
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To: abb

http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti.../701200333/1020

DA had to exit from botched Duke rape case

OTHER OPINIONS




Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong has handled sexual assault charges against three Duke University lacrosse players in a strange fashion that’s taken more than a few twists and turns.

On Friday [last week], Nifong took his last turn and pulled off the road. He asked the state Attorney General’s Office to name a special prosecutor, in effect recusing himself from the case. At this point, it was his only alternative.

Early on, after the charges came forth related to the alleged attack at an off-campus party on March 13 of last year, the prosecutor assured people he was confident that an assault had occurred. Despite a lack of DNA evidence linking the victim and those she identified as her attackers, Nifong pressed on. Then it turned out that police had not followed customary procedures with regard to lineup identification. …


Last month, the N.C. State Bar filed ethics charges against Nifong, charges that could lead to his disbarment. And much criticism has been aimed at him for pursuing a case that seemed so weak.

Asking to be removed from the case was the proper course. Now it should fall to another prosecutor to decide whether to pursue the case or end it.


7 posted on 01/20/2007 2:56:33 AM PST by abb (The Dinosaur Media: A One-Way Medium in a Two-Way World)
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To: abb

http://www.newsobserver.com/580/story/534132.html

Letter: Published: Jan 20, 2007 12:30 AM
Modified: Jan 20, 2007 02:40 AM

She should talk

Regarding Ruth Sheehan's Jan. 15 column "Nifong made call too late":
How can Sheehan criticize Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong for his actions, when just last month she was attacking Cary Academy officials for not speaking to the media until all the facts were known [about a teacher's case] -- while she was the one speaking out too quickly? Maybe Sheehan should take a hint from Nifong and step aside.

Bill Wagner

Cary

http://www.newsobserver.com/580/story/534136.html

Letter: Published: Jan 20, 2007 12:30 AM
Modified: Jan 20, 2007 02:40 AM

Degrading culture

District Attorney Mike Nifong's sensationalizing of the Duke lacrosse case is reprehensible. If the rape charges were false, it is unforgivable. However, dropping the rape charges does not acquit us from seriously considering the values we teach our children.
There should be little doubt from the underage binge drinking, racial taunts, hired strippers, e-mailed violent sexual fantasies and past criminal offenses that some lacrosse team members would be no one's first choice to date their daughter. But to what extent are these incidents also reflective of our own culture's flaws?

We are bombarded every day by violent and sexual images in the media, many of which are degrading to women. To what extent have we become desensitized? To what degree do we dismiss truly alarming behavior and attitudes as simply youthful indiscretion?

The facts of the Duke lacrosse case -- regardless of guilt or innocence -- will disappear all too quickly from the media. Already the accused are being portrayed as upstanding, wrongfully accused nice guys who have always tried to do the right thing. I hope we do not so easily dismiss the past and its warnings.

Leigh-Anne Krometis

Chapel Hill

http://www.newsobserver.com/580/story/534130.html

Letter: Published: Jan 20, 2007 12:30 AM
Modified: Jan 20, 2007 02:40 AM

Agenda-driven

Cathy N. Davidson's Jan. 5 opinion piece shows how removed she is from the facts of this issue. The statement she signed with the other 87 at Duke is very clear.
I have a much different definition of "social disaster" than Davidson. The real social disaster here is to heighten race at the expense of reason. District Attorney Mike Nifong could not have found better friends than the Duke 88, who fed the irrational response based on one woman's unproven claims.

Who look the fools now? The backpeddling and damage control has begun, and this opinion piece is just one recent example. Instead of dealing with the facts of the false rape claim, Davidson continues to pound a racial agenda to cover for the ignorance of decisions made earlier.

The more of this mind-set that is exposed, the more potential students who will decide to find a less agenda-driven group of professors at another university.

