Mike McQueary in protective custody, won’t coach again

Mike McQueary in protective custody, won’t coach again
posted at 8:28 pm on November 11, 2011 by Allahpundit

There aren’t many bad decisions in life that are so bad you can never walk away from them. But there are a few.

According to PennLive.com, one of the PSU coaches gathered several players in a room on campus and allowed McQueary to speak to the team via speaker phone.

McQueary reportedly told the team, “I wanted to let you guys know I’m not your coach anymore. I’m done.”

McQueary also told the team he’s not at the University, but in protective custody after receiving several threats … and “double fisting” booze.

Penn State placed him on administrative leave today but it sounds from that passage like he’s done for good, likely for his own safety. Some of the bloodlust for this guy, I think, is simply hatred for Sandusky being redirected towards one of his more accessible enablers. If/when Sandusky is tried, convicted, and then thrown to the sharks in some state prison where he’ll be the lowest, most widely despised perp in the pecking order, some of the anger towards McQueary will cool. Not all of it, but some.

Meanwhile, via Red State’s Jeff Emanuel, here’s what Paterno was allegedly told by McQueary at the time about what happened in the showers:

In 2002, McQueary, then a graduate assistant, went to Paterno and reported seeing Sandusky assaulting a young boy in the Penn State football team’s showers. Paterno notified the athletic director, Tim Curley, and a vice president, Gary Schultz, who in turn notified president Graham Spanier.

A source told ESPN that Paterno recalls McQueary “vaguely” referencing “fondling” or “touching” or “horsing around” by Sandusky and a youth. But Paterno never had the understanding that McQueary had witnessed a “sodomy” or “rape.”

I’m not sure how him knowing there was “fondling” going on as opposed to actual sodomy is some hugely exculpating detail for the wrist slap Sandusky got from the program in the aftermath. In fact, read this long, harrowing piece from the Patriot-News about the endless red flags that various people in Sandusky’s orbit missed dating back to 1995. Evidently, McQueary’s account of what he saw was progressively watered down among the PSU brass in some sort of pedophile-themed version of “telephone.” Fancy that:

Even though Paterno himself had told the grand jury that McQueary saw “something of a sexual nature,” Paterno said this week that he had stopped the conversation before it got too graphic. Instead, he told McQueary he would need to speak with his superior, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and with Schultz.

That meeting did not happen for 10 days.

What was said at that meeting is in dispute.

McQueary testified he told the men in specific detail exactly what he’d seen, and what he testified to before the grand jury.

Curley and Schultz say nothing criminal was described. Instead, Curley says, it was characterized as “inappropriate conduct” or “horsing around.

Schultz said it seemed like “not that serious.”…

According to the grand jury, then, here is how McQueary’s eyewitness account became watered down at each stage:

McQueary: anal rape.
Paterno: something of a sexual nature.
Schultz: inappropriately grabbing of the young boy’s genitals.
Curley: inappropriate conduct or horsing around.
Spanier: conduct that made someone uncomfortable.
Raykovitz: a ban on bringing kids to the locker room.

You can hate McQueary for not intervening to stop Sandusky in the act, but are we sure he’s the main enabler here? Paterno, by his own admission, apparently knew “something of a sexual nature” was happening between Sandusky and a 10-year-old. If he wanted to raise hell about it, Curley and Spanier were in no position to stop him. They’re top administrators but Paterno is a god on campus. Blame McQueary for leaving that 10-year-old for the wolf, but who should be blamed for all the kids who came afterward?

