Ooowhee! Just what I wanted a subscription to the Weekly Standard . . .

Kevin - I don't see any humor in the Duke Lacrosse case. Do you?

Third place: a poke in the eye with a dirty stick?

Also, there is evidence here: Mounds and mounds of significant physical evidence. There is a rape kit. There are bruises, and then, apparently, more bruises. There are DNA tests and broken fingernails and witnesses seemingly tumbling out of the woodwork. There are time-stamped photographic accounts of much of the evening. This is not a classic "he says/she says." The evidence has something to say to us as well.

None of which is true, except in liberalland. Yet another liberal 'cause' is proven to be more white guy bashing.

The Duke lacrosse hoax was, from the beginning, pretty clearly another example of a DA and the media engaging in another "Hunt for the Great White Defendant," as Tom Wolfe phrased it 20 years ago in "Bonfire of the Vanities." Last April I outlined the many ways Wolfe prefigured the Duke hoax in his 1987 fictional depiction of Sherman McCoy's ordeal. You can read it here:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/060430_unequal_justice.htm

It's quite funny (and maybe a bit scary) that three of the first five to these threads are posters who seem to completely miss the point of Kevin's post. Hmmm...

Freq, if Kevin were seeing any humor in the Duke lacrosse case, your comment might make sense.

He is having fun ridiculing a hack. Hacks tend to write about serious subjects. The seriousness of the subject doesn't have to preclude the celebration of the hackery.

Nonsense Kevin. Dahlia Lithwick is quite typical of the anti-white and anti-male bent of liberals. She's just not as honest about it as most liberals are.

Why isn't selective quoting as heinous a journalism crime as fabrication?

So three defendants who appear to be innocent and have been wrongly accused are some Left-Right issue to Kevin (or anybody else, presumably)?

I dissent.

Al, American Hawk, Mr. Sailer and all the other blowhards:

The Duke lacrosse case is a local story, and I mean that literally. If you try to impose your own external views on the story you're bound to vier far from the truth. Anti-white and anti-male prejudice have very little to do with anything, but I guess that shit sounds good on a blog message board.

If you want to see a serious case of DA misconduct in Durham, NC, why not look a little closer at the Michael Peterson conviction?

"The Duke lacrosse case is a local story"

Oh, so that's why the New York Times ran two dozen stories trumpeting the case in the first six weeks?

Lithwick's article includes many allegations that were not so. It gives less coverage to things that were known.

By far the best coverage of this case has been the blog Durham-in-Wonderland,(written by Professor KC Johnson (a liberal, by the way). On April 23, 2006, he wrote:

Newsweek also became the second major news outlet (ABC is the other) to have received access to the exculpatory evidence of one of the indicted players, Reade Seligmann. (The story confirmed that the D.A. refused to review this evidence before making a charge, despite a request from defense attorneys.) According to the magazine, during or within the 16 minutes after the time of the alleged rape, Seligmann placed eight calls on his cell phone, was waiting on a curb a block away from the site of the alleged rape, where he was picked up by a cab; and he then went to an ATM machine, a fast-food restaurant, and card-swiped his way into his dorm. The cab driver has given a statement, cell-phone records exist of the eight calls, the ATM withdrawal slip was saved, and the card-swipe was timed by Duke’s security system.

Note how precise that description is. And, it was available to Lithwick, but she chose to write something vaguer.

Conclusions:

1. The media did jump to incorrect conclusions early on. A few have had the courage to admit that they were wrong.

2. The coverage in Professor KC Johnson's blog, done in his spare time for no pay, was stupendously better than any professional media coverage. He was accurate, clear, fair, and comprehensive.

3. Even though the particular quote chosen by the Standard doesn't prove that Lithwick's article was unfair to the defendants, it was indeed unfair, given what was known as of the date it was written.

The NYT's obsession with railroading the Duke lacrosse players stemmed from the same reason why "Law & Order" and its spinoffs have run hundreds of shows about rich white criminals committing murder in their Upper East Side lairs: because white people find minority criminals (who commit the vast majority of murders in New York City) to be depressing and boring. What white people want are other white people to hate and to feel morally superior to. Thus, Tom Wolfe's "Hunt for the Great White Defendant."

Once again Steve Sailor ignores the obvious connections with International Islamofascism, the Masons, the Rosicrucians and bigfoot.

What have you got to hide, Steve?!

Um, guys? This post isn't really about the Duke rape case. It's about the fact that Charlotte Allen deliberately misquoted Dahlia Lithwick, who wrote a column saying precisely the opposite of what Allen implied. For example, here's Allen:

"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."

