Will Bunch highlighted the… slightly dubious claim, as reported by a Detroit CBS affiliate (emphasis Bunch’s):

“I’m very careful about the colleges and universities our children go to,” Santorum said. “There are schools, I went to one — Penn State — that’s one of the liberal icons, unfortunately it’s gotten a lot worse. I can tell you professor after professor who docked my grades because of the viewpoints I expressed and the papers that I wrote, there’s no question that happened.”

“Your grades suffered because of your views at Penn State?” Langton asked

“Absolutely, absolutely,” Santorum said. “I used to go to war with some of my professors, who thought I was out of the pale, these are just not proper ideas. This is not something that’s not unusual, folks, I know this may be a surprise to some people … There is clearly a bias at the university.”

Liberal icon Penn State. It’s central Pennsylvania’s own Frankfurt School, really.

Santorum hasn’t released his college transcripts, so we can’t know how bad his grades were, but according to the New Republic and the Philadelphia City Paper Santorum was actually not that conservative in college. (Or maybe he was hiding it to escape the vicious persecution conservatives suffered at Penn State in the late-1970s?)

Santorum’s Penn State experience was so traumatizing that he remained a fan of the football team and called himself a “friend” of longtime coach Joe Paterno as recently as last November.

Santorum’s claim is pretty obviously just an attempt to add a dose of self-proclaimed victimization to the anti-elite tack he’s been taking with his recent focus on the dangers of higher education, but it’s a silly one, considering that, well, he is talking about Penn State, not Penn or something. But Santorum’s entire “college is awful” tour has been a bit of a puzzler.

Now I don’t have a highfalutin’ “degree” from some fancy “college,” unlike Rick Santorum, who has three, but I do know that a lot of people seem to think “education” is a good thing. I know this because I read an article in which a guy from the Pew Research Center explained that nearly all American parents hope their children will attend college.

Anti-college talk is a fine rhetorical strategy when your target is snobbery against adults without college educations, but basically all parents — even blue collar parents who work with their hands like real Americans — want their kids to get degrees and good jobs because that is part of “the American dream.”

This is conservative class warfare totally backfiring, basically. Maybe Santorum’s grades were actually docked because he is dumb?

That was the case for Jasmine, a Florida resident who asked to go by a pseudonym. On the day of her discovery, she got a call at work — the local elementary school where she taught first grade — notifying her that her husband had been arrested. It wasn’t until she arrived at the local police department and was directed toward the special victims unit that she began to understand. After being arrested, and confronted with an incriminating taped conversation he had with the victim, Jasmine’s husband confessed to molesting a young girl who lived across the street — on one occasion, in his own home.

The revelation was harrowing for Jasmine — but before she left the station that night, when a detective asked her what she was going to do, her answer was immediate: “I’m going to stay.” That isn’t to say that she instantly forgave him. When she went to court the next day for his hearing, she says, “I felt like I was going to a funeral. I was grieving for the life that we had.” They were high school sweethearts and had been married for six years at that point. “The person who I thought I knew absolutely everything about had this hidden life,” she says, her voice still carrying an air of disbelief. He revealed to her that he had experienced attraction to pre-pubescent girls in the past – in addition to adult women — but had convinced himself that “he could control it.” She says she was angry at him — not for experiencing these attractions but for not telling her about it sooner, and for putting himself in the position to act on it. Approaching the situation with that mind-set that allowed her to continue in the relationship.

Her husband was jailed for 60 days, served two years of house arrest, completed 10 years probation and is a lifetime registered sex offender in Florida. She’s stood by him the whole time and supported him financially when he was on house arrest and unable to work. “I had to think about our marriage and that he had been a good person — this was really the first thing we had gone through,” she explains. “He went through years and years of sex-offender treatment and I could see his thinking change. There weren’t so many rationalizations and excuses.”

