The blogosphere is agog with talk about how Perry’s gaffe in the debate last night has finished him.
And it did look bad, although it’s the sort of senior moment (or semi-senior moment) many of us of a certain age are quite familiar with, unfortunately.
Now, what was I saying?
Oh yes…
That sort of lapse is just not okay in a presidential candidate, especially one who’s not doing so well in the first place. Just think what the Obama campaign could do with this clip:
What did Joe Paterno know and when did he know it?
And what was his duty based on what he knew, and did he shirk it?
I won’t mince words here: what is alleged to have taken place at the hands of Jerry Sandusky in the Penn State locker room in 2002, the anal rape of a child, is a terrible sexual crime of great magnitude. If Paterno knew that had happened and had any part in covering it up, he shirked his duty in a major way and his firing is a mild punishment.
Of course, even Sandusky himself is innocent until proven guilty. But the allegations in the grand jury indictment against him are compelling (and revolting), and seem to point very strongly towards guilt (a witness, many seemingly independent reports of other instances of Sandusky abusing children and using a similar m.o. in some of the cases). But even if Sandusky is innocent—which does not appear to be the case—that would not affect Paterno’s duty to report when he got word of the allegations of child rape.
And therein lies the conundrum: what word of child rape did Paterno get? He says he was told something much more vague—that something untoward and inappropriate but only possibly sexual happened in the shower at Penn State, involving Sandusky and a male child:
…[E]ven if the grad assistant [who reported the offense] in question, Mike McQueary, was too traumatized or intimidated to tell Paterno the unfathomable particulars of what he saw (and we’ll see how that story develops), Paterno knew a naked Sandusky didn’t belong anywhere near a naked grade schooler in the shower.
In his original statement on the case, after denying that McQueary informed him of “the very specific actions contained in the Grand Jury report,” Paterno went on to concede that “it was clear that the witness saw something inappropriate involving Mr. Sandusky.”
The former defensive coordinator stands accused of something that “inappropriate” couldn’t begin to describe. Sandusky was indicted on felony charges of sexually abusing eight boys, and experts believe the damage inflicted on child victims in these cases can be everlasting.
However, no one alleges that Paterno knew about the other victims. But it is indeed the case that, had a proper investigation been launched at Paterno’s request in 2002, at least some of those victims—the ones who came after the incident of which he had been informed—might have been spared their terrible experiences.
What did Paterno do when he was told whatever he was told by McQueary? He launched an internal investigation—within the athletic department—hardly worthy of the name. And that, I think, is where his major wrongdoing lies.
Why not tell the police? Why not tell Child Protective Services? And why such tepid findings resulting from the internal investigation, given the extreme nature of the allegations? One cannot help but think there was a coverup, at least on the part of Tim Curley and Gary Schultz:
Penn State athletic director Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, the school’s vice president for business and finance, were charged with perjury and failure to report the allegations. Curley and Schultz each face up to seven years in prison if convicted…
Pennsylvania law requires that anyone who comes into contact with children in the course of their employment to report evidence of abuse to “appropriate authorities.” Failure to do so is a third-degree misdemeanor.
The statute specifically lists teachers, nurses, doctors and child-care workers, among others, as those required to notify authorities when they suspect children in their care have been molested.
Paterno apparently followed the letter of the law by telling Curley about what McQueary had witnessed. But if Paterno had notified law-enforcement officials once it became clear university officials had not shared the allegation with police, Sandusky may have been arrested, sparing at least one of the boys whose abuse was detailed in the grand jury report.
Paterno does seem guilty of extremely poor judgment and excessive trust in the internal mechanism of the university, and a simple lack of common sense. He had no legal duty to report to the police, but he should have done so:
Penn State football icon Joe Paterno probably adhered to the letter of the law when he told the school’s athletic director – but not the police – that former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky allegedly sexually abused a boy in the Nittany Lions’ locker room in 2002.
But attorneys familiar with child abuse statutes say that while the venerable college coach may not face criminal charges, he is hardly an innocent bystander…
Paterno issued a statement late Sunday that said he “did what I was supposed to do with the one charge brought to my attention.”
But he also claimed that a graduate assistant who told him he witnessed Sandusky having anal sex with a boy in a locker room on the Penn State campus “at no time related to me the very specific actions contained in the grand jury report.”…
“After learning that school officials were not reporting the matter to police, Joe Paterno should have reported it himself,” [attorney] Garabedian said. “It is simply common – and ethical and moral – sense.
Agreed.
