"Who but Enemies of the Good would Object?"

The Countertop Chronicle's blog pointed me to an interesting article in the WSJ editorial page entitled: "The Michael Nifong Scandal" that states "that the Duke rape hoax is redolent of past decades' phony child-abuse cases." Here are a few excerpt's from the editorial by Dorothy Rabinowitz:

Mr. Nifong's confidence that he had nothing to fear from establishment opinion or from the leaders of the great university as he bounded about making hash of the rules of justice--prime among them the accused's right to a presumption of innocence--proved justified. And might have remained so longer but for the catastrophic effects of the accuser's unraveling stories.

For all the public shock and fury over his behavior, there is little that is new or strange about Mr. Nifong. We have seen the likes of this district attorney, uninterested in proofs of innocence, willing to suppress any he found, many times in the busy army of prosecutors claiming to have found evidence of rampant child abuse in nursery schools and other child-care centers around the country in the 1980s and throughout most of the '90s. They built case after headline-making case charging the mass molestation of small children, and managed to convict scores of innocent Americans on the basis of testimony no rational mind could credit. Law officers who regularly violated requirements of due process in their effort to obtain a conviction, they grasped the special advantage that was theirs: that for a prosecutor dealing with molestation, and wearing the mantle of avenger, there was no such thing as excess, no limits to what could be said of the accused. In court, rules could be bent, any charges presented, and nonexistent medical evidence proclaimed as proof positive of the accusation...

In his role of avenger of a young black woman alleged to have been brutalized by white males, Mr. Nifong proceeded with similar assurance. His was a crusade. Who but enemies of the good would object? (I bolded this for emphasis). Confronted with hard questions about his evidence, whether from the defense or the press, Mr. Nifong answered that these challenges were all designed to intimidate the rape victim. More than once the DA suggested, as criticisms of his case multiplied, that he was himself a victim of the press.

The jury to which Mr. Nifong played--the black population of Durham--duly helped re-elect him. This could not prevent his case of rape and abuse against the three Duke students from coming undone, thanks in part to his own heedless behavior but mainly to the accusing dancer herself, whose shifting stories and checkered past could not be hidden.

Have you noticed that in our society, that as long as you are fighting the "good fight" that little things like facts, innocence, evidence, freedom, autonomy and discrimination against groups deemed as "bad" don't really matter? When did appearing as a crusader trump justice and truth in our society? And when did the fear of appearing "hard-hearted" become so strong that the majority of people will go along with these abusers of justice to avoid looking like "enemies of the good"? Just a few questions I think about from time to time.