Duke Professors Free to Smear

While it appears the Duke rape case has unraveled and the unctuous Mike Nifong is headed for disbarment, those who sit in their lofty ivory towers are still free to smear with impunity.

John Podhoretz reminds us that academic freedom means there really never is any price to pay when you slander people.

Yet some of the most disgraceful actors in this case will go unpunished.

I'm referring to a huge cohort of the professors at the top-flight university attended by the three unjustly accused men.

Some 88 of them - more than 10 percent of the entire Duke professoriat - engaged in a shocking rush to judgment in the weeks following the party where the accuser falsely alleged she had been raped.

They signed an ad declaring they were "turning up the volume at a moment when some of the most vulnerable among us are being asked to quiet down."

Their shameful conduct helped create the lynch-mob atmosphere that tempted and seduced DA Nifong to believe he could ride an indictment of the three young men to political victory in the Democratic primary that took place only weeks after he charged them.

It is not too much to say that many of the adults at Duke, who should be stewards for their students, actually wanted the false rape story to be true because it fulfilled their ideological predilections.

Since the academic work of those who organized the ad centers around the notion that the white male power structure subjugates and violates all those who are neither white nor male, the case was actually a dream come true for them.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Fox reports all charges will be dropped.

Will Bush Pardon Libby?

John Podhoretz thinks he will. I hope he does. Let the unhinged left caterwaul all they want. We didn't hear squat from them when Bill Clinton pardoned drug dealers, terrorists and fugitives.

In his last days as president, George W. Bush will pardon Scooter Libby - that is, if the convictions secured yesterday don't get overturned on appeal.

For political reasons, Bush can't pardon Libby earlier than that. His responsibilities as head of the Republican Party, heading into an election year, would preclude such action.

But Bush won't leave office without issuing that pardon.

Why? Because if Bush fails to pardon Libby, he will implicitly be accepting the contention that Scooter Libby was part of a White House conspiracy at the highest levels to destroy the career of a CIA agent whose husband had proved Bush & Co. had lied us into the Iraq War.