Perhaps Paterno wanted to protect his beloved Penn State and the athletic department there (although Sandusky had stopped working for the university in 1999 and was no longer an employee at the time of the offense). Perhaps Paterno was naive and didn’t believe Sandusky capable of anything so terrible. But there’s no “perhaps” to the fact that Paterno committed a terrible lapse of judgment in not reporting the allegations to the proper authorities—which were most definitely not the athletic department at Penn State.
Instead of wandering around fruitlessly at the Yahoo site, looking for a way to get back to Yahoo Classic email, it finally dawned on me that I might be able to actually write to the folks at Yahoo and request a return to the tried-and-true.
And so I did—and got the following almost immediate reply:
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.
We have received your request to return to a previous version of Yahoo!Mail, and we will switch the email service of your account to Yahoo! Mail Classic within two business days. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced while using our new Yahoo! Mail, and we hope this change helps.
The speed and the cooperative tone of Yahoo’s reply indicate to me that I’m not the only one who’s been deeply unhappy with the forced change they instituted back in September. Here are some of the problems others have encountered with it. The right click problem mentioned at the end is definitely among the very worst faults of the new, “improved” system:
As the new Yahoo! Mail became mandatory for users, a number of previously satisfied users of Yahoo! Mail started to report slow typing speeds with the new Yahoo! Mail,[citation needed] running contradictory to Yahoo!’s claims that the new Yahoo! Mail would perform “2x” faster. Yahoo! offered no resolution to the problem as of September 12, 2011, and continued to advertise that Yahoo! Mail “provides performance that is 2x faster than the previous versions of Yahoo! Mail” and runs at “lightning speed.” Further slowing down user productivity, users cannot copy and paste email addresses from the sender box but must navigate to the Contacts tab and search for a contact to be able to copy and paste an email address. This is because now recipient email addresses convert to the name of the recipient highlighted inside a box, without an immediate option for accessing the email address to copy and paste like in traditional email clients. Although it is not mentioned, upgrading to the new version disables the use of the secondary addresses provided in the previous version. Thus users will not receive emails sent to a secondary address anymore. The new interface overrides the browser’s right mouse button (e.g., making functions such as opening mails in new tab windows unavailable).
Plus é§a change, plus c’est la méªme chose.
…what’s “a spokeswoman in the office of the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration“?
Because that’s what Karen Kraushaar does these days. Seems a rather odd job description.
But remind me never to send Kraushaar any of those silly email forwards:
[Kraushaar’s] complaint [at the job she held after her NRA position] also cited as objectionable an email that a manager had circulated comparing computers to women and men, a former supervisor said. The complaint claimed that the email, based on humor widely circulated on the Internet, was sexually explicit, according to the supervisor, who did not have a copy of the email. The joke circulated online lists reasons men and women were like computers, including that men were like computers because “in order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.” Women were like computers because “even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.”
Can’t imagine why Kraushaar would take offense at that.
And we still don’t know what Kraushaar is alleging Cain did or said to her that she found so offensive.
I’ve long had a special interest in the topic of false accusations—or rather, how to tell false from true, when the only evidence is the word of one party against another. Whether the charge be date rape, recovered memories of childhood molestation at the hands of a relative, sexual harassment, or just raunchy behavior of the type some of his accusers have claimed for Cain; if there’s no evidence, what’s a person to do?
It’s one thing to insist that Cain should “confront” the sexual harassment issue and the charges by giving a press conference. It’s another to see how it’s possible to effectively do so.
Cain gave an interview today (not a press conference) that constituted some sort of “confrontation” of the charges: categorical denial of harassing anyone, and calling Bialek a liar. But because of the number of accusers (and the amorphous quality of some of the charges), the situation resembles an almost endless game of whack-a-mole.
In such a situation, how can the accused give a full answer to the charges? What would a full answer be?
If the charges are true, admit it and pull out of the race. But if not, how does a person answer a fabrication, especially if there are no witnesses? What can a person say besides “it didn’t happen” or “it didn’t happen that way” or “she’s a liar?”
One thing to do is smear the women–dig into their pasts and find the flaws. That opens Cain (or anyone in his position) up to headlines like this one in Politico: “Herman Cain campaign launches attack on accuser Sharon Bialek.” It makes him seem like a thug, even though he’s just pointing out facts about her somewhat shady financial past.
This lady, Karen Kraushaar (one of the two woman at the NRA who got a settlement), seems to be a more credible witness than Bialek in terms of her past. But she has yet to describe exactly what Cain is supposed to have done that constituted her cause of action and for which she received a relatively small payment from the NRA. She also says she wants to have a joint conference with other accusers: why? To compound the effect of the accusations?