Nancy McCaffrey

Fuquay-Varina

http://www.newsobserver.com/580/story/534135.html

Letter: Published: Jan 20, 2007 12:30 AM
Modified: Jan 20, 2007 02:40 AM

Poisoned comments

Regarding the Jan. 12 article "Venom has aftereffects for Duke":
Of all the insults hurled throughout the Duke lacrosse scandal, Tricia Dowd's vitriolic attack on Karla Holloway was among the most revealing. Lacrosse parent Dowd charged Duke professor Holloway with being a selfish, failed mother of her mentally ill son. [The article also quoted Dowd as saying she regrets her comments about Holloway.]

Apparently Dowd defined successful parents as ones whose sons urinate on neighbors' lawns, hire strippers for entertainment and shout racial epithets at minorities. Holloway and her husband, on the other hand, adopted a 4-year-old abused boy with a history of mental illness and gave him a second chance at life.

Choose your definition of success.

Marjorie George

Durham

http://www.newsobserver.com/580/story/534129.html

Letter:

Published: Jan 20, 2007 12:30 AM
Modified: Jan 20, 2007 02:40 AM

Out of control

Regarding a Jan. 14 People's Forum letter-writer who said the decrease in applications at Duke University may be because mothers are afraid to have their sons suffer the same fate as the accused lacrosse players:
Some of us are afraid to send our daughters to a university that lets student athletes run amok by hiring strippers and allowing underage drinking.

Donna M. Stewart

Raleigh

http://www.newsobserver.com/580/story/534133.html

Letter: Published: Jan 20, 2007 12:30 AM
Modified: Jan 20, 2007 02:40 AM

Siding with the defense

I am disturbed by the way The N&O, unwittingly or not, has presented lacrosse-case defense team accounts of District Attorney Mike Nifong's conduct as if these were fact. The latest example was your Jan. 15 front-page story headlined "Nifong conduct rebuked early." The headline appears to suggest that there were concerns early on about Nifong's conduct, and the term "rebuke" suggests an official concern, perhaps by the Bar Association.
However, it turns out the rebuke was actually a defense representation of Nifong's conduct. Anyone following this case is aware that from the start a key defense strategy has been to draw questions about Nifong's early remarks on the case, characterizing these as exceptional and unprofessional. What was missing was any outside substantiation of defense attorney Joe Cheshire's account of professional standards and norms. As it stands, you act as a conduit for the defense team's narrative and argument.

David Need

Durham

http://www.newsobserver.com/580/story/534128.html

Letter: Published: Jan 20, 2007 12:30 AM
Modified: Jan 20, 2007 02:40 AM

Naming the accused

Under no circumstance is there justification for a woman to be raped. But there is a flaw in the policies that protect the accuser's identity.
Until such time as the accused has been tried and convicted, that person should have the same protection -- keeping his name from publication.

The Duke lacrosse players' names and pictures have constantly appeared in the national press. How can they ever be compensated for defamation of character if they are innocent, as it certainly appears?

It is way past time for equal justice under the law to be practiced in all circumstances.

Dolores Collins

Kinston

http://www.newsobserver.com/580/story/534131.html

Letter: Published: Jan 20, 2007 12:30 AM
Modified: Jan 20, 2007 02:40 AM


Unequal justice

I find People's Forum letters about the lacrosse case very disturbing. The enraged outcry about judicial misconduct in this case was noticeably absent in the case of Alan Gell, who faced the death penalty as a result of prosecutorial skullduggery. Gell was poor, unconnected, without a prestigious legal team. What strikes me about the lacrosse case is how so many are so outraged about three privileged young men experiencing unfairness, and the level of vitriol and hatred directed to those who suggest this case is about more than legal culpability.
I notice that these young men (and their parents) insist on innocence without appearing to take responsibility for team members' behavior at the party on the night in question. Forget the team's culture of longstanding, irresponsible and unaccountable behavior. Forget the elitist, racist, sexist behavior on campus exposed by this case. Forget the larger context of violence against women.

Instead, decry with wrath and resentment any threat to assumed privilege while remaining silent about insidious injustice that happens to nameless people every day. My hope is that we might instead hold equivalent compassion and concern for everyone in this community.

