Here’s my question about the death of The New Republic

The New Neo Posted on by

If you’re going to buy the venerable liberal publication The New Republic only to turn it into a “digital media company,” why bother to buy it at all? Why not just start your own digital media company and leave TNR to limp along and die in peace?

I’m no TNR fan, and I often criticize it on this blog. But it’s long exhibited more intelligence than most liberal publications, and a more robust attitude towards foreign policy. When not-dry-behind-the-ears Facebook wunderkind Chris Hughes purchased it and promised to respect it, did anyone actually believe him? Certainly not this writer, who predicted at the outset that Hughes would end up canning TNR’s longtime editor and columnist Leon Wieseltier, although it took a bit longer than forecast and involved a lot more people than Wieseltier. So many people have as a result quit the magazine in addition to those fired by Hughes that it would make more sense to list the people who appear to be staying than those leaving.

Wieseltier, by the way, is a curious figure, emblematic of TNR’s former place in the liberal pantheon. He was an Obama supporter in 2008, albeit one with reservations. He wrote the following at the time, which shows that he misjudged Obama by giving him far too much credit, and he largely misread him, although not entirely. A tiny warning bell was ringing in Wieseltier’s ears, and the editor, whose Scoop Jacksonesque liberalism is as old-fashioned as the sophisticated flow of his prose, could not entirely ignore it:

Obama is a smart man. He is a decent man. He is an undangerous man, in the manner of all pragmatists and opportunists. He reveres reason, though he often confuses it with conversation. His domestic goals are good, though the titans of American finance, the greedy geniuses of Wall Street, may have made many of those goals fantastic. He will see to it that some liberalism survives at the Supreme Court. This leaves only the rest of the world. What a time for a novice! I dread the prospect of Obama’s West Wing education in foreign policy: even when he spoke well about these matters in the debates, it all sounded so new to him, so light.

Wieseltier is snob enough to hate Sarah Palin (and I think “hate” is really the correct word) but he was also patriot enough to have hated Bill Ayers even more, and distrusted Obama because of his association with him:

I must say that the Ayers affair rankles me, because I would not shake the man’s dirty hand; and the fact that Obama was eight years old at the time of the Weather Underground is no more pertinent to his moral and historical awareness than the fact that he was six years old at the time of the King assassination.

When you read the essay, you can see why newcomers such as Hughes and his henchman Vidra (who used to work for the illustrious Gawker) have no use for Wieseltier’s fussy style or his old-fashioned love of this country. When I read it myself, here in late 2014, it made me wonder what Wieseltier thinks of Obama these days.

This essay from last April gave me the answer, which is that Wieseltier is well aware that the foreign policy prospect he dreaded so much in 2008 has come true:

…[T]he president feels inconvenienced by history. It refuses to follow his program for it. It regularly exasperates him and regularly disappoints him. It flows when he wants it to ebb and it ebbs when he wants it flow. Like Mr. Incredible, the president is flummoxed that the world won’t stay saved, or agree to be saved at all. After all, he came to save it. And so the world has only itself to blame if Obama is sick of it and going home…

…[T]he Obama administration abandons to their fates one people after another, who pay the price for the president’s impatience with large historical struggles. The Ukrainians, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Saudis, the Moldovans, the Poles, the Czechs, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, the Baltic populations: they are all living with the jitters, and some of them on the cusp of despair, because the United States seems no longer reliable in emergencies…

Obama’s impatience with history has left him patient with evil. It is not a pretty sight; but his broken foreign policy is riddled with such ironies…The grim fact is that Obama’s containment is not containing Putin, whose “green men” and “peoples’ republics” and Big Lies and Russophilic incitement and covert operations and military deployments are undeterred by it. While Obama pitches the “off-ramp,” Putin revels in the on-ramp. Geneva is now the world capital of failure. The only country that American containment is containing is America.

…But the richest of the ironies about Obama’s foreign policy is this: the world that in his view wanted to be rid of American salience now longs for it…There are many places in the world where we are despised not for taking action but for not taking action. Our allies do not trust us. Our enemies do not fear us. What if American preeminence is good for the world and good for America?

It’s worth reading in its entirety, much like that earlier essay of Wieseltier’s. There are many rich ironies, and one of them is that Wieselthier voted for Obama in 2008, and thought him an “undangerous” man.

