12 Angry Men revisited

The American Thinker has an outstanding consideration of Sidney Lumet’s famous movie. As he says, it is agitprop, but it is also “it's also a terrific film, full ofgreat dialogue, drama, intensity, and superb acting, so tightly produced that there is not a moment or shot wasted.”

Margolies Sees 12 Angry Men as “a precusor and contributor to liberal reforms of court procedure that transformed the justice system in the 1960s and beyond, accompanied by a vast increase in violent crime rates.” What struck me, however, is how the dishonest methods he criticizes in the movie now permeate our criminal justice system and the tabloid media.

For instance, he does not like how Henry Fonda handled the evidence:

Fonda was not saying the boy didn't stab his father, but it's possible he didn't. Fonda was not saying the woman didn't see the boy stab his father, but it's possible she really didn't. Fonda was not saying the old man didn't hear the boy shout "I'll kill you" to his father and then see him running down the stairs, but it's possible he was mistaken or lying. Fonda's juror # 8 no doubt could have said with similar ease, "I'm not saying it wasn't Islamic terrorists who plowed two planes into the WTC, but it's possible." With jurors like Fonda, forget DNA, just open up the prison doors and let everybody out.

There were plenty of echoes of Fonda’s methods in the defense of DA Nifong in the Duke lacrosse case. For months a cadre of ex-prosecutors like Georgia Goslee and Wendy Murphy made the same sort of suggestion as the evidence of innocence piled up.

“It’s possible they wore condoms.”

“It’s possible she was given a date rape drug.”

“It’s possible the cab driver was paid off.”

“It’s possible the lawyers lied in their motions.”

“It’s possible the nurse did not notice her injuries.”

“It’s possible that one of the lax players has flipped and cut a deal.”

“It’s possible the DA has held back his best evidence.”

Yadda yadda yadda.

Nancy Grace and Bill O’Reilly are determined to make us a nation of angry men and women. They paint a picture of America where children are under siege and homicidal predators lurk behind every tree. Judges and lawyers conspire to protect evil-doers while innocent kids suffer.

Grace, of course, boasts of being an ex-prosecutor. BO’R is happy to give a platform to Murphy and Goslee. None of them care that the facts contradict their picture. Would Margolies call what they do agitprop?

OK, Joe Theismann deserved to get fired

How can he put Dallas and Baltimore on this list? Dallas has a great history but the last several years have not been kind.

Baltimore has neither a great history nor an outstanding recent record. One playoff appearance in the last three years. No play-off wins in the period.

New England is clearly number one. Denver and Indy belong on the list. The Steelers have a claim to be number 2 (them or Indy, flip a coin). Then the Eagles or Seatle. I can't think of any other teams that have been consistently good over the last three or five years. Surely that is the mark of a good organization.

Why did Robert Lipsyte become a sportwriter?

It’s a strange career choice for someone with deep-seated issues about athletes.

College basketball coaches tend to be big guys with the confident patter of televangelists; just the kind of mouthy jocks who were allowed to dominate the dorks in high school because their personal goals, winning games to advance their careers, complemented the principal's goal, putting the school on the happy map.

The rest of his article is a screed against college basketball. Good points are mixed with laughable posturing. Logic is in short supply.

Bobby Knight is a “bully” and a “symptom” of the problem in college ball even though “his players actually graduated at far higher rates than the national average for big-time athletes and few of them complained about their treatment.”

Lipsyte tosses the R-word around freely which further illustrates that for many liberals “racism” has become a synonym for “stuff I don’t like.”

Fuzzy features or exposés or straight game detail are okay, but you can't weave the systemic corruption, commercialization, and racism into every story--and yet once you stop the stories aren't true anymore. How many times can you write that 56 percent of varsity basketball players are black compared to 7 percent of the student bodies of the schools they represent? Those numbers are from the last time I wrote it, in the early 1990s. Watching games now, I often see eight black players on the floor being cheered by a sea of white (often painted) faces.

He sees that as evidence of systemic racism. Yet, if white fans demanded white players, that, too, would be racist. Not long ago the sports scribblers were ga-ga over the movie “Glory Road”. The victory of an all black team from a mostly white school was claimed as a great milestone in civil rights. Today, according to Lipsyte, such teams are racist. Like I said, logic is in short supply.

Lipsyte has a good point about the exploitation of athletes but his analysis is colored by a Marxian view of commerce. He acts as though college arenas are filled solely because of the players. He dreams of a time that the Masses rise and get their fair share.

That seemed like an invitation to tell him my longtime Final Four fantasy: Just before the title game, the opposing captains demand $50,000 per player from the TV producer. No cash, no game.

Nice thought. Doubt if it will work. For one thing, most of the players would have to go along. Why would a superstar waste his shot on a national stage for a measly $50,000? He will make many times that when he turns pro. Why would the less talented toss away a shot at glory for $50,000? It’s not a life-changing amount of money.

