Duke and Marmaduke

There is nothing so dangerous as a Southern liberal hoping to be invited to a Graydon Carter party.

As is now well-known, Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong falsely accused three white Duke lacrosse players of gang-raping a stripper, even as evidence piled up proving it never happened.

In the weeks after an unstable stripper — or, since this is not a Hollywood movie, “a stripper” — accused the players of rape, Nifong stated on national TV: “I am convinced that there was a rape.” He called the players “hooligans,” contemptuously sneering that their “daddies could buy them expensive lawyers.”

Envy is an emotion well-known for producing model behavior.

Revealing his own motives, Nifong said defense attorneys for the non-indicted players “were almost disappointed that their clients didn’t get indicted so they could be a part of this spectacle here in Durham.” Hello, Vanity Fair? Did you see where I talked about their “daddies”?

The Arianna Huffington of the legal profession might still have made his star turn at a Vanity Fair party, but for the fortuity of the defense lawyers discovering that he had tried to hide DNA evidence from the defendants, revealing that the stripper, Crystal Gail Mangum, had the DNA of four different men in or on her person, including the driver who took her to stripping gigs and enough other men to bring a class-action suit against her.

None of the DNA matched any Duke lacrosse players, who are starting to look like the only adult males in the Durham area who haven’t had sex with Mangum.

Nifong has tried to portray himself as simply making “mistakes.” This is absurd. Not even a half-wit like Nifong could have believed “something happened in that bathroom,” as he said during his disbarment hearing last weekend. He was willing to send three innocent men to prison to improve his electoral viability in a heavily black district and to become a liberal hero in Manhattan salons.

Admittedly, Nifong studiously refused to take a peek at the evidence. On March 29, 2006, he told reporters he knew a rape had occurred based on — I quote — “my reading of the report of the emergency-room nurse.” That report was not given to the police until April 5, 2006, making it the equivalent of the forged Nigerian letter Joe Wilson claims to have debunked eight months before it surfaced at the CIA.

But there were some facts even Nifong couldn’t have missed.

He knew, for example, that the cab driver who picked up accused “rapist” Reade Seligmann had signed a sworn statement attesting to the fact that the accused was in his cab when the rape was allegedly taking place.

We know Nifong’s office knew about the cab driver because the police soon picked him up on a 3-year-old shoplifting charge. The cabdriver claims that when the police came to arrest him, they asked “if I had anything new to say about the lacrosse case.” When he said no, they arrested him. He was tried on the 3-year-old case and acquitted.

Nifong also knew that the second “exotic dancer” at the party called the rape allegation a “crock” and said she had been separated from Mangum for no more than five minutes all night. In other words, another stripper knew Mangum wasn’t credible, but Nifong based his entire case on her — or rather on one version of her multiple stories.

We know Nifong knew about the second stripper’s statement because his office was soon offering her favorable bail treatment for violating probation. She took the deal — and suddenly decided it was possible a rape had occurred.

Mangum had made similar accusations of gang rape 10 years earlier, but her own father denied it had happened and no charges were ever brought. We know Nifong knew about Mangum’s prior false accusation because when he was asked about it, he responded: “All the facts are not yet known, and many of the so-called ‘facts’ that have been reported and commented on are simply wrong.” As we now know, the only “wrong” facts circulating in the press were the ones Nifong had put there.

Nifong knew that Mangum made Tawana Brawley look like Billy Graham: She kept changing her story, altering the number of men who raped her, and was unable to identify her attackers.

Except one. Mangum confidently and repeatedly identified only one lacrosse player as one of her rapists: Brad Ross. Nifong knew this because Brad Ross promptly gave the police proof that he was at North Carolina State University with his girlfriend the night of the party.

This investigation wasn’t a mistake — it was malice.

The media love to drone on about the explosive combination of “race and sex” — and they’ll wait forever for a single non-hoax case to prove it! In fact, the truly explosive combination is “liberal” and “mediocrity.”

Half-bright liberals think Hollywood fantasies are real life. And in Hollywood, conservatives like Rush Limbaugh are never fabulously rich and successful. Conservative Christians like Tom DeLay are never savvy, influential congressmen. And handsome boys from good families are never nice.

Nifong was supposed to look like Gregory Peck — not like Bob Wexler! But it’s the lacrosse players who look like Gregory Peck.

Second-rate liberals who went to mediocre schools and married mediocre women are burning with jealousy from their nondescript, mediocre jobs. So they use their government jobs to attack their betters and sneer about the players’ “daddies.”

Like so much injustice in America, this whole sick spectacle was the revenge of the mediocre against the successful. Stupid and envious is a bad combo platter.

COPYRIGHT 2007 ANN COULTER, DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE