My Liberalism Says You're Guilty of Rape (Updated)

**Note: I put this up a day late because I wanted to tweak it a bit. Enjoy.

This is a long post. Greenwaldian long. So pull up a chair. You may learn something, and I don't need to be the one to teach it. It will teach itself.

So the Duke non-rape case is teetering on the edge of being thrown out of court before it even gets to court. As it should. Nifong should be imprisoned, the accuser should be thrown in the cell next to him, and both should be forced to pay all legal fees and compensatory damages. We don't, however, live in a just society.

The Duke Lacrosse Incident has revealed a lot about some of our friends on the left. In particular, it has shown that a contingency of them are willing to indict, convict and sentence people based strictly on their worldviews and not on the merits of the case or on the preponderence of evidence.

READ MUCH MORE BELOW THE FOLD --> There are sensible lefties, for sure. Jeralynn Merritt of TalkLeft, for example, had the good sense early on in the now-crumbling case to keep her biases in check:

The parents are hoping the accuser is embellishing what happened. If it turns out the boys did it, they should be removed immediately and programs need to be installed to teach these kids how unacceptable the behavior was, from top to bottom. If, on the other hand, as they suspect, the girl embellished what happened out of anger over being asked to return the money or the racial slurs, she should be held accountable too.

With evidence continuing to mount that the accuser had embellished and changed her story and likely lied to the prosecution and defense, Merritt comes out looking reasonable and fair minded (which she is).

There is even a diarist at Daily Kos, of all places, who realizes what this case really was and calls on the previous diarists who accused and convicted the boys of heinous crimes without evidence (based on their worldview) to recant and make amends. I was, needless to say, shocked and rather pleased to read this entry (based on my worldview as to what constitutes the majority of the Kos site):

[...]My first hope is that this DA is removed from office for misconduct.

My second hope is that all the Kos posters who determined these guys' guilt based on their skin color and the skin color of the accuser, their economic circumstances, the fact that they are on an athletic team at an elite and largely white school and hired a woman to strip, will atone somehow for their eager and arrogant presumption, their abyssal ignorance, and the weakness of their dedication to due process and democratic (small d) norms.

Agreed. I wish the Kospatriots were as level-headed. But alas, these are the Kosbots we're talking about here.

Interestingly, I tried doing a search for the phrase "Duke Lacrosse Team" and "Duke Rape Case" using the search mechanisms on a few big-name lefty blogs like Wonkette, TPM, Matthew Yglesias, Left Coaster, Tbogg and Kevin Drum for postings on the subject. Perhaps it was my inferior ability to use boolean searching, but nothing came up.

Then there are the rabid liberals. In this case, I'm going to highlight the foul-mouthed, 8-year-old-like tirades of hyperfeminist Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon as the case study. This feminist ninny couldn't wait to jump down the collective throats of "conservatives" regarding this story. The story had it all - racism, sexism, privilege vs. poverty, vicitimization - everything a liberal could want to rant about. The only problem? There was no rape, the accuser lied, the DA lied and the other charges are on their way to being dropped. So it is worth reading what this particularly rabid liberal convicted these boys (and somehow by proxy, all conservatives) of before knowing anything. Hence, convicting them based on her worldview without a shred of evidence.

Starting with April 6, an excerpt from the tastefully titled "That's No Crime Scene, Its My Vagina," in which she gets her panties in a wad over a facetious email from one of the Duke player (none of whose DNA appeared anywhere near the stripper):

Here in the states, while some conservatives are gearing up to defend the Duke lacrosse team against accusations of gang-raping a stripper, an email one of the team members sent around has been made public. The email text is being hinted at most places, but I think our stomachs are strong enough here:

"...tommrow night, after tonights show, ive decided to have some strippers over to edens 2c. all are welcome.. however there will be no nudity. i plan on killing the bitches as soon as the walk in and proceding to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex.. all besides arch and tack please respond..."

The prevailing them, of course, is physical humiliation and especially mutiliation. Bad pregnancies mustn’t be interferred with, lest we deprive the sadists of the pleasure of knowing their laws have forced women to endure having the ovaries burst open for no good reason. Strippers are for killing and raping. Only doctors go to prison under abortion bans–that’s because the patriarchs aren’t satisfied with orange jumpsuits for women who fuck. They must pay in having their ovaries burst, their vaginas split open. Nothing less that blood and bruises and being treated like your body is a crime scene will do.

The other prevailing theme is that when you’re a woman, anyone can do whatever they want to your body and expect the patriarchy to come running to their defense. Oh yeah, anyone but you. You do with “your” body what you like, and you’re a fucking criminal.

If there is a more penetrating, probing and phallophobic analysis of...female genital politics, I'd love to read it. Or maybe not.

