How a liberal takes responsibility

Here, according to the September 29 Washington Post, is the way Duke University President Richard H. Brodhead apologized for his treatment of the lacrosse players falsely accused in “rape” scandal:

Brodhead, speaking at the university’s law school, said he regretted Duke’s “failure to reach out” in a “time of extraordinary peril” after a woman accused three players of raping her at a March 2006 party thrown by the team.

“Given the complexities of this case, getting the communication right would never have been easy,” Brodhead said. “But the fact is that we did not get it right, causing the families to feel abandoned when they were most in need of support. This was a mistake. I take responsibility for it, and I apologize for it.”

What contemptible b.s. Instead of admitting that he persecuted the students, instead of admitting that he joined a liberal lynch mob against these students, Brodhead says that his mistake was “not reaching out enough” to them! That is liberals’ only moral category. Either you’re “reaching out” and “being inclusive” and “compassionate” to people, which is good, or else you’re “excluding” and “discriminating” against them, which is bad. Since there is no such thing as moral truth in their universe, there is no such thing as a morally wrong action. For liberals, the only wrongful act is the failure to be sufficiently embracing and non-judgmental, i.e., the failure to be sufficiently liberal.

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John B. writes:

What always strikes me about this sort of thing is its insipidity, to which liberals are completely insensitive. I often think the divide between liberals and humans is aesthetic.

Charles G. writes:

If you recall in the old movies, the liberal would always stand up before a mob and declare that the accused was innocent until proven guilty and that everyone should just calm down until the facts were in. In the classic Western, this speech would be made in front of a lynch mob, in which case the liberal hero helps the sheriff keep the peace until the circuit court judge arrives. Meanwhile, the facts are made known and the liberal hero is admired for having upheld justice. How far we’ve strayed. In a modern Duke University (or any other liberal run variant) version of this movie, the liberal “hero” would immediately stand up and denounce the accused, get the rope and be the one to admit the mob to the jail.

James W. writes:

May I refuse Brodhead’s apology on behalf of all right-thinking people. What is required is not an apology, but consequences. Both the president and the Gang of 88 should receive the exact punishment for the acts they committed that the Lacrosse team received for those that they didn’t. You will recall that was the termination of their season.

LA replies:

They also intended 30 years in jail for the three railroaded defendants.

Nifong should have been convicted of a serious crime and sent to prison. He consciously sought to condemn three person who he knew were innocent to long prison terms. That he only served one token day in jail for doing this is a disgrace.

LA writes:

This blog entry began as an e-mail I sent to Vincent Chiarello. In it, I did not use initials in the phrase “contemtible b.s.”

Mr. Chiarello wrote back:

Fellow Pilgrim,

It was shocking—absolutely shocking—to read your purple prose directed at the esteemed head of an American university. I still have not fully recovered from the impact of reading that invective.

But, being the charitable Christian that I am, I will only require that, for your penance, you say Five Our Fathers, Five Hail Marys, and three decades of the Rosary…and I’m letting you off easy. People who have repeated your offense have been required, among other things, to go to Lourdes, or climb the Rock of Cashel…on their knees! I urge you to be prudent in your choice of words to describe members of the academic community, for they are, as we all well know, in the true vanguard of maintaining our traditions.

I assume that you have reflected upon your lack of linguistic propriety, and feel inwardly ashamed. Still, I warn you that I may not be as lenient the next time.

Ego te absolve in nomine … you know the rest.

a presto

Vincent

P.S. Joking aside, when I read your comment, I laughed out loud.

P.P.S. Are there moral gradations of “b______t?” If so, “contemptible b______t” must rank near the very bottom.

I replied:

Vincenzo, I’ve posted an entry based on my e-mail to you. I had some difficulty coming up with adjectives that would be strong enough but not too strong for publication.

A little while later I sent a follow-up:

What I posted wasn’t strong enough, so I went back to my original wording to you, except that I wrote “b.s.” instead of the full word. Sometimes you just need to use strong language. It’s the only way to say what needs to be said.

Howard Sutherland writes:

Out of curiosity, I looked up Brodhead’s bio. He left Dayton for Yale in the mid-1960s (Class of ‘68, no less!). Once he got to New Haven he never left until Duke hired him in 2004. So he is a career ivy league academic/bureaucrat. He seems good at sniffing prevailing winds, too. At some point in his Yale career he outgrew the dull study of such whitebreads as Hawthorne, Melville and Faulkner, developing a fascination for the diaries of Charles W. Chestnutt, “a leading African-American author of the post-Civil War generation.” Given the state of our “elite” (scare quotes intentional) universities nowadays, I would have been surprised if Brodhead had done the right thing.

HRS continues:

Brodhead really needs to go, but not in such a way that his departure becomes the only thing Duke does about this disgrace (other than write checks to the wrongly accused players’ families and the wrongly fired coach).

My worry is that in liberal post-America, even the most clear exposition of how rotten elite academia has become (and this case couldn’t be clearer) won’t compel anybody to change anything.

After all, Moslem immigration and illegal entry into these United States has soared since September 11, 2001!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 02, 2007 06:17 PM | Send