I know this is John’s beat, but this item in the Times yesterday caught my attention:
In January 2011, Joe Paterno learned prosecutors were investigating his longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky for sexually assaulting young boys….
That same month, Mr. Paterno, the football coach at Penn State, began negotiating with his superiors to amend his contract, with the timing something of a surprise because the contract was not set to expire until the end of 2012, according to university documents and people with knowledge of the discussions. By August, Mr. Paterno and the university’s president, both of whom were by then embroiled in the Sandusky investigation, had reached an agreement.
Mr. Paterno was to be paid $3 million at the end of the 2011 season if he agreed it would be his last. Interest-free loans totaling $350,000 that the university had made to Mr. Paterno over the years would be forgiven as part of the retirement package. He would also have the use of the university’s private plane and a luxury box at Beaver Stadium for him and his family to use over the next 25 years.
The university’s full board of trustees was kept in the dark about the arrangement until November, when Mr. Sandusky was arrested….
Anyone care to defend Paterno on this one? PSU? Best keep this in mind then:
The university’s full board of trustees was kept in the dark about the arrangement until November, when Mr. Sandusky was arrested and the contract arrangements, along with so much else at Penn State, were upended. Mr. Paterno was fired, two of the university’s top officials were indicted in connection with the scandal, and the trustees, who held Mr. Paterno’s financial fate in their hands, came under verbal assault from the coach’s angry supporters.
Board members who raised questions about whether the university ought to go forward with the payments were quickly shut down, according to two people with direct knowledge of the negotiations.
In the end, the board of trustees — bombarded with hate mail and threatened with a defamation lawsuit by Mr. Paterno’s family — gave the family virtually everything it wanted, with a package worth roughly $5.5 million. Documents show that the board even tossed in some extras that the family demanded, like the use of specialized hydrotherapy massage equipment for Mr. Paterno’s wife at the university’s Lasch Building, where Mr. Sandusky had molested a number of his victims.
I’m reading Chris Haye’s Twilight of the Elites just now — highly recommended btw, from a just over half way perspective — and one of his key points is that disintegration of a viable polity or society is driven in part by the discovery that those at the top play be utterly different rules than the rest of us.
Yup.
One more thing: the claim routinely made by academics — and especially by the leaders of the Academy — is that in a complex and here-and-now society, universities teach and embody not just knowledge, but values — or rather, an approach to living that makes it possible to lead an ethical life, one of value. Obviously, everyone reading this can come up with examples in which such claims are honored only in the breach. But still, that’s the point of the liberal arts, and have been claimed as such since the days of the trivium and quadrivium (and before).
That means to me that there really is a higher obligation here — just as there was and is for, say, the Catholic Church when confronted by the abomination of child rape. The Church conspicuously failed in its duties to its own claims of virtue, and it continues to do so, which is one of the reasons why someone like me, not a member of the faith, so deeply resents any assertion of moral authority in politics by the princes of the church.
In that context Penn State/Paterno scandal only makes it easier to lump the universities in with every other failed institution in our society — at a time when the importance of knowledge and its interpretation/application to the great problems we face has never been greater.
Hence, it seems to me that Penn State needs demonstrate that it’s not just another Lehman/Boston Archdiocese. How to do that? I don’t really know — I haven’t thought hard, nor talked to people who really understand how institutional cultures change. Suggestions?
Image: Francisco de Goya, The Great He-Goat or Witches Sabbath, 1821-1823 (worth the click through for seeing it at a readable size.)
Steeplejack
The money quote in that story is at the bottom:
Compare and contrast that with any number of cities running into fiscal problems and reducing or eliminating previously negotiated salaries and pensions for city employees.
So true that “disintegration of a viable polity or society is driven in part by the discovery that those at the top play by utterly different rules than the rest of us.”
Robin G.
I’m seriously at the point where I want to punch the remaining Paterno supporters in the face. Starting to think they’d act the same way if it had been *Paterno* molesting boys instead of Sandusky.