Lipsyte writes as though college arenas are filled solely because of the players. He completely ignores the relationship between fan interest and institutional loyalties. Cameron Arena is filled because it is Duke basketball not just winning basketball. You could take the top 20 players out of the ACC and have them form the Great Ballers Collective. They could tour the Carolinas and display their awesome talent. They would be lucky to fill high school gyms and clear gas money from the gate. Meanwhile, Duke and North Carolina would still play in front of sold out houses.

He also has a weird grasp of the dynamics on college campuses.

No matter who you think causes the problems here--fans, players, boosters, coaches, presidents, or shoe salespeople -- the only group that could begin to solve them are the faculty of the schools in question, at once victims and accomplices when it comes to sports. They are intimidated by the jock bullies, easily bought off by them, and protective of their own little campus deals--why risk blowing the whistle on the altered or eased grades of athletes when someone could knock off your summer-in-Prague Kafka scam?

(Again with the mean athlete thing, what exactly is his problem?)

Lipsyte worries that student-athletes are not real students. Somehow, he expects that the faculty will want to change that for the benefit of the players. The behavior of the Duke’s Gang of 88 makes me wonder. The lacrosse team was made up of accomplished athletes and good students. Many on the faculty have used Nifong’s frame up as an excuse to de-emphasize athletics at Duke. Their main concern is not with athletes who are poor students; they have a problem with good students who are also good athletes.

I suspect that Lipsyte does, too. All his false piety about the exploitation of big time college sports sounds like a convenient way to get back at the jocks who traumatized him high school.

The New York Times actually gave this guy a sports column. I can only imagine what the water cooler chatter was like when he and Selena Roberts got going.

Important article

Terrorists Targeting Students: The Kids are not alright

Duke lacrosse: Columnist's silence is sickening

John in Carolina looks at Ruth Sheehan and her role in starting this witch hunt.

Sheehan's opportunity

Shoot! They fired the wrong guy

Theismann blindsided by ESPN

The last thing Joe Theismann expected when he showed up for a meeting Friday in New York was that it would be his final one as a "Monday Night Football" analyst.

Why, oh why, did they keep Kornheiser?

A sad commentary on out junk food pop culture

Real genius loses out to celebrities

If John Backus had been a buxom model who married an old guy, or if he had been a cartoon, would you know of him?

Or, put another way, if Anna Nicole Smith had invented the Fortran computer programming language, would her death have been widespread news?

I resisted weighing in after Smith died last month. It seemed pointless to add to the ceaseless coverage of her sad life. But Backus died recently, and I got to thinking why I knew details about Smith but knew little of the computer genius who changed our lives.

Important read

A President All Alone

With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress -- not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment.

See also:

GWB and his MBA redux

Jim Webb's gun

Hypocrisy is bi-partisan.

No. Not Senator Webb.

Remember how right-wingers excoriated the Gang of 88 and the New York Times for presuming guilt in the Duke lacrosse case? Remember how we criticized the rush to judgement? Remember when we were opposed to scoring political points based on an incomplete investigation?

Yeah. I remember, too. So why can't they?

Newsbusters on Selena Roberts

NY Times Sports Columnist Slurs Innocent Duke Lacrosse Players, Again

Fighting the revisionists: The Swift Boaters

On Reliable Sources this weekend, Jeff Jarvis referred to the Swift Boaters as "obnoxious." It was just an aside and so he did not have to explain what he meant or offer any evidence.

This attitude is becoming the conventional wisdom within the MSM. The Swifties were bad. End of story.

In light of that, this post is a useful refresher.

Swift Boating the Swift Boaters

Anger chic

Good George Will column:

Anger Is All The Rage

HT: Betsy's Page

As usual Tom Wolfe had something interesting to say on the subject:

From the outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseperable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down on the rest of humanity. And it did not cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: 'Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.'

That helps to explain why people are willing to rant, but why is there an "appreciative audience" for such displays?

Is it that they make for better television and more quotable punditry? How large is that appreciative audience, anyway? Is this another case where the margins get the attention while the middle is ignored?

More "fake but accurate" journalism

I'm shocked to see that it is from the New York Times. Sara Corbett and Selena Roberts, birds of a feather. Always ready to choose the useful lie over the inconvenient fact.

Say it ain't so!

You mean to tell me that the Chinese character for "crisis" is not written by combining the symbols for "danger" and "opportunity"?

Shoot, i've liked that bit ever since i read it in Kissinger's memoirs. I've even been known to repeat it. Now, i find out that it is just another one of those myths and lies that float around in the culture. I'm going to miss this one.

Duke lacrosse: Bigots with big vocabularies

From the very beginning of the case there were those who tried to use the events in Durham in the same way that racist websites use crimes committed by minorities. Both use sensational headlines to drive home their ideological point.