Taking rape allegations seriously

The New Neo Posted on by

The WaPo has some words on the UVA rape story’s unraveling and the lessons we should take from it:

As the doubts and discrepancies are sorted out, here are some truths that must not get lost: Sexual assault, often associated with excessive alcohol consumption, is a scourge that, for far too long, has not been taken seriously enough by colleges and universities. The critical work of putting in place a system that effectively and fairly investigates allegations of sexual assaults, supports victims and provides for due process must continue with even more urgency…

The University of Virginia is certainly no exception to those truths, as its officials have acknowledged in recent days. The fact that it apparently never expels students for sexual assault, the outpouring of complaints from other students and the federal investigation of the school for possible noncompliance with Title IX equal rights protections all point to a serious problem.

To the university’s credit, it responded to Friday’s revelations with exactly the right message. “Despite doubts that have been cast on the Rolling Stone story, we need to keep our eyes on the prize, which is nothing less than zero tolerance for rape,” said Helen Dragas, a member of the university’s governing Board of Visitors. “Our primary concern must be for the well-being of our students. We need to get this right for them, and do so with no hesitation or concern for image.”

Zero tolerance for rape? Isn’t that already in place, if the rape is proven? What does the assertion that the university “apparently never expels students for sexual assault” actually mean? I cannot imagine—although correct me if I’m wrong—that if a UVA student is convicted of rape that the student is not expelled. My guess is that what is meant by the statement is that students accused of rape are not expelled for mere accusations, as long as the charges are unproven.

University-run procedures are not enough to provide protection for the accused; I would prefer that these sorts of accusations be dealt with by the criminal justice system. But if universities must be involved, taking rape seriously does not mean believing every accusation. I say this as a woman, and as someone who is completely against rape. But I also say this as a person who is aware that false accusations exist, and that each case stands alone and most be proved or disproved based on its fact situation rather than the word of one person or another taken as an article of faith.

It strikes me, on reading about this case and its fallout on many websites, that many people on the left approach rape as an either/or proposition. Their thought process is something like this: we believe that women tell the truth about rape, but if one woman (such as Jackie) is proven to have lied, that means that all women are now suspect and the right will regard them all as liars. That’s identity politics as the left practices it; people placed in categories and lumped together by that classification.

But each woman is an individual telling a story that may or may not be true, which must be evaluated on its own according to to the facts of the case rather than some pre-conceived notions of who is telling the truth and who lying based on his/her gender. That is the only way to take rape allegations seriously, and to honor the rights of both accuser and accused. That would seem obvious, but it’s not at all obvious to the left.

Hostage Luke Somers killed during rescue attempt

The New Neo Posted on by

Sad news:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that Somers and the other hostage, later identified as South African Pierre Korkie, were “murdered by AQAP [al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] terrorists during the course of the operation.”

Somers, 33, appeared late Wednesday in a hostage video put online by AQAP in which the terror group said they were going to kill him in three days if their demands — unspecified in the video — were not met. Days before that, a team of U.S. Navy SEALs, along with Yemeni commandos, had attempted to rescue Somers in a raid similar to Friday’s, but he had been moved to another location.

The U.S. government found Somers again, however, and launched the second rescue attempt at 1 a.m. local time Saturday, a senior administration official told ABC News.

The special operations team infiltrated first by Osprey aircraft and then on foot, a defense official said.

But working in difficult, mountainous terrain, the 40-man team was met with gunfire, according to the administration official. During the firefight, one of the AQAP fighters went into the compound holding the hostages just ahead of the American forces. By the time the Americans arrived, both Somers and Korkie had been shot. The commandos got Somers and Korkie out but medics were unable to save them.

We have become used to successful rescue attempts, but that means we can lose sight of how extraordinarily difficult and risky they are to pull off. In this case, it’s also hard if not impossible to know what really happened, because it’s not the sort of thing about which the government would be revealing a lot of details about what went wrong.

If we take the report at face value, however, it appears that someone most likely tipped off the kidnappers about the rescue operation, which gave AQAP time to murder their captives. Does anyone doubt they would do that, if they had warning and time?

