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More Outrage in Duke Lacrosse Case

by Rush Limbaugh - Jan 15,2007


RUSH: Valparaiso, Indiana, and Dave. Thank you for waiting sir, we’re back to you now and I appreciate it.
CALLER: It is a pleasure and an honor to be on with you Rush. I just wanted to let you know about some of the things our university is doing to celebrate Martin Luther King Day for diversity. Our topic of discussion this year is feminism in race relations. You’re going to love this one. We had a speaker, the cofounder of the Black Think Tank out in San Francisco, Dr. Julia Hare. Luckily I had a pen and was able to write down a couple of her comments this morning during our convocation, which I was required to attend by my English class. In talking about empowering women, she forgave the mothers of Donald Rumsfeld and Clarence Thomas for giving birth to them.
RUSH: (Laughing.)
CALLER: She praised women who ignore the men in their lives, and said that women make better CEOs than men, at which time I turned to my friend right next to me and told him about the Queen Bee effect that you were talking about a couple of weeks ago.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: Yeah, and it goes on. We have several possible classes that we can go to for the rest of the day, including the No Child Left Behind Act and how underachieving minority students are affected.
RUSH: Well, look, you know, this is hilarious in one sense. It’s also frustrating. It’s a great example of how the left has corrupted academia. I’m going to have more on this when we get to the Duke lacrosse case. I don’t know if you?ve seen that press conference on Saturday afternoon where the North Carolina attorney general announced that he’s taking the case over and assigning two prosecutors in his office to handle it. Nifong wanted to be recused, Nifong wanted out, and fine, Mike, you’re gone. But I’m getting ahead of myself here, but they said, (doing impression) ?Well, you know, we don’t know anything about this case. I wish we could promise a speedy conclusion, but we can’t promise anything. We’re starting from scratch. I mean we haven’t seen the case file. We’re not going to get the case files ’til next week. We can’t rule out anything. We can’t rule out rape charges.?
Oh, okay, so we’re looking at another year of this, perhaps? The parents of these three guys are facing another year or whatever length of time it is of legal fees to start all over again? There’s no case! You know, this is one of the things that just frustrates me about the legal system. This case is not about the evidence because there isn’t any. This case is about the seriousness of the charge. So some stripper comes forward now with three or four different versions of what happened to her that night and we’ve got charges based on that because the charge is the only thing that matters. Not the veracity of the accuser, not the legitimacy. No, the nature of the charge, the nature of the evidence here is irrelevant. I can’t believe these people. I know from a legal standpoint they have to say certain things, but I can’t believe they don’t know anything about this case. I can’t believe they do not watch television or read the local paper in Raleigh.
I’m going to tell you what, 60 Minutes had this DNA guy on last night, the lab guy, and he admitted again that he and Nifong withheld exculpatory evidence, and Nifong even after he knew the exculpatory evidence existed, was out there still trashing these three guys. I’ll tell you, if I’m an American parent, and I have an athlete being recruited to Duke, I say no way. In the first place, I don’t want to have to send them to school with this kind of a faculty, with this kind of a local law enforcement agency, and I don’t want to have to start saving millions of dollars here for legal fees if some wacko comes along and makes some unsubstantiated charge that happens to fill a liberal political template and so everybody accepts it and believes it.
What happened at that campus with those three guys? They were walking through campus after this all happened with big banners saying castrate them, suspend them, expel them or what have you. Can you imagine if anybody had done that with a group of gay students or female students or whatever? This was all tolerated. You know, so of course I’m not surprised you’re going to have some lunatic show up on Martin Luther King Day doing a little convocation here on feminism and the civil rights movement and what have you, and then say she forgave the mothers of Rumsfeld and whoever else, Cheney, Clarence Thomas? The thing you have to understand here, these people are not trying to be funny. They mean this stuff.


BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Ted, Pocatello, Idaho, you’re next on the EIB Network, hello.
CALLER: Yes, thanks for taking my call, and the only thing I wanted to say was I wanted to make a comment about that Duke lacrosse rape case. The rape charge has been dropped and some more charges have been filed, but I was just saying everybody trying to act like these people are so — these guys are athletes. Now, I’m an ex-athlete myself, they’re nothing but some athletes, and they —
RUSH: Hey, hey, hey, hey, do me a favor, Ted, because my hearing, if you would slow down just a little.