Tema Okun

Durham

http://www.newsobserver.com/580/story/534134.html


Letter: Published: Jan 20, 2007 12:30 AM
Modified: Jan 20, 2007 02:40 AM

Faculty trouble

Regarding the Jan. 17 article "Duke post seeks to defuse '88' ad":
How much longer must the public endure the train wreck in Durham? Sadly, this travesty has been made even worse by the Group of 88 professors at Duke whose selfish antics only serve to create a constant atmosphere of discord, with whipped-up archaic fantasies of mass victimhood.

The only victims here are the three innocent Duke athletes, Duke alumni, and Duke parents who fund the often six-figure salaries allowed for these troublemakers to teach courses whose subject matter would make anyone interested in serious scholarship laugh out loud.

In the meantime, Duke might consider a new course of study. One that teaches the meaning of due process, the destructiveness of mob rule and the art of giving real victims an apology.

Duke President Richard Brodhead and his administration should work decisively to rein in this madness in order to avoid having to write some very large checks.

Debrah Correll
Chapel Hill


8 posted on 01/20/2007 2:59:53 AM PST by abb (The Dinosaur Media: A One-Way Medium in a Two-Way World)
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To: abb

http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/hsletters/

LAX coverage unfair

What hypocrisy! Nowhere in your Jan. 11 editorial do you admit culpability for the rift between town and gown, black and white, rich and poor, private and public education.

You, along with Duke's administration, were the very first to join with District Attorney Mike Nifong in his vainglorious pursuit of a higher profile by leading a figurative lynching party against three lacrosse players. When this is all over, if there is any justice, Nifong will be disbarred, disgraced and both unemployed and unemployable.

Duke's administrators will probably reach a settlement with the families of the accused and should, but probably won't, lose their jobs. The paper will remain whole, and that will be a grave injustice.

Perhaps the next time, the paper will at least pretend to be objective and report events as they unfold, rather than play apologist for some incompetent bureaucrat simply because he shares your leftist philosophy.

David Highlands
St. Petersburg, Fla.
January 20, 2007


More media exploitation

There was yet more media exploitation of Durham's lacrosse tragedy Tuesday night. Paula Zahn of CNN swooped into town for another round of hit-and-run "television journalism." Zahn hosted a televised forum on race.

Those of us who work and live in Durham know this wonderful city and its wonderful people -- who come in all colors, shapes and sizes. Out-of-town media shills like Zahn know and care nothing about Durham, its history or its people. They've proven it innumerable times in the last months. Their only interest in Durham is to play on this city's tragedy to whip up their ratings and their paychecks.

It would have been great if Paula Zahn gave her "forum" and nobody showed up.

John Madden
Durham
January 20, 2007


Nifong's fumble

I am appalled at District Attorney Mike Nifong's handling of the Duke lacrosse case. It seems Nifong has been trying to make a name for himself at these young men's expense. The whole dirty episode has backfired on him and now he wants to turn the heat over to someone else.

After all that has come out in the news, it seems to me the girl should be put on the hot seat. No, actually, Nifong should drop the case and let all concerned get on with their lives. It's about time our prosecutors start trying to get to the bottom of cases and quit trying to make a name for themselves.

Well, this one has made a name for himself, but you can't print it in a family newspaper.

A.D. George
Hot Springs, Ark.
January 20, 2007


Tired of LAX case

The first thing Roy Cooper, North Carolina's attorney general, does after receiving Mike Nifong's request to take on the Duke rape case is to go on CNN and hold a press conference. All he had to do was issue a one sentence press release but it seems that politicians cannot resist the opportunity to grab their one minute of fame.

Sadly, this is all at the expense of the three young men who are accused. I hope this fiasco ends soon.


John Garand
Durham
January 20, 2007


No excuse for Nifong

Three years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to the Durham/Chapel Hill area a couple of times to visit a friend who was doing her residency at Duke. I found the area to be a great place to dine, shop and visit historic sites. After the Jan. 14 story on "60 Minutes", I was appalled at the way the Duke boys in the rape case have been treated by law enforcement in Durham.