This Reuters article has a bit more information, which may or may not be correct:

A U.S. official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said American special forces had conducted the operation alone at 1 a.m. in Yemen, but that the kidnappers had been alerted to their approach shortly before they arrived…

Yemen’s government said in a statement carried on state media that its security forces had led the raid. It said the security forces had surrounded the house and called on the kidnappers to surrender, but they instead shot the hostages.

That led to an assault on the building in which four Yemeni security officers were also wounded, it said.

So, which is it? Reuters doesn’t know, nor do I. But both reports indicate (to me at least) that the kidnappers were most likely tipped off by someone in Yemen who was aware of the plans.

The Reuters article also mentions that the South African hostage who was killed was supposedly, according to the Gift of the Givers relief group, about to be freed on Sunday because they had successfully negotiated for his release. My guess is that, if that is true, it was because a hefty ransom had been paid (the US does not allow this for our hostages, but many other countries do). But whether or not the promise of release was actually going to be carried out or not is impossible to know.

I’m somewhat inclined to give the Obama administration a break on this one, because of the inherent difficulty of such operations. It is better to attempt a rescue and fail than to allow hostages to be murdered after reciting words given to them by their captors, and their deaths and/or dead bodies videotaped and spread around the world for propaganda purposes.

It is, of course, far better for the rescues to be successful, but realistically speaking that is not going to happen 100% of the time.

RIP Luke Somers and Pierre Korkie, and condolences to their grieving families.

Another controversial shooting by police

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s another shooting of a black man who turned out to be unarmed, but was actively resisting arrest by fighting with the officer:

According to Sgt. Trent Crump, the officer responded Tuesday to reports of someone selling drugs out of a Cadillac SUV. Upon locating the SUV, he ordered Brisbon, the sole occupant, to show his hands.

Authorities say Brisbon ran inside an apartment building and then got into a struggle with the officer. Brisbon put his hand in his pocket, and when the officer grabbed the hand, he thought he felt the handle of a gun through Brisbon’s pants, police said.

Police say the officer repeatedly told Brisbon to keep his hand in his pocket, then shot him twice when he didn’t.

Brisbon, an ex-convict, was hit in the torso and later pronounced dead at the scene. Investigators recovered a semi-automatic handgun and a jar of marijuana from his SUV.

An internal investigation is already underway, Crump said Thursday. The Maricopa County attorney’s office will determine whether the officer will face criminal charges. Police did not identify the 30-year-old officer but said he is a seven-year veteran of the department.

So, what would the protestors have had the officer do? Apparently, police are expected to allow themselves to be shot to prove what good guys they are. Eric Garner presented a different situation than this one because he wasn’t attacking anyone. Michael Brown definitely was the aggressor, however, and this guy Brisbon (who was an ex-con) seems to have been fighting, too.

The moral of the story is that resisting arrest is not good for your health. Not following instructions about where to put your hands is not good for your health, either. Outraged demonstrators don’t care, however.

Even I, mild-mannered white woman of a certain age, know better than to make any sudden movements when stopped by police, and to keep my hands visible. I try to throw in a few “sirs,” too, if I can remember to do so.

Then again, I don’t have a police record, and I’m not aware of many crimes I’ve committed, except traffic violations. But when you’re caught, you’re caught; resisting arrest sometimes works, but the costs can be high. I suppose if you would rather die than go back to prison, though, it makes sense to try.

The WaPo commits a rare act of journalism, while Rolling Stone admits that maybe it made a few wee errors

The New Neo Posted on by

There have been quite a few new developments on the UVA rape story I wrote about yesterday, and they all point to the strong likelihood that the sordid and shocking tale told by “Jackie” was, to put it bluntly, a crock of lies.

I wish I could say it is a shock that Rolling Stone would publish such an unchecked story or that a journalist with supposedly strong investigative credentials such as Erdely would write it. No, the bigger shock is that the WaPo actually published this today:

Officials close to the fraternity [accused of rape in the RS story] said that the statement will indicate that Phi Kappa Psi did not host a party on Sept. 28, 2012, the night that a university student named Jackie alleges she was invited to a date party, lured into an upstairs room and was then ambushed and gang-raped by seven men who were rushing the fraternity.