And therein lies an important point: a great many people say that now that there are many accusers the accusations become more credible. To me, each accusation is only as credible as (a) the person making it, and (b) the charges themselves. The numbers matter a little, but not that much, although there’s probably a tipping point where they would matter to me more.
Another circumstance that would enhance the charges’ believability would be if several woman had come forward independently—each without knowing about the other—alleging similar behavior on Cain’s part. That might be the case with the two accusers from the NRA, if they hadn’t spoken to each other or compared notes before each made her claim, but we don’t yet know.
That’s not the case with Bialek, who only has come forward recently after all the publicity rather than before it. And as far as her having supposedly told a friend or a boyfriend about Cain’s behavior at the time it happened, that’s slightly more convincing but not very. Unfortunately, people will lie to back each other up; I’ve seen it happen way too many times.
Let me repeat: I don’t know whether the women accusing Cain are telling the truth. They very well might be. It’s also possible that some are and some aren’t. But I do know that it is far too easy to lie about these matters if one has a mind to—for money, attention, anger, politics, or self-delusion—and that the more people who do so against a single prominent person, the more likely it is that their false charges will stick.
…to publish this story.
But not Politico.
[ADDENDUM: Actually, it seems the story first appeared in the Washington Examiner, a fairly conservative rag.]
…who’s fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough, depending on the results) to have a possibly-exonerating DNA test to fall back on. In the case of a false accusation of fathering a baby, it’s a simple way to prove the truth or falsehood of a claim.
It’s hard for me to understand the motivation of Bieber’s accuser if it is a false claim and the test exonerates Bieber—although, as I wrote earlier today, some people are attracted to notoriety.
Assuming the test shows Bieber to not be the father of Yeater’s baby, he’s got plans:
The pop superstar is also likely to sue Yeater and the people representing her to show there are consequences to making false accusations.
In addition, his accuser could be subject to prosecution for statutory rape if they did have intercourse, because of the age difference.
And speaking of babies—to me, Bieber has always looked so young as to be nearly fetal himself. But he seems to be one of the more extreme examples of a phenomenon I wrote about here, the androgynous male heartthrob.
I’ve just discovered a not-so-well-known dancer named Melissa Hough, who used to dance with the Boston Ballet but is now a member of the Houston Ballet.
Hough reminds me of retired ballerina Cynthia Gregory, who used to dance with American Ballet Theater during the heyday of ballet in the 60s and 70s and through the 80s. They share qualities rare in ballet dancers (who usually tend to be elfin): a plumb line solidity, weightiness, presence, serenity, centered strength, power, and elegance. When she balances, Hough never seems as though she can’t wait to get down, or as if it’s a strain for her to be en pointe. It appears instead that her natural state is up—and that it’s a mere afterthought, and somewhat of an effort (and an unnecessary one at that) for her to come down.
Take a look at Hough in the fiendishly difficult Lilac Fairy variation. She does an especially hard variation on the variation, one that requires Italian fouettes (starting at :58) which very few people can accomplish without looking intensely strained; they demand astounding strength and perfect balance:
Alas, I can’t find a clip of Gregory performing the same variation. But here she is, somewhat blurry, in the same ballet (“Sleeping Beauty”) but in a different role, that of the princess and main character Aurora performing the Rose Adagio (note that this excerpt comes at the end of a long variation, when the dancer is quite tired) Both dancers are tall (I know that about Gregory but I only assume it about Hough) and although slender, not emaciated—which is a great relief and part of the reason their dancing is so satisfyingly sculptural:
While we’re at it, here’s British ballerina Margot Fonteyn in the same Rose Adagio during the 60s when she was already in her forties. Fonteyn was renowned for something altogether different—not technique but charm, and a delicate humanity and refinement. She was never strong and her extensions are low, but here we observe her steeling herself to balance longer by sheer will:
And here’s a more varied clip of Hough excepts, including modern pieces which showcase her speed and versatility as well as her leap:
[NOTE: I find myself so repelled by the news lately that dance seems a refreshing oasis in comparison.]
A new book has come out by former Navy SEAL Chuck Pfarrer, detailing the killing of Bin Laden and alleging that many former accounts got it wrong.
