The Duke rape case might just be the closest thing to a political Vietnam that the left-wing, reality-based community will allow itself to endure. I put that qualification there because the brownshirts are now going into hiding and MiniTrue is already starting to strain the memory hole to its max. Normally I don't read Michelle Malkin, but I found this was linked to from Instapundit and written by one of her blog's other contributors. It's a good summary of the ways that the reality-based community of the perpetually oppressed, victimized and emotional have gone into disingenuous damage control.
This was one of those things that was linked to, however, that I found particularly amusing:
A team of distinguished athletes at an elite and highly respected university hired two local women to strip at a house filled with men (including those underage) who had been drinking too much. That's sleazy, to say the least. That those women were women of color underscores the appalling power dynamics of the situation.
A truly compelling argument if there ever was one. She was black, female and they are white men. The professor who wrote that little comment apparently has succumbed to the untermensch-ubermensch dichotomy, and this is evidenced by her immediate assumption that a black woman who chooses to bare her flesh in front of paying white men is inherently at their mercy. Those vicious, predatory savages who pay her to bare it all, coercing her with the primal force of their greenbacks! What is a black woman to do?
I must have missed the details published about her being a crack-addicted whore who is under a pimp's thumb or being coerced to work as a sex worker to receive welfare benefits. It would seem to me that the outraged professor is simply angry that a young black woman can make a decent living by doing what amounts to no work, and which might actually be enjoyable on a sensual level at times. All of the outraged histrionics are a cover for the fact that she is just outraged that a woman might rationally decide that selling her body for several times the rate of an "honest job" is more appealing than the alternatives.
That aside, the 88 professors who denounced the lacrosse players and their activist ilk might want to actually think about what sort of damage they have done to their causes. Their quickness to jump in without substantiating claims has done a number of their reputation, and proved that they are no better than angry white mobs who used to lynch black men at the mere allegation of sexual impropriety from a white person. Once again the pendulum has swung to an extreme.
You beat me to the punch of this just being another dialectical political advertisement passed of as commentary by an intelligent member of society.
But you also managed to flush out something more telling about the Left: their absent of a moral grounding.
What matters not is the action being tried, but rather the roles of the actors. Pale Males as thesis-oppressors and the lovely negresses as antithesis-oppressed.
This is why it's OK for Che Guevera to commit mass-murder of Cubans and Congolese and for affirmitive action to violate the rights of caucasians and asians, but black girls stripping for drunk, white college boys is "bad".
I have for a while said about leftists that they are not interested in actually solving problems, only addressing "historical grievances." For example, it's all well and good to talk about slavery and racism in the 1960s and 1970s, but a significant number of white and black people have grown up in an America where the majority of dangerous, divisive racism is things like black-on-everyone-else racism like the black-on-latino and black-on-asian (especially that!) in places like Los Angeles. When the 1992 riots went up, so did all of the Korean-owned stores and homes anywhere near the ghetto/riot areas.
My main concern is how do we fix these problems. Theirs is how do we keep reliving our glory years. I'm so sick to death of the talk about past grievances like slavery, the "we will overcome" bullshit, the nostalgia for the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s and things like that. It's over. Let it die or it'll come back as horrifyingly dangerous as the zombies in the remake of Dawn of the Dead.
Personally, I think there's a lot of envy here. She's probably just pissed off that a young black woman can rip her clothes off and make a solid living without an education. Nevermind the fact that making $50-$200/hour doing that is far less work and "oppression" than what most white men go through at the office. Hell, even in my line of work, I probably make half of what a good-looking stripper could make if she sells herself right.