The officials also said that no members of the fraternity were employed at the university’s Aquatic Fitness Center during that time frame ”” a detail Jackie provided in her account to Rolling Stone and in interviews with The Washington Post ”” and that no member of the house matches the description detailed in the Rolling Stone account…

The Washington Post has interviewed Jackie several times during the past week and has worked to corroborate her version of events, contacting dozens of current and former members of the fraternity, the fraternity’s faculty adviser, Jackie’s friends and former roommates, and others on campus. Fraternity members said anonymously that the description of the assailant doesn’t match anyone they know and have been telling others on campus that they did not have a party the night of the alleged attack.

If Erdely had tried a little harder to corroborate Jackie’s story, she would have found more or less what the WaPo discovered, and Erdely’s article would probably never have been written. But Erdely chose not to do her job, no doubt because the story was just too good to not be true.

Jackie’s friends are wondering, too:

A group of Jackie’s close friends, who are sex assault awareness advocates at U-Va., said they believe something traumatic happened to Jackie but have come to doubt her account. They said details have changed over time, and they have not been able to verify key points of the story in recent days. A name of an alleged attacker that Jackie provided to them for the first time this week, for example, turned out to be similar to the name of a student who belongs to a different fraternity, and no one by that name has been a member of Phi Kappa Psi.

Everyone involved in this story was primed to believe it: Erdely, the assault awareness people, and Rolling Stone. The reporter and the paper acted with careless disregard for the truth. The assault awareness students, on the other hand, are in a different position; they are younger people, who have been brainwashed to believe they should always trust the woman who tells the story. But a certain amount of skepticism is always warranted, unfortunately: trust, but verify. The facts have to check out, and the truth is that some people lie about this sort of thing.

Statistics about what percentage of women lie about rape are meaningless. If such a lie is successful, it doesn’t enter into those statistics. Also, I would guess that older statistics underestimate what’s happening nowadays, because in recent years the emotional rewards for coming forward as a rape victim have increased compared to the past.

My guess is that Jackie herself began her story as a way to get some sympathy and attention. Maybe she even started to believe it, as effective liars sometimes do. But then it got out of hand when Erdely came to the campus seeking someone to tell her such a tale [emphasis mine]:

Jackie told the Post that she had not intended to share her story widely until the Rolling Stone writer contacted her.

“If she had not come to me I probably would not have gone public about my rape,” said Jackie, who added that she had been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder and that she is now on a regimen of anti-depressants.

There are many such quotes in the WaPo article that are very telling about Jackie’s state of mind. She wanted to tell her story, but was reluctant to give out too many facts or to go to authorities, because she knew her veracity would be challenged [emphasis mine]:

In July, [UVA student] Renda introduced Jackie to Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the Rolling Stone writer who was on assignment to write about sexual violence on college campuses. Overwhelmed from sitting through interviews with the writer, Jackie said she asked Erdely to be taken out of the article. She said Erdely refused and Jackie was told that the article would go forward regardless.

Jackie said she finally relented and agreed to participate on the condition that she be able to fact-check her parts in the story, which she said Erdely accepted. Erdely said in an e-mail message that she was not immediately available to comment Friday morning.

“I didn’t want the world to read about the worst three hours of my life, the thing I have nightmares about every night,” Jackie said…

Jackie said numerous times that she didn’t expect that an investigation the Charlottesville Police department opened after the article’s publication to result in any charges. She said she knew there was little if any forensic evidence that could prove the allegations two years after they occurred.

“I didn’t want a trial,” Jackie said. “I can’t imagine getting up on a defense stand having them tear me apart.”

Jackie said early in the week that she felt manipulated by Erdely, the Rolling Stone reporter, saying that she “felt completely out of control over my own story.” In an in-person interview Thursday, Jackie said that Rolling Stone account of her attack was truthful but also acknowledged that some details in the article might not be accurate.

Not fake, but inaccurate.

Anyone interviewing this woman should have perceived almost immediately that she was covered in red flags. But people didn’t want to know and didn’t want to see—and some don’t, even now. Witness the struggle:

Alex Pinkleton, a close friend of Jackie’s who survived a rape and an attempted rape during her first two years on campus, said in an interview that she has had numerous conversations with Jackie in recent days and now feels misled.

“One of my biggest fears with these inconsistencies emerging is that people will be unwilling to believe survivors in the future,” Pinkleton said. “However, we need to remember that the majority of survivors who come forward are telling the truth.”