About two weeks later, she went off the handle again. In a dynamite post combining the Santa-Cruz anti-military morons and the Lacrosse incident, she reveals her naked hypocricy in all of its capacious glory. Remember, this is less than a month after the story broke - and the story line was that these eeevil white boys had gang-raped a poor little stripper presumably while praising George Bush:

As I mentioned yesterday, Kathleen Parker compared the Duke lacrosse team to lynching victims (missing the much more apt comparison of them to lynchers due to the whites-ganging-up-on-one-black-person aspect) and even vaguely implied they were martyrs like Christ. Charlotte Allen is running a series on the Duke rape case called “Crying Rape”, which she says means “accusing someone of rape”, but for some reason she felt that the phrasing that implies to most of us that the victim is lying worked better. The good news is so far I haven’t seen any right wingers fantazing about another Kent State at UC Santa Cruz, and believe me, I looked.

But what strikes me about the two incidents is that they are both good examples of how violent acting out is derived from feelings of entitlement. The Santa Cruz kids felt entitled to run the recruiters off campus because they feel the campus belongs to them and they should have the right to run people off their property. At bare minimum, the Duke lacrosse team felt entitled to humiliate the strippers they hired because they were women and they were even paid for. At worst, they felt entitled to gang rape a woman for those reasons.

I’m inclined to think that the Santa Cruz students might have a right to do what they did, because I’m convinced that they, as the actual students at the school, are entitled to their claim to the school, and especially that they have a stronger claim to it than the military recruiters. It’s hard for me to quarrel with people in the age group that’s being targeted to fight BushCo’s colonialist adventures when they resist that recruitment, even to the point of violence. Since their motivations are understandable to me, it’s hard for me to be anything less than half-hearted in my condemnation of it.

Which is what makes language like Parker’s or David Brooks’ rape apologies–they argue that it’s quite understandable that boys will go bananas and rape someone if they are exposed to a woman shaking her ass, which makes any condemnation of such things come across as half-assed and shallow. Just as my disinclination to jump all over the Santa Cruz students speaks volumes about my agreement that they’re entitled to claim campus space for the students instead of the military, conservatives who white wash the Duke rape case are speaking volumes about what entitlements they are willing tolerate, in this case, white male entitlement to abuse women and get away with it, especially if they are of the wrong sex class or wrong skin color.

That's an awfully tart take on a case in which any evidence of a rape had to yet be produced. I wonder how her position evolved as time went on and the case began to crumble publically. Let's take a look at this May 10 post in which her magical worldview enables her to read the mind of so-called "rape apologists" for a "rape" that never occured:

There’s just something about this Duke rape case that’s inspiring to rape apologists. The sheer amount of energy that’s going into rape apologies lately, not just for the Duke lacrosse team but in general, is breathtaking. Kathleen Parker has been writing about almost nothing else, but instead building a long case that unless the victim is 9 years old and a virgin and white and blonde and her attacker kills her and he mutiliates her body, then rape isn’t so much a crime as a feminist plot to put all men in jail so that we can, I don’t know, wear sweatpants more or something. If this was indeed our plot, we are some dumb motherfuckers, considering less than 16% of rapes result in charges and less than half of those result in any kind of punishment. We could certainly come up with a more efficient method if we wanted to of getting men in jail besides getting ourselves raped and then raising a fuss as if we had a right not to be raped.

The other thing I’ve learned from rape apologists lately is that while in most crimes, the presumption of innocence is a legal standard for determining if a defendent is guilty or not, but when it comes to rape, that’s not good enough. Rape and rape alone is a crime where it’s critical that we heap disdain on the victim and refuse to believe her until it’s proven in court, which should be easy to do after everyone has satiated him/herself on accusing the victim of lying.

Well see, little child, that's to prevent psycho hose beasts like you from ruining the lives of every patriarchy-enabling-phalocentric-hegemonist (male) on the street who looks at you the wrong way. Note the preening and preeching about "presumptions of innocence" and "standards" of evidence. Ms. Marcotte has made no such presumption of innocence of the lacrosse players (in fact, they've already been castrated in prison along with 'conservative white American males'), and she herself adheres to no standards of evidence whatsoever. Of course, the only evidence that was really available to the public at the time was that of the accuser's then-crumbling story, and the proclamations of innocence of those charged. Who do you think she's going to side with?