I have no way of knowing whether Pfarrer is correct—he says that Bin Laden was killed much earlier than usually reported, within 90 seconds of the SEALS’ arrival at the compound and while reaching for a rifle. But the following caught my eye and I suspect the charge is likely to be true:
President Obama stepped up to a podium in the East Room of the White House that night to announce bin Laden’s death. That rapid announcement, explained Pfarrer, posed a major threat to U.S. national security.
“There was a choice that night,” Pfarrer told TheDC. “There was a choice to keep the mission secret.” America, Pfarrer explained, could have left things alone for “weeks or months ”¦ even though there was evidence left on the ground there ”¦ and use the intelligence and finish off al-Qaida.”
But Obama’s announcement, he said, “rendered moot all of the intelligence that was gathered from the nexus of al-Qaida. The computer drives, the hard drives, the videocasettes, the CDs, the thumb drives, everything. Before that could even be looked through, the political decision was made to take credit for the operation.”
…Gloria Allred digs up another Cain accuser, Sharon Bialek, who ups the ante and accuses him of genital groping in a car in July of 1997. In another enormous surprise, the accuser failed to report the offense to the NRA or to come forward until now.
There is absolutely nothing other than fear of notoriety to stop anyone who’s ever had any contact with Herman Cain from making such as allegation if she so chooses. And some people, of course, are attracted to notoriety. As more women come forward and accuse Cain in this way, people who are already inclined to think Cain guilty will believe that this constitutes a pattern of behavior on his part.
But if these claims are going to have any credibility at all, there will either need to have been witnesses to the act and/or compelling evidence of it (which is almost never the case), and/or the accuser is at least going to have to have filed an official claim with the authorities at the time and be willing to talk now and reveal her identity and the specifics of that claim (the latter assumes a release from any settlement that would bar such discussion; the Cain accusers were offered such a release from the NRA but declined). Otherwise, a gaggle of women could come forward and it would not tell us much—except that there’s a bandwagon to be jumped on and a reputation to smear.
Oh, and by the way, my position has nothing to do with the alleged perpetrator being a Republican in this case. I would and do feel the same no matter what the political orientation of the accused. For example, Juanita Broaddrick has no credibility as far as I’m concerned (see this for one example of why), and I’m always amazed every time an otherwise seemingly fair-minded Republican cites her as “the woman Bill Clinton raped.” There’s plenty of evidence that Clinton was/is a womanizer, but next to none that he ever coerced or threatened anyone.
[ADDENDUM: By the way, just to be clear, I believe it is most definitely possible that Cain is guilty as charged. But there is no way to know at this point; the sort of evidence I require is simply unavailable so far. I also believe that Cain has been wounded by this and will not be the nominee. But then again, I never thought he would be the nominee.]
Who first tipped off Politico to the sexual harassment charges against Herman Cain that have become such a big story?
I will say at the outset that I haven’t a clue. And neither, I suspect, does anyone else, except Politico and the source[s] him/herself.
That doesn’t mean we can’t speculate, with the caveat that all of this is a mere flight of fancy. So here’s my shot at it.
It may have been the folks at Politico themselves, sleuthing around in LexisNexis for any dirt they could find on Cain. Highly unlikely, however; it’s hard to see why they’d focus on Cain, plus Politico’s pieces on the subject have repeatedly referred to “multiple sources.”
Most of the speculation on the sources’ identities has so far centered on Cain’s Republican opponents. That makes a great deal of sense because they’re the ones who are seemingly most threatened by Cain. Cain himself appears to think one of them bears the blame; he’s been shooting from the hip and accusing Perry consultant Kurt Anderson of being the culprit, although he’s walked back a bit from that charge in recent days.
Or Cain may have other antagonists, perhaps even personal rather than political ones, who possessed the lawsuit information and would like to see him brought him down. As in a detective novel, there’s probably a plethora of possibilities there; a powerful and successful man is likely to make quite a few enemies.
Of course, Politico itself is well aware of its sources, and probably its sources’ motivations, too. But so far Politico isn’t spilling the beans, which puts it in an interesting position. As Andrew McCarthy writes:
[In subsequent articles,] Politico has reported [on allegations] that Perry may be the source and that Romney may be the source. Yet, Politico knows precisely whether the Perry campaign or the Romney campaign (or both . . . or neither) is the source…
In sum, Politico is publishing at least some things it knows to be misleading or untrue, and framing as a great mystery something to which it knows the answer. That can only be because Politico finds the specter of the Republican circular firing squad more appealing than the prospect of informing readers of the accurate version of events.
One possible source that’s hardly been pointed to is Obama or someone in his camp. But why would Obama bother at this point? In fact, Cain might be a weaker opponent than some of the others, and Obama might even welcome a Cain candidacy.