Jasmine’s husband now tells her that he no longer experiences attraction to pre-pubescent girls, although even experts who promote sex-offender treatment doubt such a complete change is possible. “There is no evidence that a man can change from pedophilic to non-pedophilic (or vice versa),” says clinical psychologist James Cantor, the editor in chief of “Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment,” in an email. “A person can be taught tools to help him deal with his sexual interests, and a person’s sex drive can sometimes be suppressed, such as with testosterone-blocking medications. The overall evidence, however, is that changing from pedophilic to non-pedophilic is as impossible as changing a gay man to a straight man.” He adds: “The kind and scale of differences that we see on MRIs of pedophilic men are not the kind or scale that are known to change with training, or psychotherapy or other kinds of intervention.”

Joan Tabachnick of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers tells me, “For some, it is a good decision [to stay] and helps to keep the community safer,” she says. That’s because it gives the offender “a reason to stay connected, to not reoffend.” However, she is careful to add, “For others, it may mean that they are not looking at the reality of what is around them.”

Jasmine has been with her husband for 17 years now – in the same house where the abuse took place — and they now have a 1-year-old and a 4-year-old boy. But she says she doesn’t worry about her husband abusing their children: “I do want to point out that I have boys,” she says, adding that her husband never experienced attraction to males of any age. At the same time, though, she acknowledges that “the experts say it doesn’t really matter if it’s a girl or boy. It’s the age range that an offender is particularly attracted to.” They had their first child during the 10-year probation period; a judge ruled that Jasmine’s husband could be allowed to spend time alone with the boy.

Cantor declined to comment on Jasmine’s specific situation, but notes that “a sizable proportion — sometimes a third — of sexual offenders against multiple children committed those offenses against children of both sexes.” In general, offenders target a single sex, but it’s also true that pedophiles “distinguish between boys and girls much less” than those who are primarily oriented toward adults.

Some wives convince themselves their husband will change even without a conviction, imprisonment or treatment. Christina Enevoldsen, co-founder of the online support group Overcoming Sexual Abuse, married and had a child with her high school boyfriend, who had admitted to molesting a female relative in the past but swore he would never do such a thing again. When she found blood in her 1-year-old daughter’s diaper, her husband “tearfully admitted that he had molested her but promised it would never happen again,” she writes in a blog post. “He seemed very remorseful and I thought that since I caught him, he wouldn’t feel safe repeating the abuse. He seemed afraid of losing his family, so I thought that fear would stop him.”

But he continued to abuse his daughter for most of her childhood. “Yes, I had been fooled by my husband, but I had also fooled myself,” she says. Enevoldsen blames it in part on the repeated sexual abuse she experienced as a child at the hands of male relatives. “Finding blood in her diaper was finding blood in my diaper. I was transported to my own abuse with the same feelings and response: I froze as though my only choice was to lie still and stay quiet.”

Denial among close family members who suspect sexual abuse is terribly common – it’s why Tabachnick wrote the guide “Engaging Bystanders in Sexual Violence Prevention.” Tabachnick attempted to explain what might have been going through the mind of Fine’s wife: “We would be asking Bernie’s wife to report her husband, bring shame onto her family and her child, lose their standing in the community and whatever love was left in that marriage,” she says. “In our society there is a very high cost for reporting — and the benefit of reporting is very small if you are truly not sure there would be a successful prosecution.” (You can find more here on the reasons why witnesses to child sexual abuse fail to call police.)

There can also be a great deal of guilt on the wife’s part about the abuse: Molesters who are discovered often place blame on their partner. “He tried to say, ‘Well, you didn’t give me a lot of attention and things weren’t so good in the bedroom,’” Jasmine says. “After years of therapy, I realized that any healthy adult male doesn’t do that with a child. It doesn’t matter how much attention your wife is giving you.”

Jasmine insists that things with her husband are good now, despite the fact that she will have to live with his sex-offender status. His registration publicly lists their home address alongside the details of his conviction for “lewd or lascivious molestation.” It isn’t what she pictured for her life, but it’s what she’s chosen, given the circumstances. “Before this happened, I was the person who picked up the paper and said, ‘Oh, what a monster!’ Until you’re in the situation, you don’t know how you’ll react.”

Dershowitz’s Harvard Legal Ethics class had a little debate about the Penn State situation. They all agree that Paterno had no legal obligation to do anything after assistant coach Mike McQueary told Paterno that he saw defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky raping children in the locker room shower. But what about his moral obligations?

