Notes on scandals

[tahnan]

My brother, with his incredibly unfortunate photo, tweeted a link to this article about Joe Paterno. My wife and I have talked about the scandal enough this week that I'm not going to do so any further here; but my brother is right (as he is more often than you'd expect, but especially about sports) that it's an article worth reading.

(Well—I'm not going to talk about the scandal any further, but the linguist in me is fascinated by the sentence "All that matters are the victims of the horrible crimes allegedly committed by former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky". "Allegedly" is of course necessary until a trial has occurred; but there's an interesting factivity vs. counterfactuality problem with saying that the crimes are alleged, but to refer to "the victims of the crimes" and thereby assert that the crimes are real and not merely alleged. This is what happens when linguists overthink.)

Meanwhile, a great deal of attention is being paid to Herman Cain's alleged acts of sexual harassment. And I have to admit that I think that's a shame, for a number of reasons:

1. Far, far less interesting to me than whether or not Herman Cain committed any sort of harassment is how unprepared he seems to have been for this fact to come to light.
2. In the meantime, the question of whether Cain broke a law over a decade ago (in a way that was settled out of court) is overshadowing the much more serious question of whether his campaign flagrantly violated campaign finance laws this year.
3. Even if the harassment allegations are true, that fact would be, in my mind, quite frankly at the very bottom of the list of reasons that he's incredibly unqualified to be president. The more people talk about the scandal, the less they're talking about his dismissive reference to Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan, the insanity of his 9-9-9 plan (as encapsulated in the best graph ever), his complete loss of words when asked about things like Medicare and the Palestinian Right of Return....

And finally, to make it all better, the 11/10/11 Stephen Colbert sign-off, which you shouldn't watch if you, you know, hate really good singing.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I think whether or not he likes what Nancy Pelosi has done in the past, the former Speaker of the House deserves a little more respect than to be referred to as 'Princess Nancy' during a debate. He's a clown and circling the bowl, as his recent drop in numbers illustrate.

- Kit

[tahnan]

Absolutely. Call that point 1a: part of the way in which he hasn't been prepared for these allegations is the number of things he's said in the last week that show a profound disrespect for women, such as calling a former Speaker "princess" and saying, of Gloria Allred, "I can't think of anything that I would hire her to do" with an expression that makes it clear what sort of female-hiring he has in mind.

I didn't realize his numbers were dropping; I thought that, through all of this, he was still polling fairly well. Hey, has Chris Christie really definitively for certain absolutely said no?

[cyllan]

Repeatedly, yes. And I believe we are past the Drop-Dead date for getting into the race at this point. The only way Christie will be selected is if the convention actually goes back to the smokey-back-room-deal sort of election engineering that used to take place.

[tahnan]

...which I wouldn't rule out, if the party ends up facing a showdown between the establishment candidate that no one feels enthusiastic for and the radical candidate that the establishment looks at and says, "Hey, um, I know we've been moving farther right and all, but really?".