Here's the final sentence of Lithwick's column:

"There are, in the end, objective truths to be found here. But the jurors must work hard to look past their prejudices, and the lawyers' spin, to find them."

This is hackery of the first order. That's what this post is about. The Duke rape case just happens to be the subject of the hackery.

Kevin, let's take all the comments Allen made about Lithwick and see if they're fair or unfair:

On April 22, Slate legal columnist Dahlia Lithwick penned what read like a pop version of Lubiano:

I think this is unfair. Lithwick's piece was sloppy and inaccurate, but it was nothing like Lubiano.

"The Duke lacrosse team's rape scandal cuts too deeply into this country's most tender places: race and class and gender."

In a way this was correct. Of course, it would have been more accurate to say that the scandal cuts deeply into racebaiting and abuse of prosecutorial powers.

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)

I believe this is fair. At the time the article was written, it was known how little evidence of a rape there was.

and maintained that anyone who believed the players were innocent had a "creepy closet under the stairs" of his brain.

This is inaccurate and unfair. Lithwick used the "creepy closet" epithet for those she claimed made pronouncements without knowing anything. Of course, Limbaugh turned out to be right, so maybe he was just better than Lithwick at evaluating what was known.

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.

This is close to the opposite of what Lithwick wrote. However, Lithwick did imply that the case was unknowable at the time her article was written. In my opinion, by then it was highly likely that the rape accusation was not valid.

Overall, I agree that Allen's accusations against Lihwick were sloppy and sometimes inaccurate. It's unclear to my why Allen didn't take the New York Times as her example, since their coverage was much worse than Lithwick's.

"Um, guys? This post isn't really about the Duke rape case. It's about the fact that Charlotte Allen deliberately misquoted Dahlia Lithwick..."

Yes, it's ironic that Kevin and Dahlia are getting all upset about the horrible injustice done to Dahlia Lithwick by quoting her out of context, when they haven't gotten anywhere near as indignant about the injustice done to the lacrosse players who were framed by the DA Mike Nifong, with most of the media cheering the hoax on last spring.

Y'know it's real heartening to see conservatives standing up the civil rights of rich white boys; God knows our legal system is heavily stacked against them.

AH quotes Lithwick:

"Also, there is evidence here: Mounds and mounds of significant physical evidence. There is a rape kit. There are bruises, and then, apparently, more bruises. There are DNA tests and broken fingernails and witnesses seemingly tumbling out of the woodwork. There are time-stamped photographic accounts of much of the evening. This is not a classic 'he says/she says.' The evidence has something to say to us as well."

AH then concludes:

"None of which is true, except in liberalland." Yet another liberal 'cause' is proven to be more white guy bashing."

But of course, he misses Lithwick's point: the list of physical evidence she gives includes both inculpatory and exculpatory evidence, and the result (last year when she wrote this) was uncertain.

Far be it from us to disturb AH in his little projection fantasy, in which liberals act like wingnuts and let their proconceptions overcome facts . . .

Lithwick's article includes many allegations that were not so.

Since "ex-liberal" is an expert on allegations that are not so, his/her/its opinion on anyone elese's veracity isn't worth a bucket of piss.

By the way, it's deliciously ironic that "ex-liberal", for whom no lie is too much to tell in service of carrying water for the neocons, comments on a thread called "Hackwork." Shame on you, "ex-liberal."

There's a post about Marcotte resigning and then a post about the Duke rape story. It turns out that Marcotte had some things to say about the Duke story: http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/02/edwards-fiasco.html

Or just Google for Marcotte and Duke.

Anybody else see the irony in this? Early in the case, Mike Nifong was quoted as saying, "If they are innocent, why are they hiring lawyers?" Now, of course--he is all lawyered up. Hope he gets some cell time with a perp he previously railroaded.

Not enough time to enter the contest, but absolutely loving it that our dear right-wing trolls just cannot bring themselves to see the point of Kevin's post and Dahlia Lithwick's contest. Their posts here are just so predictable, and so hilarious.

Including Lithwick's essay in her (Charlotte Allen) column is inexcusable sloppiness, or worse. Indeed, Lithwick's is one of the few examples of anyone in the media taking an objective view of the case during the first month after the incident.

I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, and will assume Allen was finding quotes on the case via Google searches. If she does not retract and correct her essay, then one has to assume the worst.