Some take the view that Penn State is a rigidly hierarchical organization, and that in such an organization, it is sufficient to report to one’s superior. Others point out that the Catholic Church too, is a hierarchical organization, and when priests reported abuse to their bishops and the bishops reported the abuse up the hierarchy, the problem persisted. Yet others take the view that if Penn State is a hierarchy like the Vatican, then Paterno was “the Pope,” and the buck stopped with him. He, not his superiors, was the person responsible for reporting the episode to the police. That seems unfair in light of the fact that popes can’t be fired, and yet Paterno was discarded like a bag of putrid garbage, when it served the interests of the Board of Directors to distance themselves from him.

Emphasis mine, because that bit indicates where Dershowitz’s sympathies are. Poor JoePa, tossed out like “putrid garbage.” Then Dersh’s argument gets weirder: Turns out, Paterno’s inaction was a result of the anti-”snitch” culture of old people.

There is another factor, which may explain, if not justify, Paterno’s limited actions in going only to his immediate superior. Paterno and I come from roughly the same generation. We grew up during the period of McCarthyism, and my parents taught me, as his parents may well have taught him, that the most unforgivable sin is to “snitch” on one’s friends and colleagues. Being called a “snitch” was just about the worst thing anybody could say about someone who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s.

Hah, what? McCarthyism? Paterno’s parents probably told their child never to “name names” when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, that surely explains why he didn’t go to the police.

Dershowitz’s class — snitches, all of them — basically agree that Paterno had a moral obligation to see to it that Sandusky actually went to jail instead of merely being told he could rape children on his own time, as long as it didn’t happen in Penn State’s locker room.

I think the consensus of the class was that regardless of what the law did or did not require, Paterno should have done more than simply report to his superior and wash his hands of the matter — if, in fact, that’s all he did. As the moral leader of Penn State athletics, he should have served as a role model for the current generation of students and athletics. At the very least, he should have followed up to see whether the school had done enough to avoid a recurrence.

What a reasonable consensus, class. Your professor, though, feels differently. He feels bad for the real victim in all of this, the old guy with enough money to retire quite comfortably: “I believe, and here I’m speaking for myself and not my students, that, on the basis of the information now in the public sphere, Paterno was treated unfairly by the Penn Board.”

I think it should be remembered that Paterno is totally fine. He’s not in a jail cell or living in abject poverty, shunned by society. All that happened is that he got fired, for his role in a large organization’s self-serving coverup of criminal activity. He knew Sandusky had abused children, and after reporting this to his superior, he watched in total silence as Sandusky remained a free man who was allowed to continue bringing kids to a summer camp at a Penn State campus, for years. Even if his inaction was understandable — we are all human, I get that — it still seems eminently worthy of punishment.

Given the nature of the crimes alleged and the fact that said crimes went unpunished even though they were known to so many authorities at Penn State, I figured Dershowitz would argue that that the United States should announce to Penn State that they have 24 to abandon their campus before our tanks and bulldozers roll in, but apparently he only assigns collective guilt to … certain peoples.

[Via Mondoweiss]

The question that these stories of sexual misconduct raise is a peculiarly American one: Why do our people handle such episodes so badly?  The answer lies in the public’s inability to reconcile an admiration for powerful men and powerful institutions with its inevitable consequence of corruption.  Blind trust and unalloyed admiration create the atmosphere for abuses of power, for covering up misconduct, and even excusing it when it is revealed.

Herman Cain is merely the most recent in a long list of defiant politicians accused of sexual misconduct.  Abraham Lincoln didn’t live long enough for consorting with prostitutes to tar his reputation.  James Buchanan lived too soon to be presumed gay, though he pulled a Joe Paterno in protecting his close associate Dan Sickles, adulterous congressman and later Union general, who traveled to London on state business accompanied by his favorite prostitute.

Andrew Jackson and his wife Rachel were smeared for their alleged bigamy, having “accidentally” lived as husband and wife for years before her divorce became official.  And, as we know, Thomas Jefferson had to wait two centuries, until the advent of DNA, for the private life he implicitly denied to light up the news cycle.

