Posted on 06/18/2007 9:05:57 PM PDT by jazusamo
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The disbarment of Durham District Attorney Michael Nifong should be just the first step in remedying the gross and cynical fraud of last year's "rape" case against Duke University lacrosse players.
Not only is Nifong still liable to civil lawsuits from the three young men whose lives he tried to ruin, and criminal prosecution for his obstruction of justice and making false statements to a judge, there are many other people who disgraced themselves in hyping a lynch mob atmosphere when this case first broke last year.
The New York Times, which splashed these Duke students' pictures on the front page, along with inflammatory charges against them, and went ballistic on its editorial page, carried the story of Nifong's disbarment for prosecuting them on page 16.
The 88 Duke University faculty members who took out a hysterical ad, supporting those local loudmouths who were denouncing and threatening the Duke students, have apparently had nothing at all to say now.
Not only did many Duke University professors join the lynch mob atmosphere, so did the Duke University administration, which got rid of the lacrosse coach and cancelled the team's season, without a speck of evidence that anybody was guilty of anything.
This is one of the few times when Jesse Jackson is speechless, even though he was loudly supporting the bogus "rape" charges last year.
A local civil rights activist even had the gall to accost the mother of one of the accused students at Nifong's disbarment hearings to say that she still believes they were guilty.
The sad and tragic fact is that the civil rights movement, despite its honorable and courageous past, has over the years degenerated into a demagogic hustle, promoting the mindless racism they once fought against.
Although the committee that disbarred Michael Nifong said many things that needed to be said, they muddied the waters by saying that Nifong may have deceived himself before he deceived others.
Nothing that District Attorney Nifong did suggests that he ever thought these players were guilty or that he ever intended to bring them to trial.
The photo lineup presented to the stripper was so completely different from standard procedure that it was virtually an invitation for a judge to throw out any identification resulting from it -- and without that identification, there was no case.
This was not about winning a case. It was about winning an election.
Nifong could not allow a standard lineup to be used to have the accuser identify her alleged attackers, or else her unreliability would have been exposed early on, depriving him of a case to use to get the black vote in his election.
There is not the slightest reason to believe that Nifong was deceived or mistaken. He was not some kid fresh out of law school. He had decades of experience as a prosecutor. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Nor was the New York Times a naive ingenue in these matters. It had backed Al Sharpton's fraudulent accusations of rape in the Tawana Brawley case, which had the same politically correct elements of a black woman accusing white men of rape.
Nor were the 88 Duke faculty members who promoted a lynch mob atmosphere naive. Most were from departments promoting the "race, class, and gender" vision of victimhood.
This case served their purposes. That trumped any question about whether the charges were true or not.
Don't expect any of these people to recant or apologize. But be aware of how wide and how deep the moral dry rot goes.
That such people are teaching students at an elite university is a chilling thought. That they promote a campus atmosphere where political correctness trumps the search for truth is painful.
That such attitudes and such atmospheres are not peculiar to Duke University, but are common on elite college campuses from coast to coast is a time bomb with the potential to destroy individuals and ultimately undermine the whole society.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.
Anyway, if there is room or cost extra?
I don’t want the ad to get wordy, so I’m inclined to provide a link to Sowell’s page at the Hoover Institute and encourage all readers to go there to start learning. I will NOT refer to Dr. Sowell ever as “the leading black intellectual.” I refer to him as one of the preeminent political and social scholars in America today.
John / Billybob
Sounds perfect.
bump
John, It looks like both Dr. Sowell and you have hit one out of the park.
Let me know when you start taking up the collection!
Amazing.......
Count me in...
Just let me know....
FRegards,
The following members of the Duke faculty have signed the Open Letter to the Duke Community.
Stan Abe
Benjamin Albers
Anne Allison
Srinivas Aravamudan
Lee Baker
Sarah Beckwith
Paul Berliner
Tolly Boatwright
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
Jack Bookman
Matt Brim
Bill Chafe
Leo Ching
Elizabeth Clark
Rom Coles
Michaeline A. Crichlow
Kim Curtis
Roberto Dainotto
Leslie Damasceno
Ariel Dorfman
Laura Edwards
Grant Farred
Jeffrey Forbes
Mary M. Fulkerson
Erin Gayton
Jehanne Gheith
Margaret Greer
Michael Hardt
Erik Harms
Joe Harris
Kerry Haynie
Karla Holloway
Bayo Holsey
Mary Hovsepian
Sherman James
Alice Kaplan
Keval Khalsa
Ranjana Khanna
Fred Klaits
Claudia Koonz
Robert Korstad
Pedro Lasch
Caroline Light
Marcy Litle
Ralph Litzinger
Michele Longino
Wahneema Lubiano
Anne-Maria Makhulu
Tamera Marko
Paula McClain
Louise Meintjes
Sean Metzger
Walter Mignolo
Alberto Moreiras
Cary Moskovitz
Mark Anthony Neal
David Need
Diane Nelson
Jocelyn Olcott
Charles Payne
Charlie Piot
Ronen Plesser
Maureen Quilligan
Jan Radway
Tom Rankin
Marcia Rego
William Reichert
Deb Reisinger
Alex Rosenberg
Marc Schachter
Stephanie Sieburth
Laurie Shannon
Pete Sigal
Irene Silverblatt
Joshua Socolar
Kristin Solli
Helen Solterer
Fiona Somerset
Roxanne Springer
Rebecca Stein
Kenneth Surin
Susan Thorne
John Transue
Maurice Wallace
Priscilla Wald
Kathryn Whetten
Robyn Wiegman
David Wong
Tomiko Yoda
That is a tight deadline.
But if you can get Dr. Sowell’s permission I am in for $50.
No doubt.... The first thing I thought of when I read that was...."I'd have punched them out".
Will you need a waiver from Dr. Sowell? The piece is copyrighted.
Reread the last paragraph of the post. CBB is taking care of that.
That such attitudes and such atmospheres are not peculiar to Duke University, but are common on elite college campuses from coast to coast is a time bomb with the potential to destroy individuals and ultimately undermine the whole society.
Amen! The NEA needs to be taken down and then these liberal school teachers/professors need to be fired, and sanity be restored to the educational system. Of course, that's never going to happen. America is going down and it's people like these that are taking it down. They are too stupid to realize that they will be forced to live in the stink hole that they have helped to create. Unbelievable!
That would be a VERY good use of some spare change. The potential is there for the entire left-wing power structure at a major university to be largely annihilated.
That would be a REALLY worthy cause; I’d be willing to donate a hundred bucks.
bttt
I agree...The majority of these professors and leftists spew their socialist propaganga only because they have never lived under it. Please check post #55.
It will be delicious to see the tort monster turn upon the liberals who nurtured the beast.
We’ve got them on the run. Now is not the time to pull our punches.
Thanks for putting this together,
HundredDollars
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