I hope District Attorney Mike Nifong gets his day in court. There is no excuse for this kind of behavior.

Denis Crivello
Alton, Ill.
January 20, 2007


Not visiting Durham

As a Tennessee transplant in Ohio and a Democrat to boot, I am totally embarrassed by the prosecutor in the Duke rape case. Durham and Duke University are the laughing stock of America and the southern justice system. Anyone who would send their child to your county to attend Duke would have to be crazy!

Anyone guilty of the things the Duke students are accused of should be made an example of, but to not even investigate the charges or the credibility of the alleged victim and drag it out for 10 months is criminal.

Who is going to pay the legal bills for the accused? Who is going to wipe this rape charge from the memory of all the people these accused Duke students come in contact with for the rest of their lives?

It certainly appears District Attorney Mike Nifong was playing politics at the expense of three boys who only wish to obtain a degree from Duke.

The people of North Carolina should be embarrassed and most especially the citizens that elected Nifong. The university should be ashamed for their actions as well.

The common, decent people of Durham should be protesting and marching in front of the prosecutor's office demanding the state take action against him. How many other cases has Nifong railroaded?

Not only will my children not be attending Duke, I certainly won't be visiting your county anytime soon.

Monte Scott
Centerville, Ohio
January 20, 2007


9 posted on 01/20/2007 3:00:41 AM PST by abb (The Dinosaur Media: A One-Way Medium in a Two-Way World)
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To: abb
"Duke President Richard Brodhead and his administration should work decisively to rein in this madness in order to avoid having to write some very large checks."

Duke has that coming.

10 posted on 01/20/2007 3:07:12 AM PST by Anti-Bubba182
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To: abb

Superb summation.


11 posted on 01/20/2007 3:18:53 AM PST by commonguymd
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To: abb
"It would not have helped the players if Duke had tried to improperly influence the outcome of such a high-profile court case by becoming a legal advocate, said John Burness, a Duke senior vice president."

This "Senior Vice President of Duke" doesn't demonstrate the logic or credibility necessary to run a push cart taco stand - and he's running a University!

So - Duke didn't want to "improperly influence the outcome of the high profile case, instead Duke led the charge to ignore the presumption of innocence and vocally convict and punish the players on the word of a bastard breeding skank....

Why do I doubt Duke and its feckless faculty would have acted differently if it had been black basketball players charged with raping a white cheer leader.

If this is the quality of intellect running our "premier" Universities -- we're in a lot of trouble...

I hope the boy's families end up owning Duke and everything of value within the North Carolina border.

Semper Fi

12 posted on 01/20/2007 4:17:24 AM PST by river rat (You may turn the other cheek, but I prefer to look into my enemy's vacant dead eyes.)
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To: abb

ping


13 posted on 01/20/2007 4:28:26 AM PST by Republican Babe (God bless America.)
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To: abb

I suppose that no one has ever told Tema Okun that the attorneys who secured Alan Gell's new trial and his eventual acquittal were Joe Cheshire and James Cooney -- now currently representing Dave Evans and Reade Seligmann respectively.


14 posted on 01/20/2007 4:43:33 AM PST by writmeister
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To: abb
Kudos to Charlotte Allen: a well researched, sourced, synoptic article of what has taken place. Thank for you for posting this, abb.

The PC Elite essentially have their panties down around their ankles, by their own hands, and are screaming that a rape is about to occur. Wishful thinking? Their ideology and pedogogy suggests this is exactly what they wish to happen to themselves or that it will happen, or that they hope it will happen. Only then, as their arguments show, only then can they prove that America is out to rape them.

I'd suggest psychotherapy for these people; but psychotherapy has become just as mentally unhinged alongside the PC Elite. It'd merely be a lovefest, and with no constructive purpose.

The liberals around SF Bay Area now have "peace" colleges specifically designed for those who are fixed and adoring of "domestic terrorists". Perhaps the PC Elite, in this case, should apply to teach at those colleges.

