"No Fault on The Left" Prevails on Duke Rape Case, & Duke has a Course on "Hooking up at Duke"

Stuart Taylor is still occasionally commenting on legal issues on TV, despite his rock-ribbed defense of traditional values in the American legal system. "No Fault on the Left" was what a rad named Mark Rudd told me in Ann Arbor while he was a "house-guest" during a long-ago SDS Conference---through clouds of cannabis smoke [my dope] MR explained that "dare to cheat, dare to win" is the mantra of the ultra-left.

Some things never change.

Flash forward forty years and a joke of a program hosted by a contemptible liar named Nancy Grace still inflicts itself on mindless ears nightly on CNN, despite months of lies by the porcine eponymous nutjob accusing the three indicted lacrosse players of even more crimes than they committed. No apologies and no mention of the fact that the DA she so arduously defended ended up going to jail and being kicked out of the bar. While this sow hides behind the First Amendment, CNN refuses to yank her, proving that an Eason Jordan fantasy world still leaves remnants of insanity and dishonesty on-air while A. Cooper and Beck bring a tad of reality back into the CNN playlist. [Larry King is in a parallel universe!]

Stuart's book is named Until Proved Innocent, and the review in the Economist is linked above. Below is the Economist's summary [the magazine actually joined the witch hunt for a short while] of the despicable collection of frauds and impostors laughingly called the Duke "faculty:"

The case also provides a vivid example of the evils of political correctness, which is rampant in the media. One writer noted that “You couldn't invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bien pensant journalist.”

A striking number of professors were willing to trample all over legal process in their rush to declare the lacrosse players guilty before charge, let along trial. And they did so solely on the basis of the players' race and gender. One professor, Houston Baker, denounced the lacrosse players as “young white, violent, drunken men veritably given licence to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech”. Duke's politically-correct faculty thus produced a mirror image of the worst racism of the South in the 1950s, when people were pronounced guilty—and denied their legal rights—solely because they were black. While all this was going on Duke's president, Richard Brodhead, did little, if anything, to defend the lacrosse players or to criticise the faculty for its lynch-mob mentality. A university that charges students over $40,000 per year essentially abandoned three of them to the bullying of an out-of-control prosecutor.

Some people have at least learned from the disaster at Duke. Mr Nifong has been sacked and stripped of his law licence. Last week he was sent to jail, though only for a day, for his numerous misdemeanours. The press has struggled to put the record straight—and several people have written their own mea culpas.

The only people who, it seems, have learned nothing from all this are Mr Nifong's enablers in the Duke faculty. Even after it was clear that the athletes were innocent, 87 faculty members published a letter categorically rejecting calls to recant their condemnation. And one professor, proving that some academics are as far beyond parody as they are beneath contempt, offered a course called “Hooking up at Duke” that purported to illustrate what the lacrosse scandals tell us about “power, difference and raced, classed, gendered and sexed normativity in the US.”

Bien pensant journalists like the vacuous Evan Thomas of Newsweak are one thing, they jump on a story, if they're wrong they retract it.

But the Duke faculty resembles maggots in a dead Nancy Grace and they never need to retract anything---they have tenure, you see, and there is no fault on the left.