Pinkleton said that she is concerned that sexual assault awareness advocacy groups will suffer as a result of the conflicting details of the Rolling Stone allegations.

“While the details of this one case may have been misreported, this does not erase the somber truth this article brought to light: Rape is far more prevalent than we realize and it is often misunderstood and mishandled by peers, institutions, and society at large,” Pinkleton said. “We in the advocacy community at U-Va. will continue the work of making this issue accessible to our peers, guiding the conversation and our community into a place where sexual assaults are rare, where reporting processes are clear and adjudication is fair and compassionate.”…

“An advocate is not supposed to be an investigator, a judge or an adjudicator,” said Renda, a 2014 graduate who works for the university as a sexual violence awareness specialist. But as details emerge that cast doubt on Jackie’s account, Renda said, “I don’t even know what I believe at this point.”

“This feels like a betrayal of good advocacy if this is not true,” Renda said. “We teach people to believe the victims. We know there are false reports but those are extraordinarily low.”

Renda said that research shows between 2 to 8 percent of all rape allegations are fabricated or unfounded.

As I wrote earlier, that research is practically meaningless. And 8 percent is not what I’d call “extraordinarily low,” either. It is significant, approximately one in twelve.

For advocates such as Renda this story is one that potentially threatens their deepest assumptions. How to reconcile it with “we teach people to believe the victims”? Actually, it shouldn’t be that hard, although it would require more soul-searching than is apparently going on. The answer is not to always “believe the victims.” The proper stance is empathy combined with a hard-nosed skepticism, and careful attention to detail. One can assume nothing.

Not believing a true accusation is devastating to the accuser, and false accusations are devastating to the accused. It is not an easy task to sort it out, but calm objectivity is an absolute necessity. It is possible to be sympathetic and respectful while not falling into the trap of unquestioning belief.

[NOTE: Rolling Stone has issued this apology for its story:

In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account.

I doubt very much that these editors regret anything but being caught with egg on their face. Their decision was a violation of basic journalistic standards, and it was a purposeful choice to do so.

We haven’t heard from Erdely today. Don’t sit on a hot stove waiting. Her career as an investigative journalist ought to be finished, but I bet it isn’t.]

Rolling Stone and the UVA rape

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATE 12/5 at 4 PM: The UVA rape story appears to have unraveled. See this.]

Rolling Stone has gotten a lot of publicity recently with a sensational article about a rape in 2012 at the University of Virginia, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely and featuring some harrowing and disturbing details. The victim was identified only as “Jackie.”

Almost as soon as the story was published, doubts arose about its veracity, or at least about the journalistic standards of its author, who did not manage to interview the alleged perpetrators even though it would seem there were ways to have contacted them. Even worse, Erdely hasn’t been forthcoming about the extent of her efforts to find them, and did not include any mention of any of her efforts or failures in the article.

I’ve read many articles pro and con, including of course the original Rolling Stone piece in question (warning: it’s long), and I’ve got my own opinion, which is that not only did Erdely demonstrate abysmal journalistic standards, but that the story itself is quite possibly a fabrication by the alleged victim.

This could be wrong, of course; there’s no way to know at this point. But it seems that Erdely did not fact check it properly, and neither did Rolling Stone. Their excuses seem inadequate, self-serving, and obfuscating.

When I read Erdely’s piece, it seemed to me that its style resembled a romance novel gone bad. And what did the much-criticized UVA adminstration do wrong, actually? They outlined all of Jackie’s choices, and left it to her to decide what to do. Also, Jackie had only come forward to the administration about a year after the event supposedly occurred, and it’s not clear whether she named names to them. But here’s what is purported to have occurred when she did report it to the official in charge of such incidents:

When Jackie finished talking, Eramo comforted her, then calmly laid out her options. If Jackie wished, she could file a criminal complaint with police. Or, if Jackie preferred to keep the matter within the university, she had two choices. She could file a complaint with the school’s Sexual Misconduct Board, to be decided in a “formal resolution” with a jury of students and faculty, and a dean as judge. Or Jackie could choose an “informal resolution,” in which Jackie could simply face her attackers in Eramo’s presence and tell them how she felt; Eramo could then issue a directive to the men, such as suggesting counseling. Eramo presented each option to Jackie neutrally, giving each equal weight. She assured Jackie there was no pressure ”“ whatever happened next was entirely her choice.

