That's Our Bill
Daniel Koffler | June 16, 2005, 5:20pm
The Huffington Post reports on yet another clever and thorough analogy on the part of Bill O'Reilly:
The latest dispatches from the Natalee Holloway case in Aruba in a moment. But first, what do The New York Times and the mafia have in common? That is the subject of this evening's "Talking Points Memo".
The answer to that question is both The Times and organized crime routinely engage assassins. In the case of the newspaper, they are propping up character assassins.
I must confess, I do like the image of Bill Keller lying in wait, sweat on his brow, nervously clutching at piano wire as his mark approaches.
Anonymo the Anonymous | June 17, 2005, 3:07am | #
"That seems to be what you are doing, despite your disclaimer anonymo."
It wasn't, at least it certainly wasn't my intention, and I'm sorry if that was unclear. Nor do I think that's what Rich was doing, but that's his business.
What I was saying was that A) Given what we know at this time, the reported claims of the suspects that the victim was drunk are quite likely true. 18-year-olds on trips to Aruba often drink - regardless of their reputed academic prowess and general good-girlishness. The opportunity to do so is one of the main attractions to such trips (and I'm speaking from knowing hundreds of people who took such trips within the last five years), and many teenagers don't need much incentive to drink (ditto). Nowhere did I imply that this was improper; I in fact said that the reactions of the aforementioned pundits, calling such a claim a "smear" were misguided because they read charges of impropriety into what I perceived as a description of perfectly normal, common teenage behavior in that environment. Those pundits cited the girl's sterling reputation as evidence that she wouldn't have engaged in such behavior, and I think anyone who's ever been to high school can come up with many examples of people who match that description, but also drank and had sex. The two are hardly incompatible.
B) If said charges are true, they don't constitute a valid excuse for whatever someone may have done to the victim. Those who retort with knee-jerk accusations of "character assassination" are either constructing straw men out of their (natural) zeal to defend the girl; or if those making such claims are actually attempting to sully the victim's reputation as a means of lessening their own guilt, they're not worth arguing with, and there is no danger that reasonable people will agree with them.
C) When I said that an intoxicated person makes an easier target for a predator, I wasn't assigning blame to the victim. I explicitly renounced that. Hearing- or vision-impaired persons also make easier targets; by no means do I think they deserve it. No one familiar with the effects of alcohol intoxication can deny that a drunk person is easier to attack, and this is borne out by pretty much everything we know about date rape. Even though a drunk person, unlike the otherwise handicapped, voluntarily induced their state of heightened vulnerability, I don't believe they share responsibility for their fate that occured through the predatory actions of others who violated the victim's rights for their own amusement. If you think I do, you are factually mistaken about my beliefs, which you no longer have an excuse for given this lengthy, explicit rejection of the positions you ascribe to me, or you are committing the straw man fallacy, as I suspect O'Reilly et al. are.
Let me further state that if the accounts from Aruba of the suspects' changing their stories are true, they've got guilty written all over them, and I hope they get the Aruban or Dutch equivalent of the chair. Hope that clears things up.
