More Lies from William Saletan...
William Saletan starts his column today with more lies:
Human Nature : Polanski: Three Questions: Some of you are mischaracterizing what I wrote on Tuesday...
What Saletan wrote on Tuesday:
Human Nature : The Polanski Affair: The Times reports that the authorities treated Polanski "not so much as a sexual assailant but as ... a normally responsible person who had shown terrible judgment by having sex with a very young, but sophisticated, girl." The probation officers' report "quoted a pair of psychiatrists as saying that Mr. Polanski was not ‘a pedophile,' "and it concluded that his offense "appears to have been spontaneous and an exercise of poor judgment by the defendant." That's an entirely reasonable assessment of the incident. There's a difference between pedophilia and taking advantage of somebody who's old enough to be interested in sex but too young to judge the physical and emotional risks of messing around. If the legal officers and moral critics of the 1970s saw that distinction more clearly than we do, the shame is ours.
What Saletan says today:
Human Nature : Polanski: Three Questions: One [question] is whether Polanski raped Samantha Geimer outright... by coercion.... I can't pretend to resolve the facts.... But I should be clear: If the case is ever fully presented and Polanski is proved guilty of rape, he should be put away for a long time, and that's that...
And then at the end of his column he comes clean:
In my first post on this subject, I mentioned that the probation report said Polanski's offense "appears to have been spontaneous and an exercise of poor judgment by the defendant." I then wrote: "That's an entirely reasonable assessment of the incident." I shouldn't have written that sentence, because it characterized the whole case and thereby took a position on the first question, which wasn't my point and on which I had no expertise.
But it was your point, William--a huge honking point at that.
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