And John Kerry could schedule regular "speaking visits" at easily $40K a pop. ;>

15 posted on 01/20/2007 6:07:44 AM PST by Alia
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To: abb
lol. Tom Ehrich writes as a Cling-On.

What the case has revealed? In re public trust, the public is NOT getting a good return from the PC Elite at Duke, in Durham, and the National and local press.

16 posted on 01/20/2007 6:09:31 AM PST by Alia
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To: abb
Through these letters, one can openly observe those who've been academically lobotomized into PC pedogogy, and then those who still retain common sense as a guide.

The lobotomized ones have no idea how much their letters are of the "feed me, seymour" logo.

lol. As in "me, too. I'm a famous lefty, too! Pay attention to me, I'm a star!"

Oh, lol, bless 'em. Truly. Someone's gotta!

17 posted on 01/20/2007 6:14:21 AM PST by Alia
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To: abb

I hope you write a book about this someday. I want an autographed copy!


18 posted on 01/20/2007 6:23:34 AM PST by JimFreedom (Pragmatic Common Sense Conservative - Too)
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To: abb
Dear Monte Scott:

I, for one, am not embarassed by the idiocy of those who fabricated, fueled, and abetted this hoax. People like this exist throughout the U.S. They hate America. They hate themselves. They hate themselves so much, all they can do is project their self-loathing onto others. Some make a very good income at doing this.

I find it profoundly good that all Americans can see what "self-haters" will do to innocents-but-in-the-name-of-ideology/belief/religion if ever empowered anywhere.

People like these are simply, domestic terrorists out to rape the Constitution and the lives of innocents in the name of their cult religion commonly referred to as the alter of Multi-culturalism and Diversity and because the hate first exists in their own hearts, they then look to devour others.

The Church of Multi-Culturalism & Diversity makes a very good income, lots of fundraising and speakership opportunities. It's become a very profitable industry which shams as a "civil right".

Even the adherents and faithful to the Cult of Hate can be useful props, like suicide bombers, for their Faith in the Cult. They like to think of themselves as "heroes".

The enemy I can see with my eyes is always better than the enemy I haven't yet identified.

Am I embarassed? No. I don't buy into the "mind-meld" script of Political Correctness. Ergo, how can I feel embarassed. Their shame belongs solely to them, and to their adherents. And they wear this shame as proud bearers of IEDs strapped to their chests.

How can you feel embarassed by people who hold life and freedom in such low regard?

Feeling embarassed is not the answer.

Removing these poor souls from positions of power is a start. Exposing their madness helps to deprogram those who've been lightly socially infected.

Ultimately, holding their feet to the fire and light of day is what does them in. Those whose brains and hearts have been corrupted, so thoroughly, may be able to derive benefits from deprogramming, but they are addicted to a false "power rush". So, the solution there is to keep them from their drug of choice: power.

This happens at the voting box, in private councils electing Deans and Presidents of colleges and in faculty appointments.

We must each do our part to help these poor addicts. After a time of walking a genuine life free from their addiction, it is possible that other parts of their brains and hearts might be workable. As it once was, when they were young, young children and before they became mentally infected, and that which then spread to an infection of heart, and action.

Sincerely yours,

...Alia

19 posted on 01/20/2007 6:33:35 AM PST by Alia
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To: abb
Karla Holloway resigned her position as chairman of the Campus Culture Initiative's race committee to protest the re-admission of the two players.

The cream of the crop. The facilitator/author/mother of a murdering rapist who has published a book in memory of said rapist murderer. Even after her son had murdered, raped and disemboweled his victims, she went to work on the book describing how black folks memorialize their dead and how blacks are/were victimized in death as they are in life by white people.

To my knowledge, none of her son's victims were black. What a slap in the face to the families of those killed by the son of this racist wench. Incidentally, her "professorship" at Duke is funded from the trust of the son of a decorated civil war veteran. Gray side.

20 posted on 01/20/2007 6:59:32 AM PST by RGSpincich
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