I had breakfast with John Podhoretz a few months ago when he came to Durham to do a piece on the Duke lacrosse case (how’s that for name-dropping?). As we sat in the restaurant in the Marriott downtown (I still think of it as the Omni) he picked my brain about the case and the game of lacrosse. The result was two fine pieces in The New York Post, which got none of their fineness from me. I just enjoyed the conversation.

Today he looks at the case from a different angle: Who WON’T pay a price for their irresponsible actions. Durham DA Mike Nifong, he says, may go to jail. Duke President Richard Brodhead may be canned by a board that wants a president who won’t slander its own students and institution, he writes. But it’s the execrable Group of 88 lefty new-age professors who won’t pay anything for their crimes.

Consequences? Don’t make me laugh.

The tenured ones will continue to enjoy their aristocratic installment in Durham. The untenured will be supported in their efforts to find similar perches elsewhere by the rest of the Gang of 88, because that’s how academic politics works.

How about even the loss of even a single night of sleep?

Oh, no. Not these folks. They’re fighting the white patriarchy. They’re on the side of the dispossessed and oppressed. They’re giving voice to the voiceless. They’re giving hope to the hopeless.

They’re fools at best and monsters at worst – and neither fools nor monsters are much troubled by attacks of conscience.