HACKWORK….Last year Dahlia Lithwick wrote a piece for Slate advising everyone to take a breather in the Duke rape case. “We are being played by the lawyers,” she warned. We should wait for the facts in the case to develop instead of jumping to conclusions based on our “pre-existing suspicions about what inevitably happens between men and women, rich people and poor people, black people and white people.”
Sound advice. But over at the Weekly Standard Charlotte Allen had a point to make — the liberal media convicted the white guys sight unseen — and decided to use Lithwick’s column as Exhibit A. How? The hack’s best friend, of course: selective quotation.
Lithwick has decided to laugh off this obvious smear and instead invite her readers to enter a contest: Take her original column and edit it to make her look like a bilious conservative wingnut. “Please don’t be afraid of those ellipses,” she advises. So here goes:
Here we go again. The Duke lacrosse team’s rape scandal…reaffirms…that…white men…can’t get a fair shake under our legal system….This is not a case about consent….This was[] a date gone wrong.
….We already…know, with great certainty, who’s lying[:] Jesse Jackson…[who] doesn’t hesitate to impugn the truthfulness of …white people….This…serves as yet another depressing reminder of all that is wrong with this country: Our…colleges are hotbeds of polarizing identity politics. Race and gender…more often than not…are, in the end…[just] lawyers’ spin.
Well, that was kind of fun. But I’m pretty sure someone can do a lot better. Give it a go yourself and win a free subscription to the Standard. Second place is two free subscriptions to the Standard!