Like many schools, UVA has taken to emphasizing that in matters of sexual assault, it caters to victim choice. “If students feel that we are forcing them into a criminal or disciplinary process that they don’t want to be part of, frankly, we’d be concerned that we would get fewer reports,” says associate VP for student affairs Susan Davis. Which in theory makes sense: Being forced into an unwanted choice is a sensitive point for the victims. But in practice, that utter lack of guidance can be counterproductive to a 19-year-old so traumatized as Jackie was that she was contemplating suicide. Setting aside for a moment the absurdity of a school offering to handle the investigation and adjudication of a felony sex crime ”“ something Title IX requires, but which no university on Earth is equipped to do ”“ the sheer menu of choices, paired with the reassurance that any choice is the right one, often has the end result of coddling the victim into doing nothing.

So a university is between a rock and a hard place. Give the student autonomy, sympathy, and information. But if the student doesn’t take responsibility and go further with the reporting process, then the university somehow should have been much more heavy-handed in telling the student what to do. I also agree, however, that this should be a criminal matter, rather than being left to the university, which does not feature the same protections for the accused.

No one has a clue whether Jackie is telling the truth, but her story doesn’t ring true in so many ways (you have to read it to understand my references here): her silence for so long despite the extreme seriousness of her allegations (premeditated gang rape of a violent nature), the advice her friends gave her to keep quiet in the face of such heinous accusations, the fact that if such rape is a widespread initiation rite for this fraternity (as alleged, involving large groups of men) it would have required the silence and acquiescence of many many more people over the years, Jackie’s lack of wounds or going for medical help despite her allegations of being pressed down onto cut glass for three hours, and the fact that Erdely had originally gone looking on many elite campuses for just such a story and searched until she found one.

Here’s more about why the story reads the way it does:

Both Erdely and Woods have said that they decided to tell the story mostly from Jackie’s point of view. As Woods told the Post, “We were telling Jackie’s story. It’s her story.”

In that same Post piece, Erdely seems protective of Jackie. She said that she did not identify the men in the article “by Jackie’s request. She asked me not to name the individuals because she’s so fearful of them. That was something we agreed on.” Erdely would not say, however, whether she knew who they were. “I can’t answer that,” she told the Post. “This was a topic that made Jackie extremely uncomfortable.”…

[Erdely] must know the basic rules of reporting a story like this: You try very, very hard to reach anyone you’re accusing of something. You use any method you can think of, including the jerk reporter move of making a surprise, in-person confrontation. (Sarah Koenig, the host of the Serial podcast, provides a good example of reporter due diligence.) You try especially hard if you are writing about something as serious as a gang rape accusation. Sometimes, what results is a more layered version of the truth. Sometimes, the answer you get makes the accused seem even guiltier…

If you fail to reach the person, you write a sentence explaining that you tried””and explaining how you tried””as a way to assure your readers that you gave the person a chance to defend themselves. We’re not sure why Rolling Stone didn’t think that was necessary.

I’m pretty sure I know. The article’s message was one the editors liked and with which they sympathized (a university winking at widespread campus sexual predators of the male variety), and they didn’t want to dilute it with any sort of disclaimer, and they thought they could get away with it.

A lot of people buy the line, “the woman always tells the truth.” But that’s poppycock. Women sometimes lie. What a shockeroo. So do men. Welcome to the world of humans.

People lie for a lot of reasons, especially to get attention or sympathy or money, or to implicate someone with whom they are angry, or sometimes because they just like to make up stories. Sometimes they even get paid for it—Stephen Glass, for example, whom Rolling Stone published long ago. Journalistic standards have only fallen since then, not risen. Whatever its truth or falsehood, Erdely’s article should have been sent back for much more work and better verification before it was ever published.

[NOTE: Here’s a long piece I wrote on the subject of campus sexual assault, after the Duke case was revealed to have been a hoax.]

[NOTE II: Here’s another good in-depth analysis of the Rolling Stone article.]

