Update V (6/5): Steve at Pardon My English says FOX News reported a pending ethics complaint against DA Mike Nifong. (Warning: Some of the comments are vulgar.)
Update IV (6/2): I appreciate the links you’re sending, new/first-time readers, but I’ve been blogging about this case since April 10. I’ve covered almost everything that’s been reported. The links you’re sending are “old” news articles and info I blogged about weeks ago. Check out the Duke Rape Case category to read link- and opinion-rich posts from the last two months. Thanks for reading!
By the way, here’s new info: Duke’s lacrosse team will be reinstated next week.
Update III (6/1): An indicted player’s father e-mailed and thanked me for having the courage to blog about this case. As long as the sham case continues, I’ll be on hand to balance the coverage.
Update II (5/31): I don’t know how I missed this op-ed. David Brooks, a former conservative who became a liberal (don’t ask me how!) [confused him with David Brock. Sorry for calling you a liberal, Mr. Brooks!], says the Duke lacrosse team has been unfairly vilified and recognizes the obvious class envy fueling the vilification.
Covetousness is so unattractive, people. God says it’s bad, too.
Brooks writes (registration required – bypass with BugMeNot):
But now that we know more about the Duke University lacrosse team, simple decency requires that we return to that scandal, if only to correct the slurs that were uttered by millions of people, including me.
We know now that the Duke lacrosse players are not the dumb jocks they were portrayed to be. The team has a 100 percent graduation rate. Over the past five years, 146 members of the team made the Atlantic Coast Conference Academic Honor Roll, twice as many as any other ACC lacrosse team. According to the faculty report written by law professor James E. Coleman and others – which stands out as the one carefully researched and intellectually honest piece of work in this whole mess – “The lacrosse team’s academic performance generally is one of the best among all Duke athletic teams.”
We also know that the lacrosse players are not the amoral goons of popular legend. The current and former black members of the team are “extremely positive” about the support they received. The coach of the women’s lacrosse team says relations between the men and women are respectful and supportive.
…
The members of the lacrosse team were male, mostly white and mostly members of the suburban bourgeois middle class. For many on the tenured left, bashing people like that is all that’s left of their once-great activism.
Many conservative, including me, said this from the very beginning. Bored white liberals and camera-hogging black “leaders” found something to keep them busy. Even before reading details about the rape allegation, however, I instinctively knew that three white boys at a party did not rape a black stripper. I just knew it. By now we know why Nifong pressed on with this dumb case although he had no evidence linking the players and the stripper.
The hunt for the Great White Defendant was mostly media generated, but many were willing to join the hunt, too.
Update (5/30 @ 2:34 p.m.) I can’t believe how outrageous this is. Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann, arrested and indicted for rape, turned themselves in peacefully and each posted $400,000 bond. In my limited knowledge of bonds, that is unprecedented.
Some idiot wanted for first-degree rape runs from the police and is charged with resisting arrest, and he receives only a $150,000 bond!
Update (5/30): According to History News Network, DA Mike Nifong is under investigation by the state bar’s ethics committee. There are lots of links, too.
Women will regret glomming on to this phony rape case at Duke and referring to it as an example of negative stereotypes about black women and “breaking the culture of silence.” The Duke stripper cried rape for CYA purposes, and anyone who can’t see that is willfully blind. Rape victims and women who work with rape victims are fools for standing behind the false accuser.
This case isn’t sexy (or politically beneficial) enough for Nifong.
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Ho-hum. More Duke Envy. Read this:
I never believed the day would come when we’d see an educational institution so flagrantly stupid, so selfish, so conspicuously aloof. Evidently it’s Duke, supposedly one of America’s more honorable institutions of higher learning.
What did Duke University do this time, you ask? Last week the Duke women’s lacrosse team wore headbands with the word Innocent on them as a show of support for the accused men’s lacrosse players, and Duke did nothing to prevent it. For this, Duke is “dumb,” according to liberal journalist Stephen A. Smith.
