KC Johnson and co-author Stuart Taylor Jr. have an excellent column in The New York Times today about the Duke lacrosse rape-fraud case and former DA Mike Nifong’s one-day sentence. Excellent, that is, except in one respect: They go out of their way to identify MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough as a “right-wing blowhard” who was among those “in a race to the journalistic bottom” and seem to take great pains to avoid using the term left-wing to describe anyone who fought for the players’ conviction.
Instead, they call the irresponsible professors at Duke “activists” and “extremist professors.” Duke’s mistake, they say, was letting “ideologically eccentric” professors bulldoze the “mainstream liberal academics” at the school.
They know as well as anyone that this case exploded as it did because of left-wing blowhards (the potbangers, the Group of 88, President Richard Brodhead, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the New Black Panther Party, the media, etc.). Why single out Scarborough, who isn’t even very conservative?