When neo-nazis use the "Wichita Massacre" to promote their racist views, thinking people recognize their flawed logic. Paula Zahn does not give them a respectful hearing on her show. Yet those who used the lacrosse case to underline the evils of "white skin privilege" and the "misogynistic attitudes of the patriarchy" were sought out as commentators in the early days of the Duke case.

How can the same method be despicable in one case and perfectly respectable in another?

D. W. Griffith's lurid depictions of black rapacity in "Birth of a Nation" is a permanent stain on his reputation as a filmmaker. Wendy Murphy's lurid fictions have not kept her off TV.

At Duke, a criminal investigation became the launching pad for hundreds of sociological animadversions. That was apparently A-OK. The New York Times was happy to let Selena Roberts weigh in. Dahlia Lithwick in Slate fretted that "the Duke lacrosse team's rape scandal cuts too deeply into this country's most tender places: race and class and gender "but she seemed to accept that the punditry on those issues was as valid as the criminal investigation.

Apparently, though, you need a special decoder ring to play the pundit game. Back in 1995 Newt Gingrich tried his hand at extrapolating from specific crimes to sociological generalizations. His musings generated howls of outrage.

At least Gingrich was discussing a real crime and the actual criminals. With the lacrosse case a torrent of words poured forth about the deeper societal meaning of events that never happened. Then, like a snake swallowing its tail, the hoax enablers used these sweeping conclusions about privilege, widespread racism, and endemic sexism to attack those who questioned the hoax.

Andrew Cohen of the Washington Post, for example, dismissed the evidence of innocence last year and maintained that Nifong still had a strong case. Why did anyone think otherwise? They were bigots, of course:

I suspect race and money and access to the media have a lot to do with it. I have often wondered how media coverage might be different -- how the cynical, skeptical skew would turn -- if the alleged victim in the case were white and the alleged defendants black.

Cohen's piece was a prime example of the totalitarian echoes that sounded throughout the commentary on the case. The accused were excoriated for who they were-white, male, privileged. Those who brought up inconvenient facts about DNA or alibis were quickly accused of being rape apologists, paid mouthpieces, or racists.

UPDATE: Selena Roberts just does not know when to fold. She helps make my point with her latest pathetic and hateful column on the Duke case.

There is a tendency to conflate the alleged crime at the Duke lacrosse team kegger on March 13, 2006, with the irrefutable culture of misogyny, racial animus and athlete entitlement that went unrestrained that night.

"Irrefutable"? More like systematically refuted. Each point of her litany grew out of the lurid reports in the early days of the hoax. Subsequent investigations have shown that they were wildly off the mark. Yet, here she is, still trying to sell the same old snake oil.

Hey, i wonder if i can blame her problems with the truth on the "culture of dishonesty" the prevails at the NY Times? Seems to me that there is more evidence of that (Jayson Blair, Walter Duranty) than there is against the lax team.

See also:

From the cone of silence to Emily Litella

That Ace is a really smart guy

Incidentally, it's this habit of Sullivan's -- eternally engaging in a "philosophical inquiry" that seems to be little more than a childish attempt to discover "objective rules" that favor him over his opponents -- that makes his thinking so muddied, and made his book sell so poorly.

And that's the real reason The Corner and, yeah, even Instapundit are so reluctant to toss Andrew Sullivan links. No matter what the ostensible subject, he never seems to be discussing anything except Andrew Sullivan.

RTWT

Here's hoping

If only all American Idol fans would starve themselves to death. The average IQ of the world would go up by at least 25 points.

From Jessica's Well

HT: Scott Chaffin


I've never watched AI, but i am now intrigued by the whole "vote for the worst" effort. I wonder if they can pull it off.

Novak on the Plame hearings


Novak's column on the Plame hearings is outstanding.

Was She Covert?

He raises issues that the White House could have made three years ago:

Waxman and Democratic colleagues did not ask these pertinent questions: Had not Plame been outed years ago by a Soviet agent? Was she not on an administrative, not operational, track at Langley? How could she be covert if, in public view, she drove to work each day at Langley? What about comments to me by then CIA spokesman Bill Harlow that Plame never would be given another foreign assignment? What about testimony to the FBI that her CIA employment was common knowledge in Washington?

But more to the point there is this, which highlights once again, the odd nature of the relationship between this White house and CIA:

Instead of posing such questions, Waxman said flatly that Plame was covert and cited Hayden as proof. Hayden's endorsement of Waxman's statement astounded Republicans whose queries about her had been rebuffed by the agency. That confirmed Republican suspicions that Hayden is too close to Democrats.

For more on that point see:

Do we know there's a war on?

He used to be a Steeler

Now he's part of America's Team

Former Steeler Staat deployed to Iraq

Duke lacrosse: The arrogance of the unaccountable

See Durham in Wonderland and John in Carolina