He adds:
These 18-, 19- and 20-year-old women evidently were either ignorant or insensitive to the fact that there were 94,635 rapes in the country in 2004, according to the FBI. Or they weren’t aware that rape is one of the most underreported crimes, which one would think should heighten any female’s sensitivity radar.
Make sure you understand what Smith is saying. He implies that women who publicly support men accused of rape are “ignorant or insensitive” because of “94,635 rapes in the country in 2004…”
According to Smith, the women should suspend all judgment about this tale of rape because 94,635 rapes occurred in 2004. I wonder how many were also false allegations?
Following Smith’s line of reasoning, no one should support or believe anyone accused of murder because there were 16,137 murders in 2004. I’m sure a few perpetrators of those 401,326 robberies had supporters, particularly where the accusers’ stories were full of holes and, to borrow a word from Smith, dumb. What about women who supported Kobe Bryant? Were they also “ignorant and insensitive?”
What’s ignorant is supporting and believing a woman whose fairytale of a gang rape story is increasingly implausible and rapidly unraveling. What’s dumb is campaigning for and supporting quadruple murderers like Tookie Williams, who, despite all the protestations, was justly executed for his crimes. As dumb as it was for blacks to support double murderer O.J. Simpson simply because he was black, most people didn’t say so publicly. Perhaps dumber, more ignorant, and more insensitive is a district attorney who is sworn to uphold justice but caves to political and skin color pressures and allows three men to be indicted for serious crimes based on scant evidence just so he could secure a re-election.
Ragging on Duke some more, Smith writes:
To think, once upon a time, academic institutions were held in high regard, a transitional haven for those moving from their teenage years to adulthood. What are we to think now when it’s clear that even at places such as Duke there’s an absence of common sense.
Failing to prevent a group of women from wearing “insensitive” sweaty headbands is evidence that Duke lacks common sense? I wonder where Duke’s canceling the lacrosse team’s remaining season based on shaky rape allegations, suspending the accused players from school, hiring two biased “researchers” with agendas and no pretense of objectivity to write a biased report on the investigation, and fueling race and class tension fall on Smith’s “common sense” scale?
Now, the danger of generalizing in a blog post like this is that I may attribute ideas and motives to Smith that he neither thinks nor believes. But that’s the danger of writing publicly. As I am well aware, people often read whatever they want into what you write and ascribe all kind of motives to you that you don’t have.
But let’s give it a shot. If I’m wrong, perhaps Smith will e-mail me and set me straight. I suspect that he is more concerned about the accuser’s race than her sex and wouldn’t care less about the women’s lacrosse team’s headbands if the accused men were black. Smith’s beef is with Duke University’s deserved elite status and the privileged white lacrosse players. Whatever is in Smith’s mind, a column in a major, mainstream newspaper is an ideal forum for disguising his contempt as “journalism.”
Implicit in Smith’s fluff piece is that women can’t think for themselves and form their own opinions about whether men are innocent of rape charges or women guilty of false allegations in the court of public opinion. Since rape happens overwhelmingly to women, women are incapable of making rational judgments about rape. Why feminists aren’t all over Stephen A. Smith for this column is a mystery.
The rest of the column is not worth commenting on. I simply had to say something about Smith’s most egregious, absurd, and logically unsound statements.
But I’ll make one more comment.
Smith makes a statement that reveals unintended irony, something obviously missed during the editing/proofreading process. He berates Duke’s administrators and the lacrosse women, then adds this gem from out of left field: “There were strippers, alcohol and disorderly conduct at the men’s lacrosse team’s party. How anyone who wasn’t there could possibly think they know anything is beyond me. But that’s why we call them kids.”
How a man who wasn’t there, either, could possibly think he knows anything is beyond me, especially one who calls women who support accused rapists ignorant. But that’s why we call him a biased journalist.