Nope, Novak is quite clear that he’s not arguing that Paterno should have kept his job (he was planning to resign at the end of the 2011 season anyway, as Novak pointed out in a previous article). He just thinks that Paterno should have been sloughed off more gracefully and with a more fulsome show of respect:
Stress the guy’s moral probity and leadership first, and then accept his resignation. That’s not an argument that Paterno should have continued at Penn State, that’s just a complaint that the severance process was too ungracious and undignified.
Novak certainly is claiming—and nobody else is denying—that Paterno’s actions satisfied his legal responsibilities. But Novak quite adroitly refrains from pronouncing on whether they adequately fulfilled his moral responsibilities:
Like I said, it’s compassionate, sensitive and admiring, but it’s not a vindication: rather, it’s a refusal to judge.
If Novak wants to regard the question of Paterno’s moral culpability in this case as a matter solely between Paterno and his God, that’s his business. But it’s not the same thing as a persuasive argument that Paterno had no moral culpability at all.
Interesting that you use the phrase “ravening hysterical mob” with reference to negative public opinion about Paterno and Penn State prompted by the Sandusky scandal—negative public opinion which, AFAICT, produced no violence or other illegal acts—but not about the actual mob of inflamed Paterno supporters who manifested their outrage over Paterno’s dismissal by “several violent scenes in which protesters flipped over a media van and destroyed other property”.
Yeah, people who non-violently express outrage over institutional passivity and weakness that fails to prevent years of child sex abuse are a “ravening hysterical mob”, whereas angry crowds who tear down streetlights and turn over a van because they’re upset about the firing of a football coach are… not. Got it.
The fucker was 85 years old, and apparently going senile. Not to mention the fact that he didn’t live 6 months beyond his firing. How did firing his ass in any way damage a fucking football program at a place who’s primary responsibility is “education”, not “winning football games”, and what fucking difference would it make if it had? Oh, yeah… also, why should any of us who don’t give a shit about football, give a shit about Paterno, let alone be “anti-Paterno”? What part of “Don’t fucking give-a-shit about the fucker” are you finding hard to understand. Oh, Wait! We’re a “lynch mob” because we don’t give a shit. I guess that explains your (SA’s) logical lynching in this thread.
Don’t get so defensive, anyone but an obvious idiot would know I was talking about an alternative speculative hypothetical set of facts, which are certainly true. Don’t believe it? Everyone here knows it’s true, all you have to do is take a paper towel tube, and . . . .
For the record, I have no recollection of calling either Huerta or Enola Gay liberals. I may have, it’s a long thread and given their behavior in certain ways I might have. But I don’t think so. Still, a couple of the board’s more reasonable conservative posters (Mr. Moto being one, IIRC) have chimed in to say they disagreed with me, though they did so in the civil way more typical of conservatives, and I responded civilly to them in return. Additionally, as I understand it there’s been a fair amount of condemnation for Mr. Paterno on some of the more conservative message boards as well.
So I don’t view the issue solely as one of politics. If anything, the thread’s posters made it about politics first by immediately accusing me of supporting Paterno because of his conservatism when in fact I had no idea of his politics.
To be both frank and honest though, I do believe the majority of the anti-Paterno crowd are liberal, as they exhibit many of the hallmarks of liberalism, such as a knee-jerk overreaction to perceived or factual wrongs, an aversion to the concept of individual responsibility and its corresponding desire to blame everyone in sight for the actions of the individual, etc., etc., etc.
And Huerta, I’ve devoted tons of time debunking your lies in this thread, though tellingly nothing much has come of it with this crowd. Still, you are lying yet again when you claim I haven’t. And don’t for a minute think you’re fooling anyone. Everyone can see what a lying nutjob you are, they’re just letting you get away with it for now (as they have also your sexist, homophobic and pro-Nazi comments elsewhere in the thread) because you’re on their side for now. In my opinion this speaks even worse for them than you, but there you have it. But remember, you aren’t fooling anyone with your ridiculous lies, idiotic extrapolations and pretzel logic. You are the biggest nutball in a thread filled with the likes of miss elizabeth, Kolga, Guinastasia and Hector the Librarian. I’m sure your mom would be proud.
P.S. - I’m thinking the thread is going to go at least 5,000 posts and 200,000 views and at the end no one still will have posted a shred of factual evidence that Joe Paterno deliberately sought to cover up the shower incident, that he knew Sandusky was allegedly raping children, that he knowingly enabled it, or that anal rape was what Mike McQueary saw in the shower that night.
Show me one of them. I challenged you to before but you, being a pussy, pussied out.
No, really.
If she learned that I was not defending a pedophile, claiming he couldn’t have been a pedophile because of some retarded “physics”-based loving description of anal rape of a child, she would be (and is) to quote your description of how we were supposed to react to your (invented) “fact” that a child hadn’t been anally raped, only almost-raped, by an old man, “overjoyed.”
You’re scum and will never be anything different. There’s some real real white trash walking around this country claiming to be part of the real 'Merican conservative movement. But they’re not.
Not very convincing. Certainly, many of the most vocal critics of Paterno and of Novak’s apologia have been among other conservatives. A few examples: Rod Dreher in The American Conservative:
You have got to be freakin’ kidding! The core issue of this thread is what Paterno’s individual responsibility was. You have argued that he fulfilled his legal responsibility by informing senior officials at Penn State of the allegations brought to him by McQueary. Opposing you are the people who say that he failed in his greater individual responsibility to follow up and to inform outside law enforcement.
You, and nearly only you, are excusing Paterno from any individual responsibility that Sandusky was not caught sooner.
I’ve certainly seen criticism of Huerta88’s sexist and homophobic comments in the thread. I’ve yet to see a pro-Nazi comment by him in this thread; I’d expect that if he had issued one, it would also have been criticized.
So you’re already (the second time around) worn out of accusing us all of being Nancy Grace, and have come back around to Huerta88’s reputation. I’ll simply reiterate what I posted above somewhere:
“Certainly Huerta88 is not universally admired on the SDMB. Yet, somehow, in this thread, he has kicked the shit out of you.”
I’ll look forward to the next time we’re told so many posters really support you. You know, the posters who aren’t in this thread supporting you.
Thank you, Kimstu. A good reminder that morality can cross party lines.
Restored my faith in human beings. We can hold each other to a higher standard.
A higher standard than either Sandusky or Paterno required of themselves.
If it’s perfectly OK for you to come up with absurd, laughable speculations based on your apparent experimentation with the tube from a roll of paper towels, why is it not OK for others to speculate based on testimony described in a grand jury report?
McQueary testified to seeing “some form of intercourse.” The only intercourse that can really be had from behind a three foot tall boy is anal intercourse. You’ve been told this 100 times. McQueary’s sworn and unambiguous testimony is “evidence.” Your retardate invented facts are not.
As you have also been told 1000 times, Paterno’s moral crime was not “failure to report anal rape.” Anal rape (which undoubtedly occurred in that shower, given that Sandusky is a lifelong anal rapist of boys) is not what is criminalized or proscribed in Pennsylvania or in any non-scumbag realm of Earth (I know that you, a perverted scumbag, may have trouble understanding this). “Sexual assault” and “sexual contact with a minor” are what are criminalized and what give rise to a moral obligation to extirpate them. There is not one whit of legal or moral distinction between the obligations raised by knowing of “anal rape of a child” (which McQueary repeatedly committed, including in that shower) and “sexual contact with a child.” Not a scintilla of difference, you fucking retardate.