She continues working herself into an man-hating lather, firing off a June 5 post about "insiders" protecting each other (although she doesn't really go into detail as to who these "insiders" are), and how "outsiders" are protecting "insiders." This post was little more than pure leftist paranoia run amok on steroids, so there isn't much I want to excerpt here. The post is long and windy enough without more fatally-flawed feminist fury cluttering it up. I'll just snip this post:

Outsiders rush to aid the process of maintaining a space where law-breaking is permitted for members of these groups beyond even just giving whistleblowers a hostile reaction. The woman accusing the Duke lacrosse team of rape is harassed by the media even, police who attack innocent civilians can expect to be let off in court, and even some Catholics in this country are loathe to criticize the church’s flagrant abuse of its powers in protecting pedophiles in the priesthood. It’s no accident that the majority of public ire over the Abu Gharib scandal was focused on Lyndie England; female members of these organizations are still considered illegitimate, so attacking them is not an attack on institutionalized male privilege.

Yeah. Abu Gharib. Catholic priests. Duke Lacrosse. All the same - women are the victims. The whole post is that level of teh stupid (as is most of this Pandagon tripe.) Read with your health in mind.

The firebreathing Marcotte reaches a creamy, f*ckheaded climax with her June 23 post "Racism is a System, Not an Intention." Apart from it being obvious to any three-year-old that racism does in fact have a lot to do with intentionalism of the sender and not the feelings of the reciever, I'll set that aside as to let the leftist ass-monkeyism show you clearly the liberal mind at work:

The focus on intent is what allows people to reinforce racist structures while denying that they’re doing that. Exhibit #1: LaShawn Barber has an op-ed today where she compares the members of the Duke lacrosse team that are accused of rape to the Scottsboro Boys. The cases don’t have much in common in any social sense. First of all, the Scottsboro Boys were accused in an atmosphere where lynchings were incredibly common in the South, whereas the Duke students are being accused where they are some of the most privileged in society. Second, the Scottsboro defendents had barely any defense at all, especially compared to the first class lawyers the Duke students can hire. The alleged victims in the Scottsboro case didn’t really explain themselves or the charges, and one never testified at all (presumably because she inconveniently refused to play along and pretend she was raped). I could go on (no, you can't - ed.), but you get the idea of why Barber’s comparison of the two cases is ridiculous.

But because the concept of racism has been reduced to intention instead of a systematic societal problem, people like Barber can get away with equating people who are loaded with privilege with victims of a racist system like the Scottsboro Boys. And that’s why it’s so damn frustrating when white liberals insist on making racism about someone’s intentions instead of the effects of their actions.

In case you're wondering, it doesn't matter what you think. Ever. You're racists through and through. It doesn't matter what you think, mean, say, write, feel or perceive. All that matters is what the "victim" and Amanda Marcotte see and feeeeeel. You are irrelevant, no matter what. Sorry. What does matter is your skin color, your level of privilege and her mood on that day.

And you know the funniest part? To this blogger's knowledge (and searching capabilities), Ms. Marcotte has not posted a DAMN thing on the case since August.

Not. A. Damn. Thing. To. Say.

What's the problem, Ms. Marcotte? Cat gotcher tongue?

Her silence now speaks louder than her Marxist-inspired, hyper-feminist ramblings ever could.

- - - - - -

UPDATE II - Dan Collins at protein wisdom fires an additional salvo at Pandagonism.

UPDATE: Nifong has asked to be recused from the case. Countersuits to begin in 3...2...

Check out the idiot professor who resigned because the kids haven't gone through a public trial guaranteed to ruin their young lives and reputations:

Meanwhile, [a] Duke University English professor has resigned from her committee assignments over the school's decision to invite two of the indicted players back to campus. Duke's administration has steadily increased its criticism of Nifong as the case appeared to grow weaker.

Former dean Karla Holloway calls the decision, quote, "a clear use of corporate power, and a breach, I think, of ethical citizenship."

Earlier this month, officials at Duke said Finnerty and Seligmann could return to school as students in good standing for the spring semester, which began this week. Evans graduated the day before he was indicted.

Holloway was one of 88 faculty members at Duke who endorsed an ad last April in the campus newspaper that included anonymous quotes from students discussing racism and sexual assault on Duke's campus. She is worried discussion of race and gender equality will end once the lacrosse case is settled.

"The issues about race and gender and sexuality that were made more apparent by the case need to continue to be receive serious and sustained attention by this institution," she said.

That's right, Karla. This is all about a dialogue.

Translation? "Dammit! Now we can't use this incident to spend years and millions of cirriculum dollars trashing white males and implicating them in race-driven rapes now! No faculty-led sensitivity seminars! No anti-lacrosse protests! No "Contemporary Issues in Race, Privilege, Class and Sex" or "Cultural Racism and Sexism in Sports" classes! We aren't vindicated in our premature accusations against these young boys! Our liberal wet dream won't come to pass! We were sooo close!"

Cross-posted at Mein BlogoVault.

Posted by: Good Lt. at 04:40 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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