CALLER: Okay. I would —
RUSH: Last thing I heard you say was these guys are nothing but athletes, and you said you’re an athlete yourself.
CALLER: Yes. I’m an athlete myself and I can’t see why these guys are probably guilty just on assumption, excluding DNA, but then you have to have DNA to really convict someone, but what I’m trying to say is these guys are athletes, and they have two strippers from a different nationality coming to a fraternity house or a lacrosse sports team home, you know —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — a lot of athletes around there. And these girls are strippers. You know they’re going to make racial comments, you know they’re going to try something like that, they’d act like these guys are —
RUSH: Hold it. Wait, wait, I’m a little confused. Are you speaking in defense of these guys, or are you criticizing them? I’m not quite getting where you’re going here.
CALLER: What I am doing is saying that I’m criticizing the press for — not only the press, but for everyone’s trying to exonerate these people just because the rape charge has been dropped. Now, the girl —
RUSH: Well, that’s not just why. You mentioned the DNA. They found DNA for half of North Carolina but none of it for these three guys.
CALLER: True. True. So therefore her stories conflict —
RUSH: Well, she’s changed it three or four times.
CALLER: Yes, they have.
RUSH: Nifong never spoke to the lawyers or the kids, and he only had his investigators speak to the accuser in the past four weeks or so. Nifong is facing serious disbarment charges over the way he handled this. I’ll tell you, you know what, the best way to understand this, let me go through what I’ve got here on this, because I do think this is a case, Ted, where the nature of the evidence is irrelevant and the seriousness of the charge is what is guiding everything here. I don’t know these three kids. I have read some stuff that Reade Seligmann has said in interviews, and it sounds to me like this young man is pretty well adjusted and well connected and together, despite all of this, and their families seem like they’re good, decent people, too.
You talk about a stripper from a different nationality came over, what you have to understand is you can look at this two ways. Maybe they’re looking at this without color in mind, maybe these guys didn’t care, maybe they’re not racists. You know, who is it that’s noticing the skin color here? Nobody ever mentions this. Nobody ever mentions that this lady — a-hem — came to the house in Durham willfully, and at a price she determined to take off her clothes. She set the price, she shows up to do a stripping routine. If everybody should know these are athletes are hooligans, she should know it, she shows up. Had she never considered the risks of this behavior? It’s one thing to strip on a pole in a bar with 15,000 bouncers around you, but if you’re going to hire yourself out, you have to know the risks involved. Maybe what they ought to do in North Carolina is make strippers who visit private homes illegal and all of that. Save the dancers from themselves. We need laws to protect the strippers because the strippers aren’t doing enough to protect themselves.
I’ve got a story here, I’m going to take a break here and I’m going to come back and go through this. I’ve got a column by William Anderson from the Lew Rockwell Institute, LewRockwell.com that is just informative and powerful as it can be. I don’t know if you saw the 60 Minutes piece last night with these families, but whatever you thought of the President Bush appearance with Scott Pelley, this piece on the Duke lacrosse case was the meat of the show.


BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, Duke lacrosse case, let’s get in, get it, and get out. By <a target=new href=”http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson164.html”>William Anderson</a>, LewRockwell.com. ?Even though the criminal case against the three Duke lacrosse players has not yet been deep-sixed, the lawsuits against Duke University have begun. The family of Kyle Dowd, a lacrosse player who was graduated last spring, filed against the university and a faculty member, Kim Curtis –? we <a href=”/home/daily/site_010507/content/america_s_anchorman.member.html#0011″>told you</a> about this babe ?– claiming that Curtis failed Dowd in retaliation for his being on the lacrosse team. Curtis, who is a visiting professor in Duke?s political science department, has a reputation for being a leftist ideologue, and was one of the 88 signers of the infamous ?social disaster? advertisement in the Duke Chronicle that thanked the protesters who acted in the aftermath of the charges levied against the lacrosse players. Furthermore, Curtis actively participated in a number of rallies in which protesters held up signs calling for the lacrosse players to be ?castrated,? while other signs declared: ?Get a conscience, not a lawyer,? and others just declared: ?Confess!?