I’ve got a friend who was at Penn State in 2001, and went to football games. He’s said (only half-jokingly) that he’s tempted to sue the university for using his money to help fund child rape, if only to get back the cost of the tickets. That’s something I’d love to see.
Gin & Tonic
And this is a significant part of what contributed to the decline and fall of the Soviet Union. In the late 1940’s and through the 1950’s, there was still a sense of shared sacrifice given the immense suffering and massive death toll they had endured in the war, but once the top Party cadres started really taking advantage of things, building their lavish dachas, buying Western goods in “dollar stores” while the rank-and-file would stand in line for hours to get into stores with empty shelves, the resentment really started to build. It took a while, but once the wheels started coming off the bus, it was quick.
Villago Delenda Est
@Steeplejack:
“Contracts are contracts” only when applied to guys like Paterno, or investment bankers expecting their huge bonuses for losing billions.
Contracts are worthless scraps of paper when it comes to pensions for the middle class, Medicare, health care for Veterans, and lord knows how many other examples you’d care to peruse.
We need tumbrels. We need them now. It’s time to start setting a few examples for the rest of the 1%.
pragmatism
Bill James, self styled contrarian that he is, will probably say that the renegotiation was unrelated. He already uncorked the “males showering with boys was common 40 years ago” defense for Sandusky. Some of his idiocy here http://deadspin.com/5926087/bill-james-showering-with-boys-was-quite-common-in-america-40-years-ago?tag=penn-state-scandal
Evolving Deep Southerner
Well, the Freeh Report was hardly a whitewash. So there’s something.
BethanyAnne
Twilight of the Elites is really very good. 2nd the recommendation.
Quincy
@Steeplejack: Great point. This should be contrasted directly with the Pennsylvania town that cut all govt employees down to minimum wage.
BethanyAnne
If the hippies and the tea party ever get over our mutual hatred of one another, and realize that we’re all being screwed by the same people… watch out. We’ll see some motherfuckers hanging from lampposts.
Spatula
Weighed against the gazillion dollars Penn State MADE during the Paterno years as a direct effect of the football program’s ticket sales, television contracts, bowl appearance fees, concessions, collateral, apparel and gear, and on and on and on, and the many ways in which that money funded other sports at the school, and the fact that Paterno donated millions of dollars back to the university, the $5.5 million and rights to a hot tub are a pittance.
PSU is reaping the whirlwind on this situation, there is no need for this hysteria. Harping on minutia like this, and implying that the university is not simply another facet of a very sick society but is somehow a special/rare case, does a disservice to the social order.
Pedophilia and all kinds of other dark secrets exist at every level of society. Seems to me the insane levels of hysteria and over the top vindictiveness toward PSU will only drive those secrets more deeply underground.
All the top officials connected with this have been fired and will face trial. Paterno is dead. Sandusky is destroyed and in prison for the rest of his life, the victims will receive compensation, enough to carry them thru the rest of their lives if spent wisely, the football program is humiliated, embarrassed, and tarnished; its recruiting will suffer for many years. PSU fans are mortified, even the JoPa statue will likely come down.
Kind of a big deal has been made of this.
Jesus, that really seems enough to make the point.
Amir Khalid
Here’s what I don’t get. Joe Paterno was fired. My own experience of employment contracts is that getting fired means the contract is terminated: you forfeit any contractual benefits. How come his heirs still got all that money and the freebies too?
burnspbesq
@BethanyAnne:
You do remember, I presume, how long it took the Catholics and Protestants in Ulster to figure out that England was the real enemy.
Spatula
Also, too: It is beyond hilarious that Levenson is waxing moralistic about the horror of the elites getting away with things, when it is Barack Obama who set the ultimate example in that area by allowing the elitest of the elites, the Bush administration, off the hook for mass war crimes because, well,…look forward, not back and all…
Compared to those folks, Paterno is an amateur.