In fact, Paterno’s divine status continues even now, and even among people allied with Sandusky’s alleged victims. Read this surreal NYT story about how a lawyer who’s advising some of the boys is angry at Penn State for … firing Paterno. The ferocious backlash, he says, could end up intimidating some of the boys and making it less likely that they’ll speak out. Good point, but why he’s blaming PSU for that instead of the amoral savages who actually caused the backlash by rioting on Paterno’s behalf a few days ago, I have no idea. Two clips for you while you try to figure that out: The first is GMA’s exclusive with the mother of one of Sandusky’s victims and the second is today’s message from PSU’s new president, who’s inherited the happy task of restoring the school’s reputation. It’ll get worse before it gets better.
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'Right to Riot' Cemented in Campus Culture
By Jonah Goldberg
11/11/2011

"Of course we're going to riot," Paul Howard, a 24 year-old aerospace engineering student at Penn State University, told The New York Times. "What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o'clock that they fired our football coach?"

The coach in question, as we all know, is Joe Paterno, the decades-long patriarch of Penn State football. Paterno was fired by the board of trustees for his part in a reprehensible non-response to the alleged rape of a 10-year-old boy in the locker room showers.

You have to wonder what's wrong with our society when someone can say, "Of course we're going to riot," but not over the cover-up of pedophiliac rape. Rather, students feel it is their obvious right, perhaps even duty, to throw violent temper tantrums when a multimillionaire football coach is fired, simply because the coach is part of their "college experience."

"We got rowdy, and we got maced," Jeff Heim, 19, told the Times while rubbing his bloodshot eyes after police used pepper spray to disperse the rioters. "But make no mistake, the board started this riot by firing our coach. They tarnished a legend."

Really?

I don't think Paterno is anywhere near the worst offender among those who did considerably less than the bare minimum that decency and integrity require. But there's something deeply, pathetically sick about the idea that what tarnished Paterno's legend was his termination and not the fact that he never once bothered to ensure that an alleged child rapist was stopped.

Yes, yes: Journalistic niceties require that I say Jerry Sandusky, the longtime assistant coach accused of serial sexual abuse and exploitation of children, hasn't been proven guilty of anything yet. And that's true. But it doesn't exonerate Paterno and other officials. An eyewitness said he saw Sandusky sodomizing the boy in the shower. Unless officials thought it was a demonstrable lie, they had a moral and legal obligation to contact police. But they didn't think the witness was lying. They kept him on staff. And they simply barred Sandusky from bringing children to the facility. So once Sandusky was out of sight, his crimes were out of mind.

Obviously, the real horror here is in the alleged criminal conduct (and if you haven't read the indictment of Sandusky -- and have a strong stomach -- you should look it up on the Internet).

But there's a larger point to be made here. Several, actually. People keep saying the cover-up proves the corruption of college football. Maybe so. College football certainly has its myriad and manifest vices.

But what about the riots? These aren't simply a product of football culture, they're a product of a campus culture that teaches students they have an absolute right to whatever their hearts desire, starting with a fun-filled college experience and, afterwards, a rewarding career.

Imbued with a sense of victimhood, entitlement and cultivated grievance that can only be taught, their preferred response to inconvenience is a temper tantrum. Sometimes, as with the Penn State riots, they are physical. Other times, they are intellectual or theatrical. But the tantrums are always self-justifying. Arguments are correct not if they conform to facts and reason, but if they are passionately held. Unfairness is measured by the intensity of one's feelings.

Perhaps that's why a "right to riot" has become a staple of campus culture across the country, particularly at big schools. Students riot when administrators take away their beer. They riot when they lose games. They riot when they win games. They riot when the cops try to break up parties. Inconvenience itself has become outrageous.

It is also why idiotic protests have come to be seen as "part of the college experience," as if chanting inane slogans and spouting weepy canned platitudes is essential to a well-rounded education.

(We are now seeing an extension of the repugnant narcissism of campus culture setting up outposts in Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. The bulk of their complaint seems to be that it is somehow unfair that the creature comforts of campus life should ever come to an end -- or come with a bill. Riots are undoubtedly the next act in that play).

Most of the time, I find campus protest culture to be shallow and predictable. But I would have cheered it this time around, if only someone rioted for the alleged victims of Jerry Sandusky.
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