?Her postings on a community web site left no doubt that she believed her students either committed rape or at the very least were covering for the alleged rapists. To gain a picture of what the Duke University lacrosse players experienced last spring as they walked through a literal gauntlet on their way to class, envision the following things: Students holding signs declaring: ?Castrate?; speakers at regular rallies calling for their expulsion; students screaming slogans at them; the New Black Panthers came to Durham and said they were going to the Duke University dorms where lacrosse players lived in order to get ?confessions? from them; a poster with the pictures of the white lacrosse players calling for them to ?please come forward? and tell police who allegedly raped the accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, was distributed and posted all over Duke?s campus, along with a ?fact sheet? that we know today had no ?facts? that were correct.
?For the time being, people are trying to make this a ?free speech? issue, but the situation is much deeper than that. Each year, college campuses all over the country host rallies such as ?take back the night? marches against rape, and ?stop the hate,? and the like. Many of the topics covered in these rallies are controversial and clearly people are not in agreement, but for the most part they are general in nature. What happens, however, when ideologies meet specific accusations? To use the words of the 88 Duke signees, one has a ?social disaster.? (A group called ?Liestoppers,? put its own advertisement in the Raleigh News & Observer last summer to point out that the real ?social disaster? is the attempt to railroad innocent people into prison.)
“That is where the real liability for Duke University begins. For all of the talk about free speech, Duke University also has a contractual obligation to its students, and that includes keeping them from being physically and verbally harassed by faculty and students. Assume that the objects of this wrath are homosexuals, and they are met with signs that mock them and have anti-gay slurs, or call for their sexual organs to be cut off. Furthermore, assume that the protest is not against homosexuality in general, but rather aimed specifically at certain males on campus who are gay. The liability that Duke would face in the previously-mentioned example is the same liability the university undoubtedly faces now.?
I will say this again, as I said earlier in the program. Every college basketball recruiter in the country should be showing the parents of prospective Duke players the interview that aired last night on 60 Minutes. Look at these parents of these kids. They’re pretty gifted. They’re smart athletes. You want them to spend the next four years of their life at Duke facing this kind of liberalism run amuck? Just in case, do you have a spare million hanging around to spend on attorneys potentially? The fact is that Durham and Duke, they’re cesspools. They’ve been for decades. There’s no tax base in Durham without that school. Now, this piece by Lew Rockwell — and we’ll link to it at RushLimbaugh.com — it’s just one guy’s opinion, William Anderson’s opinion. But if you read the whole thing it methodically lines out the incredible liability that Duke University, Nifong, and Durham have.
This is written before anybody knew what was revealed on 60 Minutes last night, that these boys and their families were threatened with their lives in the courtroom. As one of the mothers said last night on 60 Minutes, ?Every parent of a son in this country should be terrified by this case.? Especially, ladies and gentlemen, if they are white. As I say, this incident occurred off campus, not during standard school hours. It really wasn’t a Duke issue. The players just happened to attend school there. I don’t know, do you think they called up, ?Hi, we’re on the Duke lacrosse team, we want you to come over and strip for us, Crystal.? ?Okay, what’s the price?? They pay the price, she shows up. It is the school and the media and community that has linked this incident to the university. And why?
Because Duke is internationally known primarily for basketball. The media went nuts with this because it fulfills their template. Look it all the rich ingredients we have here: race, sex, wealth, poverty, adolescence, privilege, alcohol, a prestigious and famous university, athletics, criminal behavior, politics. The only thing missing here as far as the media was concerned was a murder scene. This wasn’t about the nature of the evidence. This was about the seriousness of the charge, the nature of the charge, because liberals, whenever something like this is charged, automatically think it’s true based on their own rampant guilt. These guys’ lives have been ruined. If they did it, they should go to jail. If they didn’t do it, they still have been jailed to a certain degree. I hope they sue. I hope they sue Nifong, the investigators, the university, and everybody else. A civil case.