I've just read Allen's and Lithwick's articles, and Allen presents Lithwick's position fairly; she does not misrepresent what Lithwick wrote, and certainly doesn't "smear" her, as Drum charges. Lithwick does criticize both sides in the controversy for jumping to conclusions, but she jumps to her own conclusions, too. Lithwick clearly says that the objective physical evidence proves that there was a rape, and she stops just short of saying that it proves the lacrosse players were the rapists. She criticizes members of the press who gave credence to the players' lawyers; when she says, "we are being played by the lawyers," she means the players' lawyers, whom she distrusts and disbelieves. She has no parallel criticism of Nifong, to whom she gives the benefit of the doubt, or of reporters who promote Nifong's accusations.

Cheap shot, Drum. Hackwork on your part.

Gary Imhoff,

I disagree. I think it pretty clear that she includes the DA and his office when speaking of "lawyers". It is regrettable that she did not make this explicit by differentiating between defense and prosecution, as I would have done in her position.

Lithwick's point was that people were jumping to conclusions without actually knowing the facts. Nowhere in her essay can I find her concluding the players were guilty.

Allen's essay, with the benefit of hindsight, takes to task those who had concluded the players were guilty. Lithwick's essay should not have been included as an example of such rush to judgement.

Well, Kevin's little bit of fun sure has gone over like a lead balloon here, hasn't it? The obvious explanation for the paucity of enthusiastic responses is that the great majority of readers of this blog are white male liberals, who really don't want to think about the Duke hoax at all. It's too awful -- humiliating for liberals and scary at the same time, with white liberal men realizing that could be their sons getting railroaded like that because they are the wrong color and sex.

Kevin must not have gotten the memo that We Shall Never Speak of Duke Again.

(Not having read Dahlia's Duke column, but having read LOTS of Dahlia's other work...)

Why doesn't Dahlia have her own blog? She is GREAT at what she does covering the Supreme Court, etc. Somebody should hire her away from Slate, and turn her loose.

"The obvious explanation for the paucity of enthusiastic responses is that the great majority of readers of this blog are white male liberals, who really don't want to think about the Duke hoax at all"

ROFL.... Or, as already noted, some of us are just too busy to perform the same kind of hatchet job that Charlotte Allen performed. But hey, you keep on living in that little fantasy world of yours if you like.

Third place: Being forced to copy edit at The Standard.

Free Mumia!!! Um, I mean "Free The Rich White Republicans!!!"

Nobody here gives a shit because this is *exactly* how our legal system is supposed to work. And *hey!* look, it is working. And the reason "Rich White Prep School Kids Get Justice" isn't on the front page of the NYT is pretty freaking obvious.

I still haven't heard a compelling explanation as to why this is *the* story of the decade for the right-o-sphere. Thanks.

Although I am white and come from the upper middle class, I expect I have almost nothing in common with Duke Lacrosse players -- and I'm a liberal. But from the beginning -- without knowing very many facts -- I suspected that the prosecutor could use this case for polical advantage. As facts began to come out, it looked more and more like that was the case. I came to believe that at least some of the defendants had been railroaded, improper procedures had been used, and that the case should be dropped. But I would find the howls of outrage from right-wing pundits, columnists & bloggers more convincing if I saw any evidence that they cared about unjustly prosecuted -- to say nothing of convicted, incarcerated and in some cases executed -- defendants who weren't rich and white.

ibc, IMHO the reason why this case is so prominent is that DA Nifong and the media made it prominent. The New York Times ran article after inaccurate article blasting the lacrosse team and supporting the supposed victim.

Now we know that Democratic DA Mike Nifong was committing all kinds of misconduct. We know that the liberal media were badly misrepresenting what was happening. They are hoist by their own petard. They're the ones who made this case national news and they're now the goats. That's poetic justice. It couldn't be more deserved.

Rich white men didn't get convicted in the Duke case. In fact, they got lawyers who effectively sidelined the case against them and certainly they will never be convicted. This is the opposite of being railroaded.

That cannot be said for Gary Tyler, recently written about by Bob Herbert of the NYTimes. The dozens of people freed by the Innocence Project - can someone find a rich white man on that list?

Oh the travails of the rich white men! It's so hard to be the dominant power in society, determing the norms, receivers of privilege and unearned deference and all the other baggage that drags you down to despair with your inherited wealth and status and those other ills your family passed on to you.

Those of us who are either poor, not white or female must remind ourselves to keep a special place in our hearts filled with compassion for the troubles you face, your white man's burden.

Since this was about "hackery", the prize of a subscription to the Weekly Standard was very apropos.

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