My list of the Most Wanted for 2006 and into the New Year ranks Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong as Public Enemy Number One. His crimes should be punishable by a life sentence for purposely seeking to ruin the lives of Duke lacrosse players because of who they are, not for crimes they allegedly committed. He needs to be separated from society and consigned to a padded cell where he can serve as a symbol to the culture warriors at Duke and in Durham that the days of staining people to achieve the goals of their politically correct agenda are over. Nifong is to have no privileges as extra punishment for embarrassing the state of North Carolina.
Holding to the Number Two Most Wanted position is Duke University president Richard Brodhead, singled out for being a sanctimonious dissembler. His first reaction to the charges against his own students was “off with their heads,” along with the lacrosse season and the coach. He immediately created five commissions to investigate where Duke had gone wrong in defense of the accuser in the case, without even a nod in the direction of fairness to the boys. As the case against the lacrosse players began to fall apart in the last month, Brodhead issued a statement saying the boys should be considered innocent until proved guilty. This comes a little late, don’t you think? Of the charges against him, his knee-jerk refusal even to attempt to be impartial and give his own students the benefit of the doubt is the most serious. Sprinting to the high ground to try to defend them nine months later is a lesser crime, but one worthy of punishment. His only chance for redemption is 1 million hours of community service dedicated to visiting every college and university in the Western world and explaining that higher education administrators must cease capitulating to the radical scholars and their politically correct class warfare — on campus and off — and return campuses to rational discourse and traditional scholarship. The lacrosse players then will have accomplished a greater good from their ordeal by helping to end the moral insanity gripping academe.
Number Three on the Most Wanted list is North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley, who has stood by while his appointee to the DA’s job in Durham County has stained the reputation of our state in his quest to ruin the lives of the lacrosse players at Duke. Someone asked me how I felt about a woman governor after Beverly Perdue announced her candidacy for the job. I replied: “We already have one, Mary Easley.” The governor’s wife is a smart, good-looking lady who finds herself appearing at dozens of public functions each year because husband Mike just can’t get himself together to show up. This is a well-known reality in Raleigh, with speculation that the governor is depressed and needs the recuperative time he spends on the golf course and taking the state airplane to his home in Brunswick County most every week. Since he purloined the state’s highway fund to balance the budget, he shouldn’t have to ride in his limo on our decaying highways. But he sure as hell could have intervened publicly and put a leash on his deranged pit bull DA in Durham and spared the state the bad reputation we have gained across the globe in the Duke lacrosse case.
Number Four on the list is the entire North Carolina Department of Transportation for gross ineptitude in the case of the newly constructed 10-mile stretch of Interstate 40 from RTP west that is going to cost taxpayers $20 million to repair. This is a much-needed widening that was already held up for 10 years because DOT was tied up by a two-person environmental activist group in Carrboro. Pair this with the 8-year delay in building the NC 70 bypass around Clayton to relieve a massive bottleneck — due to one wildlife official who maintained the project would harm the infinitesimal and pervasive dwarf wedge mussel — and you can grasp the enormity of DOT’s transgressions. In their defense, road allocations are hamstrung by a preposterous state regulation granting rural counties more than their proportionate share of road money. But these mitigating factors do not make up for the aggravating truth that we have a problem with our roads in North Carolina.
The Number Five Most Wanted is the scattered band of Triangle Transit Authority banditos who broke and ran when the Federales busted their attempt to impose an iron mask of badly thought out rail transit on the region. Hiding out in the hills of Raleigh and Durham, they are still funded and dangerous, hell-bent to maintain a guerrilla war to get their way. Like the Shining Path in Peru — a Marxist gang that operates in the jungle to disrupt political stability — TTA will never give up, no matter the absurdity of their cause. Now that Durham and Durham County have pulled out of the Research Triangle Metropolitan Statistical Area, perhaps they will come out from hiding and embrace a Raleigh-Wake County rail transit system that is — very much unlike the old TTA — accountable to the people and rational in its proposals.
Notes From La-La Land
As Russian radioactive Polonium-210 plots continue, I think of our first Raleigh Spy Conference in 2003 where noted intelligence scholar Chris Andrew talked about caches of arms and money buried around Europe and the US by the KGB. It has now come out that these lethal bundles are used today by Vympel, or Department V of the FSB — the new Russian spy agency — to supply assassination operations, including the killing of anti-Putin dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London. Go to www.raleighspyconference.com for more on this, and read the two books in the The Mitrokhin Archives series by Andrew and the now deceased former KGB colonel Vasili Mitrokhin.
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A school system in Massachusetts has rescinded the publication of honor roll students in the local newspaper, announcing that the move would reduce stress for other students in what they call a “high expectation, high achievement culture” that they say is “unhealthy for promoting learning.”
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Is the University of North Carolina endorsing the presidential bid by former US Sen. John Edwards? It sure seemed so when the matinee idol socialist inflicted the nation with his candidacy on live TV in December.