Before them all, though, it was Alexander Hamilton who established the pattern for the national politician’s good ol’ American sex scandal.  Hamilton’s problem was adultery.  Smug like Cain and a larger-than-life political fixer like Coach Paterno, he was caught sleeping with a married woman while his wife was out of town.  The affair took place in 1791, during Hamilton’s years as President Washington’s secretary of the treasury, though it was only revealed in 1797, when more damning “evidence” surfaced through the column of a scandal-mongering journalist.  Hamilton’s political opponents had agreed to keep quiet about his private behavior during the intervening six years, but remained silent no longer when the charge of misuse of federal funds was added.

A trail of clandestine payments led to James Reynolds, a former Treasury Department employee and the husband of Hamilton’s erstwhile mistress.  Hamilton admitted to adultery, while declaring in his own defense that he had never misappropriated government money when he paid off the affronted husband to buy his silence.

How Hamilton handled the charges is what makes the scandal relevant to this week’s news.  As a skilled attorney, he wrote a 100+ page pamphlet justifying his actions.  Confessing only to an “indelicate amour,” initiated by Mrs. Reynolds, which he now regretted, he insisted that his public reputation remained spotless, because he had never abused his office, had never stolen any money, and had never profited from his position as head of the Treasury Department.

On the other hand, Hamilton’s windy defense reminds one of the fumbled strategy used by Cain and his campaign staff.  Hamilton painted himself as the victim of a conspiracy in which James Reynolds contrived to entrap him, literally pimping his wife in order to gain the advantage over the otherwise incorruptible executive.  Hamilton also denied personal culpability by unabashedly blaming all undeserved publicity on a political environment generated by the machinations of Jeffersonian Republicans.

Cain, as we have seen, chose to distribute the blame liberally, in the vain (yes, both definitions of the adjective apply) hope of deflecting the shafts aimed at him.  He accused Rick Perry’s staff of leaking the story, harped on the “Democrat machine,” and claimed that at least one of his accusers had gone after him for money or fame.

Hamilton’s defense backfired, and it’s not likely that Cain’s tactics will save him either.  A high-placed Federalist, rather than defer to the leader of his party, chose instead to point out that Hamilton was trying to “creep under Mrs. R’s petticoats.”  He mocked Hamilton for his ploy of misdirection, chiding him for what amounted to an unmanly cowardice–and no one in early American politics was more self-consciously macho than Hamilton.  The newspapers likewise took him to task for his hypocrisy.  A writer asked readers to judge whether it was possible to clear one’s name when accused of breaking one of the Ten Commandments (Thou shalt not steal) by openly admitting to having transgressed upon another (Thou shalt not commit adultery).  “Does one sin wash away the other?”

In the end, Hamilton decided that the only way to repair his reputation was to engage in an “affair of honor.”  So he accused James Monroe, the most hot-tempered member of the Congressional investigating committee, of leaking the Reynolds affair to the public, and he challenged the Virginian to a duel.  Ironically enough, Aaron Burr interceded, and helped the two find a way to avoid the dueling ground.

The prototypical American political sex scandal reveals something fundamental about their nature.  While comedians and pundits have made much of Herman Cain’s referring to himself in the third person, they have missed the significance in his choice of language.  Not only is it a holdover from how royal personages refer to themselves (the royal “we”), but it also demonstrates that Cain has sought to divide himself, as Hamilton did, into a public persona and Cain the private person.  Cain the candidate (“Herman Cain”) expects, like Hamilton to be judged solely on the basis of his public conduct.

Cain also seems to think that the larger-than-life presidential aspirant is somehow above the mundane reality of everyday life.  In his own mind, at least, he cannot be guilty, because having become “Herman Cain,” he is a public figure, whose private behavior attaches to a pre-candidacy legal entity who lacks a public profile or a responsible political identity.  “Let’s keep him out of this,” he seems to be saying.

Cain’s rude dismissal of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi as “Princess Nancy” is the sort of statement that might have led to an affair of honor in the distant past.  But as it relates to the matter of the several women’s accusations against him as a textbook harasser, it is not Ms. Pelosi, but Mr. Cain, who uses the royal “we,” who imagines himself above the law.