[NOTE III: If you check out the comments here, you’ll find that Erdely also can’t seem to reveal the provenance of the salacious school song lyrics she published in the article. No one but Erdely seems to have ever heard of them before. For example:

I believe Sabrina Erdely fabricated those additonal “Rugby Road” lyrics. The ones that nobody, not the president of the Glee Club and the Virginia Gentlemen, per an article, or any other alumni and students who have left comments in these threads has ever heard of until they read that Rolling Stone article.

That, or she’s the victim of a practical joker.

In addition, before the dam burst, the students profiled have been speaking to anyone who will listen that they were lied about. They even brought up those “Rugby Road” lyrics in a newspaper interview as being unbelievable.

When asked for comment about what the students said, about her reporting and those lyrics, Erdely hit back strongly, even accusing these student activists of being in denial. Importantly, she brought up why those lyrics were so crucial to the story, but didn’t explain what her source for them was.

The comment didn’t provide a link to that article in the newspaper, although I’d like to see it.

Now, of course, the song has been banned by the UVA glee club.]

Charles Barkley, changer, defends the thin blue line

The New Neo Posted on by

I used to be a basketball fan, but haven’t watched the sport in decades. I do remember Barkley quite vividly as a player, for his hulking (he was stocky rather than super-tall) aggressiveness that sometimes segued into combativeness.

Odd that Barkley has all these rather conservative thoughts, and yet he makes it clear he is a big Barack Obama fan. I’m not sure why, but my guess is that loyalty to race and the first black president trumps Barkley’s ability to connect the dots on Obama:

Looking Barkley up, I find that he’s that rarest of rara aves: a right-to left-changer. He was apparently a Republican for his entire career (and not shy about saying so, which must have been interesting), and even considered running as a Republican for governor of Alabama in 1998. Then in 2006 Barkley changed his mind, mainly over Republicans’ opposition to gay marriage, which he strongly favors, and opposition to their management of the Iraq War. He sounds a bit more like a libertarian to me than a Democrat, and in fact in 2007 he said he’s not a Democrat, he’s an Independent.

[NOTE: Barkley had gotten a lot of publicity for his remarks on Ferguson. But a bit earlier, he took a similar stance in the Trayvon Martin case.]

Eric Garner; Michael Brown

The New Neo Posted on by

This assessment of the Eric Garner case seems just about right to me. As does this one.

The death of Eric Garner was a sad sequence of events, with unintentional overkill (literally) by the police. There is no evidence there was any racist motive, but the video indicates that police were unresponsive to the fact that Garner was experiencing dangerous physical symptoms as a result of their manner of subduing him—possibly recklessly, which could have justified an indictment for second-degree manslaughter. Until we see the evidence we don’t know, but that’s certainly a logical conclusion from the video.

Paul Mirengoff writes:

There is no doubt that the officer who killed Garner was informed by the victim repeatedly that, because of the officer’s hold, Garner couldn’t breathe. It also looks very much like the officer didn’t need to maintain the hold that prevented Garner from breathing in order to keep him subdued. Garner was on the ground looking like a beached whale with multiple officers more or less on top of him. Surely, the police officer could have loosened his hold without jeopardizing the arrest.

But did the hold itself actually kill Garner? Here’s an article that evaluates the evidence in the best possible light for the police, focusing on intent and how Garner’s health may have contributed.

The fact that the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases are juxtaposed in time makes it easy for people to lump them together, as many were already inclined to do anyway. But they are very different in their fact situations. Brown was physically attacking the officer who feared for his life, Garner was definitely not doing anything of the sort. The only similarities the two cases have in terms of fact situation (beside the grand juries’ failure to indict) are these: white officer and black civilian, with the latter physically large; the civilian resisting arrest (Brown using serious aggression, Garner passively); and the death of the civilian that police were attempting to detain or arrest (by different means and for different reasons).

Another similarity is, of course, the amount of publicity these particular cases have gotten, and the use of the two cases by those wishing to whip up racial animosity. Neither case contains anything that indicates a racial motive on the part of the police, but that doesn’t stop people from assuming there was one and speaking accordingly.

[NOTE: Here’s a good piece on eyewitness testimony in the Brown case.]

[ADDENDUM: Garner’s arrest was apparently supervised by a black female sergeant.]

