RUSH: Other news items out there. ‘Dozens of Duke University professors have posted an open letter.’ Oh, by the way, gotta find the audio sound bite because I’m going to need it here. Grab audio sound bite 14 and 15, because I’m going to need those lists here in just a second. ?Dozens of Duke professors have posted ?an open letter to the Duke community? on the Web, explaining an ad last spring that has been widely criticized as a condemnation of lacrosse players. The new letter, signed by 87 faculty and posted at www.concerneddukefaculty.org, refuses to apologize for the ad and reiterates concerns about issues of race and sexual violence on the Duke campus. It says the so-called ?Group of 88? ad – published in the university student newspaper The Chronicle last April – has been grossly misinterpreted. That ad has been a subject of heated debate on blogs and its signers have received angry and sometimes racist e-mails. ?The ad has been read as a comment on the alleged rape, the team party, or the specific students accused,? the letter said. ?Worse, it has been read as rendering a judgment in the case…We reject all attempts to try the case outside the courts, and stand firmly by the principle of the presumption of innocence.?? Right! This is laughable.
?The letter was signed by ?concerned faculty,? many of whom endorsed the original ad. The ad, entitled, ?What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like?? included anonymous statements by students talking about racism and sexism on the campus. The ad also thanked ?protesters making collective noise.? The letter this week has backed off that a bit, saying, ?We do not endorse every demonstration that took place at the time.? William Chafe, a history professor who signed both the ad and the letter, said the bloggers’ interpretation of the ad has become the version people accepted. And that’s wrong, he said. ?We’re trying to set the record straight and clarify that we never claimed the lacrosse players were guilty,? Chafe said. No matter what happens with the lacrosse sexual assault case, the letter said, issues of race and sexual violence still exist on campus and should be addressed.?
Yeah, but it seems to me the issue of race has more to do with the harassment of white men at Duke than it does anybody else. ?The rhetoric has been heated on the Duke campus, where President Richard Brodhead has called for a restoration of the ?fabric of mutual respect.?? Yeah, yeah, mutual respect after the fact when you guys are taking a bunch of heat. This place is not going to get itself back to normal until Nifong is gone, until Brodhead — this remains to be one of the biggest utter disasters of the American criminal justice system that I can recall, and there are few. I mean, they’re not that unique, but this to me is the pi?ce de r?sistance. At any rate, I remembered this ad, this ad of 88, and one of the women in this ad was this Kim Curtis, this utter wacko feminist visiting professor. There’s no question that these professors, these people that signed this thing all bought into the template that all liberals buy into that rich white guys rape and pillage and destroy and harm poor black people. It’s a great illustration of what liberalism is, it’s on display. Paula Zahn last night devoted a half hour to this case on CNN.
By the way, did you hear, I just saw this today. CNN is going high definition in the fall, I think September or October of this year, CNN is going HD. In fact, DirecTV launching a couple — this is a total aside. I think DirecTV is going to launch a couple satellites in the summer and they’re going to be offering 100 HD channels starting sometime this fall. You’re going to need a new dish, you’re going to need new receivers in order to receive it. What you have now will not be obsolete, but if you want to get all these new HD channels, which of course I think HD is incomparable. I have a bunch of sites devoted to HD. There are a bunch of geeks and nerds out there that are into it, and I have some of them bookmarked, and they went out and they did a survey of HD geeks, like me. I’m an HD geek, and these HD geeks said they would prefer to watch the Super Bowl on television on their big screen HDs rather than go to the event. When I read that, I can understand this. It’s like being there, in terms of the way it looks, without all the hassle. The only thing is that these networks that cover it show you a bunch of worthless crowd shots of drunken idiots in the stands that I rather not have to look at, but there’s a price to pay for everything.
Anyway, Paula Zahn last night CNN, managed to find a feminist professor who still thinks the accuser in the Duke lacrosse case is the victim. “Out in the Open: The Duke Assault Case, A Question of Race,” Zahn interviewed Wheelock College professor Gail Dines, and she said, ?I’ve talked with a number of people today who think that it was the players who got a really raw deal here. Gail, I know you don’t agree with that perception at all.?
DINES: Absolutely not. I think this woman has been hung out to dry by the media. I think questions about her morality, her emotional stability, her psychological stability, which is what happens to women in rape cases, and especially to women of color. I think what this case is about is not only sexism, but racism. There’s no question not all women by the media are basically hung out to dry. They even call her the accuser instead of the victim. So just the way that they turned her into somehow a perpetrator against these players —
RUSH: Wait a second. I thought we just got through reading this big bunch of pabulum from the 87 Duke professors that they want to wait and not try the case in the media, and they don’t want to hear about whatever is the truth here until the courts decide. All of a sudden this woman’s the victim, the rape happened, and this is one of these hoity-toity elitist erudite nose in-the-air libs who’s out there — even though the accuser has changed her story, gosh, how many times, in really significant ways. One thing that has been absent in this whole scenario is common sense, and somehow common sense has no place in the law, at least at times, and that is an absolute shame. Next question from Paula Zahn is to the accuser?s cousin, ?When you hear all of the racial rhetoric that seems to be circulating around the case, what does that make you think??
ACCUSER’S COUSIN: It’s unfortunate that it’s turned into race, but it’s always been there. It sensationalizes the story. You know, it’s got class and it’s got race in it, and I think from day one a lot of people felt that these were privileged young white boys who felt like they could treat these young women, strippers or not, I think they had the mentality that they were superior to these young women, and I think that’s unfortunate, and I think that — that’s just the world we live in.
RUSH: Right. See? So whether or not the rape happened, these guys are still guilty, because they’re white, and they’re supposedly privileged, we don’t even know that. They’re superiorists, and they hired the black stripper, doesn’t even have to be a stripper, hire a black babe to come over just to make her feel like an insignificant piece of human debris, because that’s who they are. Now, whether the rape happened, see, the nature of the evidence is irrelevant here. This woman is telling us exactly how liberals look at this. These guys are guilty just because. They’re just guilty. They’re on the lacrosse team, they’re white, they’re privileged, stripper was black, guilty. This is a microcosm of what’s wrong with America, America is guilty. This is an outrage because these people control the judicial system in that county, and these people control a bunch of the opinion making decision in Durham County, and they’re a bunch of flat earthed, closed-minded bigots themselves who are trying to say to everybody else, that’s what you are. These people define racists, they define sexism, and they define bigotry, and they define prejudice.