So all of you torch carriers get back to me when you can get your moral outrage tumescent over Obama’s decision and Bush’s crimes.
Yutsano
@Amir Khalid: Ahh…but contracts have termination clauses. Since premature termination involves a breach of the employment contract the contract itself describes the consequences if there is a breach by either party. It gets very meta.
eemom
@Amir Khalid:
because they claimed the termination was wrongful. And at the time they had the upper hand to force a settlement, in part because (1) the termination was handled so poorly and (2) the Freeh report hadn’t come out yet.
BethanyAnne
@burnspbesq: Yeah. Damn tribalism.
WereBear
It was all deliberate.
After their stunning defeat in 1964, the Right Wing decided, like Hitler in the bunker, that if they couldn’t make the world comply with their wishes, they would destroy it.
They created their own, false, institutions to muddy the clear waters of moral purpose and logical thought.
Their own faith-based schooling and universities and science. Their own think tanks and magazines and pundits and propaganda channel. The Prosperity Gospel, in religion, to put a moral sheen over the whole stinking mess.
It’s bad money driving out good. So now other institutions can find their moral compasses swinging wildly as the base metals of this deliberate dilution and corruption crowd ever closer.
What makes any manager decide they can’t risk admitting they have a problem? An environment where there isn’t any leeway, a bunch of screamers claiming “zero tolerance” is the best policy and “perfection” is an attainable goal.
In the case of both the Catholic Church and Penn State, it helped that media and government and the followers who prefer denial were all eager to aid and abet; to pretend it is not really happening; to encourage them to think that covering it up is the same as it never happening; and that no one would ever find out.
JoeShabadoo
How this goes in any other job:
“Hey Boss, I want to retire this year. How about you give me shitloads of money and retirement benefits?”
“Are you shitting me? What does your contract say? That’s exactly what you get.”
How the hell can you “negotiate” for anything when your bargaining position is “I’m leaving anyway.” unless it is hush money?
burnspbesq
@Amir Khalid:
Somebody made a judgment that litigating with the Paterno family was an incremental headache that the university didn’t need at that time. Easy to second guess with the benefit of hindsight, but a common response in such situations.
Villago Delenda Est
@BethanyAnne:
The problem is that the teatards suffer from cognitive dissonance that is enhanced by outright racism.
The tea bagger movement was created in reaction to Obama’s election. Before that time, they had no problem with the deserting coward spending like a poet on payday, and charging it to their grandkids. After all, their hero, St. Ronaldus Magnus, proved that deficits don’t matter.
They say their movement is about economics, but that’s a tissue of lies to cover up their real issue: the end of a white majority in this country.
burnspbesq
@Spatula:
Spoken like a true blue Nittany Lion. Get a grip.
geg6
@Evolving Deep Southerner:
Yes, it was harsh and a real wakeup call, if all the shit raining down since November hasn’t been enough.
I will say that I give President Erickson some credit for transparency since his reluctant elevation to the presidency. And changes are already being made and implemented, well before the Freeh Report came out. We have a long way to go, but the faculty and staff are committed to doing everything we can to make sure this never happens again. And the administrations at the satellite campuses are beyond horrified and mortified, if my campus’ Chancellor is any indication.
The one recommendation that Freeh has in the report that really strikes a good note for myself and our co-workers is to remove HR from the purview of the VP for Business and Finance. This creates a huge conflict of interest, as illustrated by this whole awful affair. I’d also like Police Services to be separated from Business and Finance, too. Too many hiring, compensation, discipline, and law enforcement issues are being decided by those whose main responsibility is profit and loss. That may be fine in the business world (but I don’t think so), but I agree that universities have special obligations to their students and the public and these conflicts make meeting those obligations impossible.
