Hack work

In the media train wreck known as the Duke lacrosse case, the real damage was done by pundits who used the case to promote their pet causes. They grabbed a headline, a few unverifiable facts, and leaped upon their hobbyhorses.

This is not an ideological problem; it is a pundit problem. The American Thinker demonstrates this today with a nasty little piece that blames the VT murders on the prolongation of adolescence. See, Cho was not the problem; his behavior was somehow natural:

The astonishing thing is that, with all this barrage of instruction, titillation, and humiliation, only one middle-class boy misses the point, shorts out his social conditioning, and fires up his hard wiring. It's a testament to the effectiveness of our cultural conditioning system, or at least the tolerance of modern young people for rank, unapologetic oppression.

To my lights, this is as bad as anything the Gang of 88 wrote.