Candidates and public officials routinely compartmentalize their lives.  They routinely and conveniently rationalize outrageous behavior.   Their learned comfort in the exercise of power on a regular basis invests (or infects) them with a sense of their invincibility and invulnerability—until they are caught and exposed.  Though he might prefer to separate public and private, Herman Cain the non-candidate was the head of the National Restaurant Association (NRA).  There, he held a position of power and trust, and it was the decision of a board of directors to reach a legal and financial settlement with women who brought charges against him.  Cain’s case was taken out his hands and handled by the NRA.

Cain’s defense these days is unconvincing for reasons that seem obvious.  First, all four women have to be lying to completely absolve him.  Second, if a settlement was reached with two of the women, it is reasonable to conclude that the charges had legs.  Third, Cain’s reckless claims that enemies have been trying to smear his reputation only work if the charges are not true.  As Alexander Hamilton himself argued in a prominent court case of 1804, the charge of libel can only stick if the libelous statements are not true.

At Penn State, the football staff operated under its own distorted code of honor.  It is now clear that a previous police investigation was made to disappear.  The former quarterback turned graduate assistant Mike McQueary witnessed Sandusky raping a young boy in the locker room.  On MSNBC’s “Hardball,” the writer Buzz Bissinger (author of “Friday Night Lights”) compared the Penn State football community to the Mafia; a more accurate comparison is to the rigid code of honor that exists in military communities.  Paterno was more than a head coach–-metaphorically, he was the commander-in-chief of Penn State’s football program.  It is probably the case at Penn State, as at many football-centered universities, that President Graham Spanier took his orders from Paterno, and not the other way around.

McQueary revealed what he observed to Coach Paterno, yet he lacked the will either to stop Sandusky from raping the boy, or to challenge Paterno when the crime was swept under the rug.  Just recall the plot of the movie, “A Few Good Men:” institutions built on hierarchy and honor can lead to the abuse of power and suppression of truth.  Unfortunately, when adoring fans of Paterno learned the truth, and gathered to support him, we learned that many Americans cannot handle the truth.  Or, perhaps, that winning football games and raising millions ($170.5 million in 2010-11) is more important than facing something so fundamental and so uncomfortable as serial rape.

What mattered to Hamilton most was that his “honor” had been tarnished. He was more than willing to tell Congress behind closed doors that he had had an adulterous affair–if it would clear his name of the charge of misappropriating government funds. He assumed that a private disclosure among his male peers would settle the matter for good.  But once the information became public, Hamilton was made a public laughing stock, and his only recourse was disclose his side of the story in his pamphlet–and then proceed to defend his honor on the dueling ground.

Today, politics (like big business) is without honor. Herman Cain became popular among the Tea Party crowd because he was arrogant, because he said outrageous things, and showed no embarrassment in being proven wrong, foolish, or ignorant.  The arrogance of power is bad enough; it is worse when powerful men receive the backing and support of powerful institutions—a university, a restaurant association, the Catholic Church.

The voting public has been led to expect spotless candidates, which is a prime reason why negative ads poll so well.  The idea that men can behave honorably at all times, and that their secrets should be kept because of some outdated–and frankly, perverted–code of honor, is a dangerous proposition.  It sours the political environment, which is in need of a massive overhaul as it is.  The idea that candidates are legally bought by corporate interests and association lobbies is a most unrepublican and unAmerican perversion of our founding principles. The lies and attacks, counter-lies and counter-attacks, that course through the election cycle epitomize the difference between the theory and practice of democracy.

It is this perversion which wreaks havoc on the principle that public servants should have good information, good ideas, applicable experience, and comprehensive understanding, if they are to give directions.  Our skewed system, instead, had catapulted to positions of national visibility marginally informed, manipulative people who need to write their “core principles” on one hand to avoid the “Oops!” moment.

“Herman Cain” needs to look Herman Cain in the eye and face up to the fact that his past contains some ugly blemishes.  Penn State fans need to move beyond blind idolatry, and recognize that Joe Paterno was the head of a morally corrupt outfit.  And before they can become “people,” corporations have to exhibit a living, animated moral sense.  Handle the truth, America.

I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me when you’re accused of one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, you may not want to literally phone in your defense on national television.