On the Lauten feeding frenzy

The New Neo Posted on by

Mollie Hemingway takes the media to task for its misplaced and manipulative priorities. When staffer Elizabeth Lauten posted some criticism of the Obama girls’ demeanor during their dad’s turkey-pardoning ceremony, social media went wild with anger, and the MSM covered it with the sort of attention they failed to pay to Gruber, Obama’s past associations, or pretty much anything else that would reflect poorly on Democrats:

Still, what in the world was the media doing reporting on this non-story and firing up the mob? The Washington Free Beacon reported that “major media outlets are pouring resources into tracking [Lauten’s] moves and digging into her past.” This included two network news vans camping outside of her parents’ home in North Carolina and a search of Lauten’s leaked juvenile records and college writings

And this was after Lauten had left her job as a result of the brouhaha.

The situation could not be more stark. Depart from the PC line in any way and the witch hunt is on—that is, unless you’re a Democrat. Then you get a pass—a press pass.

To impeach or not to impeach, that is the question

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed an argument in the comments section between the pro-impeachment and the con-impeachment forces.

For example, from “Truth Unites…and Divides,” we have:

Refusal to [impeach Obama] speaks to cowardice. Cowardice wildly breeds disgust, disdain, cynicism, and apathy towards the governmental system…

The GOP wants to make a difference? Remove the lawless tyrant Obola from office. PERIOD.

Bring a neutered Biden in for one year as POTUS.

Commenter “J.J.” says, on the other hand:

The Republicans must fight smart. Charging into a battle they can’t win such as impeachment is a trap that the progs hope the GOP will fall into. The coverage by the MSM would be the equivalent of Abu Ghraib. Impeachment would be somewhat the equivalent of the violent protests the progs are now engaged in. Those protest tactics, though covered sympathetically by the MSM, are turning off a lot of LIVs, just as impeachment would.

There’s more, but that’s the gist of it.

We’ve had this argument before. I see it as another example of what I’d call the DonQuixote/SanchoPanza dichotomy.

I have an emotional foot (mixed metaphor alert) in the quixotic “Truth Unites” camp. I detest Obama’s lawless defiance of the Constitution, and I would like nothing better than to see him lawfully removed for it. In fact, I would have liked the removal to have happened a long time ago, since the damage he’s done in the international field, and to the rule of law and separation of powers in this country, has been enormous, immeasurable, and perhaps irrevocable.

But I am a practical sort. I do not believe in tilting at windmills to make a point that is a good one but that will not and cannot be perceived as such, will widely be regarded as motivated by sheer animus (and racism), will almost certainly cause a backlash—and most importantly, cannot and will not succeed. The right may see the failure to impeach as cowardice, but the left would see it as a laughable, theatrical, and completely futile gesture that will backfire and play perfectly into their hands.

I wrote as much a year ago, in January of 2013:

…[I]f Obamacare goes forward and things get worse, and the Republicans win the Senate in 2014 (even if they don’t get over 2/3 of the seats there, which they almost certainly won’t), and Obama’s approval ratings drop into the cellar (low 30s or less), then there’s a chance. The public might get behind impeachment/conviction, and it’s theoretically possible (although unlikely) that even a few Democrats might come along.

That’s the only way it could happen, and I give it an infinitesimally small chance of coming about. But one thing is certain: now is most definitely not the time for impeachment. Ralph Waldo Emerson is reputed to have said, “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” He was supposed to have been responding to a student “who had told Emerson that he was writing an essay about, and presumably critical of, Plato.” Emerson wasn’t talking about literally killing Plato, who had been dead for quite some time. He was talking about knowing how to chose the right time and way to undermine a person regarded as a great and powerful man.

The same is true of impeaching Obama: don’t start unless you have the votes in the Senate to convict, and the support of the American people, or you will end up hurting yourself.

Obama’s ratings are not in the depth of the cellar. Republicans still don’t have 2/3 of the Senate. Nowhere near enough Democrats would join them in a vote for conviction. Impeachment would make Obama a temporary martyr and he is perfectly okay with that, especially since he’d be victorious at the end of the day.

So I say to those who would agree with “Truth Unites,” how do you propose that Republicans actually “Remove the lawless tyrant Obola from office, PERIOD”? If you can’t do it, empty gestures are counterproductive.