RD
@Spatula:
You know who else had a 100,000+ seat stadium in the middle of nowhere?
scav
I was struck the same way as Tom, but with the additional observation that even supporters of PSU should be concerned by the simple structural observation that institutions within the University are apparently still not in completely control of themselves in that they’re taking decisions without being given complete information and then barrelling on irregardless. That seems to me to be structural, deepset problems in governance, over and above the details of what they’re misgoverning about.
burnspbesq
Meanwhile, the NCAA puts the mighty Caltech Beavers on three years’ probation because athletes followed the same liberal drop-add rules as the rest of the student body and occasionally competed while carrying less than a full course load.
http://www.latimes.com/sports/college/basketball/la-sp-plaschke-cal-tech-20120715,0,4643830.column
scav
@geg6: Good luck, as I just said, you do have issues. Weren’t the Police under the same Business End of things? That struck me as insanely wrong.
Mnemosyne
@Spatula:
Aww, still sad that your prediction that all the charges were going to be dropped didn’t come true, Timmy?
Just can’t stop that knee-jerk reflex to defend pedophiles and their protectors, can you?
passerby
“…contracts are contracts…” PSU is as tone deaf as ever.
This morning I read a good joke (that really isn’t a joke) about PSU deciding to keep the Paterno statue:
The university announced today that they will keep the Joe Paterno statue but, will have it turned around so that it looks the other way.
Steeplejack
@Amir Khalid:
Good point. I had that in the back of my mind when I was making my previous comment but forgot to put it in. Apparently apoplexy was constricting my cranial blood flow.
Time and again we see some some bigwig do something dreadfully incompetent–or just dreadful–and he gets to resign “to spend more time with his family” or “pursue other interests”–and he gets to keep his sweet severance package. Down here in the trenches, you get fired, for whatever reason–or no reason–and you’re lucky to get two weeks’ pay, if anything.
Ash Can
Shorter Spatula: “So what if a few kids got raped? Obama’s as bad as Bush! Priorities, people!”
BethanyAnne
@Villago Delenda Est: Yeps, I think the Tea folk are just a rebranding of the poor people that vote Republican. Still, I wish we could find a way to make common cause with them, and hang a few bankers. We can go back to hating one another later, promise.
scav
@Ash Can: < continuation > No problems anywhere can be solved until I get the president I want! Stop repairing your cars and vacuuming carpets! Close down useless actions in HRs everywhere, someone I don’t approve of won an election! < /continuation >
Eric U.
They are just cutting checks to everyone that might have a claim from the football staff, $4mil as I recall. McQueary cashed the check and is threatening to sue. Spanier still has a job at the university, although he’s on sabbatical. I can’t imagine why he hasn’t actually resigned in shame. If I manage to meet him I’m going to ask.
meanwhile, there are no raises or promotions for the rest of us at PSU. This goes to the extreme of not allowing postdocs to take a real faculty-level job.
Heliopause
It is absurd to expect inert, hierarchical institutions to hew to a “higher obligation”, and utterly to be expected that individuals in those institutions will act similarly to how Paterno acted. Large, inert, hierarchical institutions need to be controlled or eliminated, if you’re waiting for these institutions to be peopled by saints and angels you’ll be waiting forever.
Nutella
@scav:
@geg6:
This story about the PSU board reminds me of the recent story about the UVA board: The board that is solely in charge of making decisions for an institution is presented with a fait accompli by the management (that supposedly reports to the board) or by one board member (who supposedly has one vote) and meekly submits.
What this shows is that these boards of directors are shams whose sole purpose is to cover up the real management structures.
Both universities are teaching and embodying a corrupt and secret power structure. I hope that the exposure of the crimes protected by the PSU power structure result in the changes to university management geg6 mentions and ALSO the destruction of the secret power structure that outranks the board. The details of this particular corrupt deal need to be used root out the people who have been secretly running PSU and run them out of town.
Apparently UVA is preserving their secret power structure since the idiot governor has re-appointed the clown in the board who started the mess that publicly shamed that university.
