My opinion on the Evil Sandusky

I essentially agree with you about Sandusky as to his guilt, the turpitude his crimes exhibit, and the punishment that is appropriate if all that has been alleged is borne out at his trial, which is why I checked the box that I did.

I disagree with you on a very basic point as to the culpability of Penn State and its employees. Which is not to say I don't agree w/ you in part - I very much do. The failure of the University and its employees to take effective follow up action and find out why referrals they made to others did not result in anything that looked like appropriate punishment is inexcusable. Even if someone making the referral didn't think Sandusky was guilty, it seems to me that loyalty to the PSU program would have compelled an individual to follow up so as to be adequately informed as to why Sandusky was innocent - or was whatever he was. No one did and shame on them all, although I am reluctant to place any great degree of blame on Mike McQuaery, the assistant coach who saw Sandusky in the showers with an apparent minor, who reported the incident to Paterno but did not follow up on his report.

The basic point on which I disagree with you is the implication arising out of your comment "how dare they put the profits of the football program above the well being of children" to the effect that there was some type of orchestrated cover-up. I find very little to support that implication. To me this was a case of incompetence - massive, inexcusable, mind-numbing incompetence, to be sure, but only that - not malevolence. These were men not accustomed to dealing with the seamier side of life, and their reaction to it, unfortunately, was to push it out of their well-manicured picket-fence environment, rather than exterminate it. The basis for my thinking? There is no affirmative act of cover-up to point at that I see; all these people were well aware that letting Sandusky continue to abuse boys, if that's what he was doing, was going to be exactly the type of problem it has turned out to be. They weren't against terminating the problem, it's just that no one person ever thought it was his job to do so. There was never a moment of "OMG, we have a problem that we have to sweep under the rug.", that's a coverup, the problem was that everyone did what minimal thing they had to do to keep their own yard clean, but noone ever took up the far more important job of assessing the filth in the community - or even asked why no one else was doing so. As I said, massive incompetence, but not the type of affirmative coverup that characterized such scandals as the Catholic Church and its sexually abusive priests, where the coverup, at least at certain Diocesan levels, is undeniable.

I, too, am always willing to believe that money will breed corruption. But it is precisely my belief in the power of money that compels me to conclude differently than you in this situation.

This scandal is as big as it is only because it went on as long as it did. After all is said and done, kids of the age that it appears Sandusky abused have little to do with what Penn State was about. If Sandusky had been dealt with in the first couple of years after allegations about him were made, probably even in the first four or five years, it would have been a scandal, but it would have been one of lurid sensationalism, it didn't affect what PSU did, like, say, a betting scandal would have. Sandusky would have been the only casualty.

I have no doubt that as the scandal later broke, anyone touching it had the sense of having a tiger by the tail, but even as late as maybe 2008, this story, had it broken as a result of PSU's self policing, would have been one that the college likely could have spun to its credit - and the guy who shepherded it through the process likely would have been rewarded for it. I haven't followed this story closely for some time now, but, as I recollect, there was never any evidence that the various actors hid stuff. All of them felt they'd done their job, and it only began to dawn on them as the story grew that the "crime" here was one of omission, not commission, it was the narrowness with which PSU staffers approached any task that didn't have to do with football. Had any one of these guys perceived the damage Sandusky was going to do to PSU football, any one of them might have secretly shot him; the problem here was not that money asserted itself in its all-too-common role as the underminer of virtue, it's that the danger to the money machine that was PSU football was not perceived by those who, had they perceived the enormity of the threat - which they failed to do because of their parochial approach to their jobs - they would have acted, if nothing else, out of a monetary motive.