Then again, perhaps Obama fears it for special reasons of his own. If so, it could be the result of what I’d call the Bobby Rush phenomenon. You may recall that Rush was Obama’s opponent in the 2000 Democratic Congressional primary, and the only person in political life who has (so far) ever gotten the better of Obama.
Rush is a black man of roughly the same age as Cain, although the former is an extreme liberal and the latter a conservative. This is what Rush did to Obama back then:
Running in 1996 from the South Side, Obama won a seat in the Illinois State Senate, but three years later, when he tried to take on Bobby Rush, a four-term Democratic incumbent in the House of Representatives, Obama got a lesson in Chicago politics…
Rush did not hesitate to mock Obama as inauthentic””and, by inference, insufficiently black. “He went to Harvard and became an educated fool,” Rush told the Chicago Reader during the campaign. “Barack is a person who read about the civil-rights protests and thinks he knows all about it.” State Senator Donne Trotter, who was also vying for Rush’s seat, told the same reporter that “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community. You have only to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It’s these individuals in Hyde Park, who don’t always have the best interest of the community in mind.” Rush’s tactics were brutal, and they were effective: Obama lost the primary by thirty points.
The experience unquestionably made a deep impression on Obama. That’s not just my guess, either; take his word for it:
“I was completely mortified and humiliated,” Obama told [David Remnick] while he was still only considering a Presidential run. “The biggest problem in politics is the fear of loss. It’s a very public thing, which most people don’t have to go through.
Not the sort of thing a person would forget, or want to repeat.
Although Obama also had an older black opponent in Alan Keyes in his Senate race of 2004, Keyes did not occupy the same “authentically black” position as either Rush or Cain could be said to. Keyes is an intellectual like Obama, hardly a man of the people, and without much political following at all. In fact, Keyes was drafted into the race as a last-minute replacement (with less than three months to go until the election) for the disgraced Jack Ryan, who was forced to quit after salacious allegations by his wife during their divorce and child custody hearings were released to the public when those records were unsealed against the will of both parties.
Obama has also been the beneficiary of other scandals felling opponents at opportune times, based on leaks to the press about legal proceedings that made them look bad. Just ask Blair Hull. And of course there’s the Alice Palmer incident, which I never tire of mentioning, in which Obama used every legal trick in the book to eliminate his mentor Alice Palmer, an older and popular black politician who probably would have defeated him in the primaries for his very first office (state senator) had he not gotten her knocked off the ballot due to irregularities in her candidacy petition.
It wasn’t just Palmer, either [emphasis mine]:
There [Obama’s people] began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city’s South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama’s four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.
Fresh from his work as a civil rights lawyer and head of a voter registration project that expanded access to the ballot box, Obama launched his first campaign for the Illinois Senate saying he wanted to empower disenfranchised citizens.
But in that initial bid for political office, Obama quickly mastered the bare-knuckle arts of Chicago electoral politics. His overwhelming legal onslaught signaled his impatience to gain office, even if that meant elbowing aside an elder stateswoman like Palmer.
A close examination of Obama’s first campaign clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career: The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it.
Right from the start, Obama seemed especially wary of competition, particularly from older black candidates who probably would be seen as more “authentically black” than he. Cain fits that description, too despite the efforts of the left to discredit him as a buffoon and/or an Uncle Tom.
Cain may indeeed be a weak candidate in many ways (lack of political experience, changing his mind on abortion), and he’s not doing so well against Obama in the polls. But nevertheless he just may be the potential opponent who frightens Obama the most.
A Cain candidacy would open Obama up to the sort of criticism no white candidate could ever mount without the fear of at least being accused of racism. Obama’s blackness, and opponents’ fear of the racist charge, has had most of his rivals treating Obama with kid gloves. With Cain—as with Bobby Rush before him—the gloves would be off, and Obama knows it.
Running against a black candidate also has the potential to split the the black vote, the group that has remained most steadfastly and valiantly behind Obama. If he can’t count on them he loses a great deal, and no other Republican candidate but Cain presents this threat.
[NOTE: Obama’s campaign manager in the fight against Bobby Rush had this interesting obvervation on the repercussions of that defeat [emphasis mine]:
…[U]ltimately, if it hadn’t been for that race, there would be no Barack Obama. That was boot camp. That’s what got him ready to do what he had to do.”.
We don’t know exactly what that thing he had to do was. But we do know the Rush experience was exceedingly formative.]