BethanyAnne
@passerby: https://twitter.com/PSU9371/status/223509162041147394/photo/1/large
Jay S
On a positive note, the news of the PSU problems resulting from failing to take appropriate action seems to have had a ripple effect. This University of Michigan pediatrician was reported before and after the news broke, with significantly different results.
It’s a sign that not just sports programs that have special treatment.
JoyfulA
The Citadel has a child molester problem like Penn State’s, and the Charleston newspaper is urging it to follow the Penn State lead and have an independent investigator: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20120714/PC16/120719516
Evolving Deep Southerner
@scav:
I’m with you about there not being something right about that arrangement, but I can tell you it’s common. I work at a big school, and we have the same arrangement.
gene108
@Spatula:
How many Presidents, in U.S. history, have opened up criminal investigations on their predecessors?
It would be a big deal, if Obama did this and unprecedented in U.S. history.
Demanding something that has never been done before is not a rational basis to dismiss President Obama.
maryQ
I’ve become a proponent of public shaming, of late. I don’t mean to be flippant, but I am too tired to explain it. Of course, all kinds of agonizing needs to happen before you throw someone under a bus. We (institutions) need to have in plane all manner of processes and policies and procedures to prevent the gratuitous or political use of under-bus-throwing.
It’s messy, and life altering. But so is the kind of lazy, covering up, uneven standards, arbitrary nonsense that goes on otherwise. I say this as someone who lost a job by essentially being collateral damage while someone was covering for an incompetant chief academic officer, a rookie dept chair, and an interim Dean with an agenda.
Public shaming of people who break the rules, as opposed to burying bodies and paying hush money severance packages, make it crystal clear what the rules are.
geg6
@scav:
Yes, Business and Finance is also in charge of Police Services. Crazy, and something my co-workers and I had misgivings about for years, same as we felt about HR being under the same VP. These should be VP level department heads, separate from profit and loss decision-makers. A huge structural flaw, so huge that I wonder that the Smeal College and the College of Education didn’t point it out years ago. Especially Smeal, being such a highly rated public U business program.
It’s been a real chore working for PSU this year, the very first time I’ve felt that way in my 15 years there (come September, that is). But the vast majority of us, staff, faculty, administration, students, and alumni, are committed to trying to make the necessary changes and are sincerely remorseful. We also know that we are better than what our so-called superiors have proven they are. We know we are ethical and talented and innovative and that they were anything but. All we can really do is to, through our actions, prove we are what we know we are. Working here has been the best employment experience of my entire career and it’s because of the commitment and passion so many of my colleagues have. That is what we have to show. For many years. It will take time, but I think we can eventually find a way to get beyond this, by learning from what has happened and demonstrating a willingness to change our structural flaws that lead to awful crimes like this. Against children, fer chrissake. I still can’t get over that.
BGinCHI
It’s a good point, Tom, about University Mission and Values: if unis are going to have them they ought to be held to these standards.
But careful. Please don’t lump all universities into this same group. Most of us are just out here teaching our asses off without having football carry any weight on campus whatsoever. You are talking about a small percentage of universities.
eemom
@geg6:
Were you surprised by what came out about Paterno? Just curious.
Citizen Alan
@BethanyAnne:
It’ll never happen. The problem with the Tea Partiers isn’t that they’re ignorant bigots, although both those things are true. The real problem is that they are in the grip of an insane religious fixation, a sort of modernized version of the Divine Right of Kings theory. They honestly believe that the rich are a higher form of being appointed by God to rule over the rest of us, and they are perfectly happy to impoverish themselves, their own children and everyone else in the country outside the 1% in order to preserve the divine order and secure treasures for themselves up in heaven. You can no more persuade a Tea Partier that he has common cause with the OWS movement against the super-rich than you could persuade a Jim Jones fanatic to put down the Kool-Aid.
scav
@BGinCHI: It’s more than the influence of football, it’s the influence of a single Business Model Uber Alles mentality. How many dept Chairs have become COOs? etc. Homo economicus is a simplified model of human behavior that made further exploration of observed behavior easier as it provided a manageable baseline for comparison, first when the models were more mental and even more so after models became increasingly mathematically expressed. It’s now burst through the “simplified model of human behavior” to become “goal of human behavior to which we all necessarily conform and aspire”.
