I'm not even going to go near the nasty letters written in this thread.

But as a Duke grad, and a grad of a couple of other institutions, and a participant in higher-ed, I'll have folks know from my observations that gang-rape happened in the past, and it happens now. From what I can tell, hard alcohol creates and exacerbates the problem, because it becomes so easy to get incredibly drunk-- unlike beer, which takes considerable effort.

THe other major factor I've seen in creating this kind of behavior is the type of built architecture/housing that encourages it. During my fraternity days at Case Western Reserve, I never witnessed anything remotely like what happened at Duke. But our rooms were single-person, with room for a bed, and a desk, and that's about it. Impossible to get four drunk guys and a drunk girl into-- the most deadly kind of situation for this type of crime to happen.

The other taboo thing to discuss is the mental condition of the woman that ends up in these situations. My first wife had a friend who was pretty mentally unstable, and she displayed risky behavior constantly. She got raped-- once, gang-raped, twice. That does not excuse nor condone the young men involved. More, it speaks to the hollowness of the mental health safety net that exists in broader society, but can be especially acute at universities, with their rapidly emotionally transforming students.

Gang-rape will always be with us-- there is a particularly nasty side of human primal behavior that allows it. But it can dramatically be minimized by working on fixing the problems around alcohol, where students live, and their mental and emotional health.

The focus on Duke has all the good aspects of a class/race parable. And there's no question that those things may have been factors in what happened. But anyone who believes that gang-rape doesn't happen in all sectors of society is fooling themselves.

Thanks for the great piece by Eric Boehlert. It does a thorough, professional job of laying out how the deception of the American people has come to pass.

One thing that folks need to realize, besides the more obvious truth that the MSM is not liberally biased, is that the New York Times is simply not as good as everyone would like to believe that it is. My own experiences with the Times and having them cover stories I've been involved with regarding the politics of remaining roadless areas on the National Forests is a classic case in point.

Back during Clinton's roadless initiative push, the Times' reporter on the beat had played up the class warfare aspect of any drive to stop destruction of the last remaining wild country in our National Forest system through logging and roadbuilding. Stories pitting environmentalists against loggers-- the typical line that sells well as the standard myth around the issue-- were being published, and one reporter went so far to declare a local community in our area was "Ground Zero" in the debate. This reporter went so far as to fly out to this remote Idaho community to cover a story that had been pre-written in his mind.

Except it wasn't Ground Zero. The enviro contingent didn't turn out to be a bunch of upper-middle-class elitists. Instead, it was the hodgepodge of people that actually live around these areas, and have successfully litigated against the Forest Service to shut down many of their timber sales, because they were illegal. On the other side was a demographic class of aging mill workers and loggers, many of who couldn't even tell one where the places in the National Forest that would be off-limits to logging were.

The bottom line-- no story at the aforementioned Ground Zero site. Because it wasn't Ground Zero.

As one of the lead activists (a poorly dressed, rumpled professor) who had an influential role in starting the Initiative, I shambled toward the reporter to tell him the environmental side of the story. He took one look at me, gave me the look of "you must not be credible" and turned to the timber industry spokesperson, a pretty woman dressed in business-white, and shut me out. I had given him my card-- I had written a book on the issue, easily checked out. He had no interest.

The Times ran their "Ground Zero" class warfare story-- they had to travel out to Nampa, Idaho, a city in the sprawling Boise megaplex, after Boise-Cascade bussed in a bunch of workers, some illegal immigrants, to find some comments similar to what they already had decided to print. They got their Ground Zero story-- just not at Ground Zero.

From what I've seen, Times reporters come predominantly from upper-middle-class backgrounds, often from elite schools. William Greider points this out most elegantly in his writings-- they have no feel for anything other than a comfortable, insulated truth. They reflect the bias of a guilt-ridden, upper-middle-class that cares very little about facing hard truths and getting to the bottom of anything.

The question I have is this: how many more banal, costly stories is the Times going to have to run before people wake up and realize this?

Normally I don't get in a lather about teenage stupidity, but conscious cruelty deserves community scorn-- even if it is Sen. Santorum's home town. Sometimes boys will be boys-- and they need to learn to grow up, respect women, and be men.

Put the shoe on the other gendered foot-- how devastating and scarring would this be if it were done to a group of boys? Why should anyone discount the effect on the girls?