Jay S
@BGinCHI: You don’t need football, see the University of Michigan story I noted @here. Institutions of all sorts have a potential to cover up instead of taking action. Assuming it can never happen here (where ever here is) because we don’t have program X is a naive assumption.
burnspbesq
@geg6:
Wait, what? Defects in the functional org chart caused Jerry Sandusky’s behavior?
Sorry, no. Jerry Sandusky caused Jerry Sandusky’s behavior. Defects in the functional org chart made it more difficult for his crimes to be discovered, reported, and prosecuted. Not even remotely the same thing.
Citizen Alan
While there are obviously problems in academia, I do suspect that the problem with Penn State and Paterno in this matter stem more from the overpowering roll that college athletics play in driving academic decisions. It appears now that Paterno got the Board to approve a sweetheart retirement deal for himself and his family with the goal of having him out of the picture by the time the Sandusky scandal broke, a deal that the Board reaffirmed even after the Freeh report. It is utterly inconceivable that the most beloved and respected academic professor on any campus in the country could have secured the kind of deal that Penn State’s legendarily winning football coach got. But then, it’s a rare professor indeed who brings in millions of dollars in football revenue and whose personal success is directly correlated with how much alumni donate to the school.
BGinCHI
@scav: I hear you on that. Administrators have become bean counters first. Almost all of them. What they need to be doing is fighting for more resources, more faculty support, more student aid, instead of trying to constantly shrink the university economy. They act like they are running little countries and doing it badly.
BGinCHI
@Jay S: No, that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the football culture and sports culture specifically. Your example (a pediatrician) is also really specific, applying to those with Med schools.
Many, many universities do not have these sports cultures or professional schools and focus on teaching undergrads and graduate students. I’m just pointing out that this is a more normal state of affairs.
Of course I agree that if malfeasance on a campus happens, university administrators are pretty likely to act craven and legalistically and in ways that do not follow an ethical imperative. But that’s the nature of the administrative class in the country and has been for a while.
RaflW
Along the lines of failed elites and universities, a great piece at WaPo (yeah, I know…) by their edumacation writer Valerie Strauss.
Why U-Va.’s governing board should go
There’s a charade playing out right now at the University of Virginia — and it’s not a game.
It’s the batty pretense that President Teresa Sullivan can and should be able to work well with people on the governing board who orchestrated her ouster — or acquiesced in it — but then reinstated her when the school community revolted. That Sullivan should be forced into a “healing” process with people who deceived her and lied to her — and who still won’t tell the public what really happened. That there isn’t a better way to end this episode.
The better though more difficult way would be for those members of the board who helped cause the disaster, or who stood idly by during it, to finally tell the public the truth and then leave the premises. A new board should be created with representatives from the various university constituencies.
Continues at…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/why-u-vas-governing-board-should-go/2012/07/15/gJQAuciOmW_blog.html
geg6
@eemom:
A bit, but not as much as most. I didn’t do undergrad at PSU (just my MEd). I went to Pitt, so I always knew JoePa was a selfish asshole. That is apparent to any Pitt grad and most residents of PA, especially Western Pennsylvanians. JoePa is the one who ended a storied intrastate rivalry between the two premier public universities in the commonwealth. And with a sneer, I might add. I have never been a JoePa fan.
However, I also remember him being enormously kind to my sister when she was an undergrad. She used to get rides home on the weekends from an academic counselor for the football team who lived here in Beaver County and would sometimes have to sit in the football office to wait for him. Whenever Paterno saw her, he’s sit down and talk to her and assuage her severe homesickness.
The man was a contradiction, a trait I often find among old-school Catholics like him.
BGinCHI
@RaflW: We’ll see what McDonnell does. I’m guessing only the Gov can dismiss the board.
AxelFoley
@Villago Delenda Est:
Thank you. I’m glad you set her straight on that bullshit.
Fuck the Tea Party and anyone who supports them.
JoyfulA
@geg6: Premier football public universities in Pennsylvania, says this Temple grad.
AxelFoley
@BethanyAnne:
“We”? Who is this “we” you speak of? Why would anyone who thinks themselves liberal/progressive/lefty want to associate with that klan of racists? Fuck that noise.
Mino
@Spatula: We’d kind like to burn it down and salt the earth. Wouldn’t mind doing same to Wall Street. Or the Catholic Bishops.
@JoyfulA: Freed will have full time employment cleaning the Augean Stables of present public edifices.
Folks have gotten a little emotional the past few years.
Amir Khalid
@BGinCHI:
The Governor already threatened once to fire the governing board over this matter. They avoided that by voting to reinstate Sullivan. Can he make the threat again over the same issue?
Spatula
@burnspbesq:
Spoken like a true blue Nittany Lion. Get a grip.
Well, except that I grew up in Kansas, went to OU and KU.
So no, not really a Lion.
Spatula
@RD:
I don’t know…George Bush?
Barrack Obama?
Spatula
@Mnemosyne:
Still got no coherent response to my question, I see?
Spatula
@Ash Can:
Shorter Ash Can: “So what if a few hundred thousand people got killed and maimed? Paterno’s worse than Bush! Priorities, People!”
Barry
@burnspbesq: “Meanwhile, the NCAA puts the mighty Caltech Beavers on three years’ probation because athletes followed the same liberal drop-add rules as the rest of the student body and occasionally competed while carrying less than a full course load.”
An important point. The NCAA has handed out the ‘death penalty’ for per malum prohibitum offenses; how do they regard malum in se offenses?
Tom Levenson
@BGinCHI: Actually — you’ve hit my point: many universities (mine included, I believe) are genuinely engaged with these values (albeit, always, imperfectly, of course). But a relatively few high profile failures can do enormous collateral damage to the ability of any institution to engage a public given reason (and with prior manufactured motive) to distrust it. So it’s precisely the clean members of the community that have the most to lose when an evil in which only a few may be implicated goes un- or barely sanctioned.
Hence the need for PSU to take a big hit, IMHO.
Tom Levenson
@Spatula: So the existence of one evil means that no other evil may go sanctioned. Good to know.
BGinCHI
@Tom Levenson: Roger that.
Thanks for clarifying.
Spatula
@Tom Levenson:
No it does not, Tom. And you might notice that I specifically did not say that.
But it does mean that our president and his supporters and the commenters here should at least try to be consistent. Consistency in the application of principals is a hallmark of integrity, wouldn’t you agree?
scav
@Spatula: As though you would recognize consistency, except for the consistency in small mean details applied to little things.
Spatula
@scav:
The Iraq War was a small mean detail? A little thing?
Interesting perspective.
Spatula
@Amir Khalid:
Please refrain from using alleged actual names in comments.
You’re way out of line.
honus
@pragmatism: Not surprising from the guy who rated Pete Rose a better right fielder than Roberto Clemente.
John Cole
Amir Khalid- if you continue to use the real names of people who are using pseudonyms to comment, I will ban you. I have deleted the two previous times you have done this, and if you do it again, I will eagerly add you to the blacklist so you may no longer comment here.
I find what you are doing to be no less offensive than what right wing blogger Ed Whelan did to Publius. You are out of line, and you will stop now.
Amir Khalid
@John Cole:
Heard and understood. My apologies to Spatula. I shall not do it again.
Spatula
@John Cole:
Thank you.
scav
@Spatula: No more interesting and small then yours, and slightly less prone to bringing all justice in the world to a halt until your pet peeve gets resolved to your satisfaction.
Spatula
@scav:
Iraq War and the attendant crimes = Pet Peeve.
Good to know.