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Tonight is the start of the second season for AMC’s Revolutionary War spy drama – Turn. The Wall Street Journal gave it a good send off.

As the second season begins of AMC’s lush and often tense Revolutionary War drama “Turn: Washington‘s Spies,” it’s the autumn of 1777. The young Long Island farmer turned secret rebel Abraham Woodhull (Jamie Bell) is looking for a way to collect information on British military strength in occupied New York City and transmit it via his friend on George Washington’s staff, Ben Tallmadge (Seth Numrich), to the general. Ranged against Abe and other members of the little anti-British spy network called the Culper Ring is the might of the king’s army in America, bolstered by loyalist colonials.

The patriots’ chief adversaries include the cultured and debonair British espionage mastermind Maj. John Andre (JJ Feild), who is based in occupied Philadelphia. There is also a sadistic killing machine, the disgraced British officer John Graves Simcoe (Samuel Roukin), who has been recalled to duty by a reluctant Andre to train a guerrilla-type force to eradicate colonial spies and other enemies of the crown.

With those basics in mind, newcomers to the series—which returns Monday with a two-hour premiere—can just let the pleasures of this handsome and well acted period piece wash over them. It doesn’t hurt at all, for instance, that “Turn” is filmed in Virginia and that this week, for instance, it makes use of authentically appointed rooms and buildings in and around Colonial Williamsburg and at the College of William and Mary. Even the accents—mostly British or versions thereof, with a smattering of Irish, Scottish and others appropriate for the time and place—promote the sense that we are peeking behind the curtain of life as it really happened, not watching another gimcrack re-creationof the bandaged head, flute and limp sort. …

Kevin Williamson writes on another aspect of the left’s “rape project.” This is a further reason for the Rolling Stone UVA fraud.

… the major obstacles to the progressive project are the rule of law, our constitutional order, and competing centers of power outside the state, all of which are on the progressive enemies list: corporations, churches, private schools, tradition-minded social organizations, etc. It takes a certain highly cultivated view of the world to see the Boy Scouts as the enemy.

Put another way: Progressives have had great success shouting “Racist!” to end debate; they hope to add shouting “Rapist.” But this will be difficult to do if rape remains — as it should remain — primarily a matter for the criminal-justice system rather than a nebulous social concern that can be shaped with distortion and exaggeration or, in the case of Rolling Stone, with outright fiction.

This is, to reiterate, not the result of conspiracy with malice aforethought, but of something much worse: a culture of totalitarianism.

Consider the global-warming argument. That argument has a scientific piece, an economic piece, and a political piece. (And other pieces, too.) The Left has for some time tried to discredit arguments about the economic and political aspects of global warming as rejection of science, of “denialism,” a term coined expressly for its association with Holocaust denial. That has not worked, partly because people understand that the political questions and the scientific questions are different questions, but also because the scientific case has been so exaggerated and overstated, generally by non-scientists, that people have come to regard it with some skepticism. What the Left would very much like to do at this point is to silence dissent, for example by pressuring media outlets to suppress criticism (“There aren’t ‘two sides’ to the science, nor to the policy response,” the same conflation of the scientific and the political) or by simply locking up those who disagree in prison, the response favored by Robert Kennedy Jr., writers at Gawker, and certain highly regarded philosophy professors, to mention nothing of Harry Reid, who was quite recently the Senate majority leader. (Mrs. Gandhi was not the first or the last to get that big idea.) This would require doing violence to the constitutional order — beginning with repealing the First Amendment, which Senator Reid attempted — which would be, in ordinary times, a difficult thing to do. But if you believe that the world is ending — and you can convince others that the world is ending, too — then there is nothing that one could not justify doing to prevent that.

But there isn’t a global-warming emergency, at least not one that is going to be fixed by throwing AEI scholars in jail. …

Manhattan Contrarian posts on the looming disaster of federal student loans.

While our federal government continues to chase many mortgage lenders for so-called “predatory lending” practices, perhaps we should check in on the situation of far and away the biggest predatory lender of all, the federal government itself.  Its most odious practices are in the area of student loans.  I find the term “predatory” a stretch when applied to a mortgage loan for a house, given that in the worst case the borrower got to live in the house, and even if he gets foreclosed and has a deficiency balance he can normally discharge that in bankruptcy.  Not a pleasant process, but sometimes life can be tough.  Compare that to federal student loans, where the government lends inexperienced 18 – 24 year-olds open-ended amounts, often for dubious and overpriced trade schools, and then flatly forbids discharge in bankruptcy.   Many borrowers’ finances are ruined for life, and they don’t even have marketable job skills to show for it.  Now that’s predatory! …

The student loan debacle is just one of the areas students are being failed by the modern university system. Victor Davis Hanson has more.

Modern American universities used to assume four goals.

First, their general education core taught students how to reason inductively and imparted an aesthetic sense through acquiring knowledge of Michelangelo, the Battle of Gettysburg, “Medea” and “King Lear,” Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and astronomy and Euclidean geometry.

Second, campuses encouraged edgy speech and raucous expression — and exposure to all sorts of weird ideas and mostly unpopular thoughts. College talk was never envisioned as boring, politically correct megaphones echoing orthodox pieties.

Third, four years of college trained students for productive careers. Implicit was the university’s assurance that its degree was a wise career investment.

Finally, universities were not monopolistic price gougers. They sought affordability to allow access to a broad middle class that had neither federal subsidies nor lots of money.

The American undergraduate university is now failing on all four counts.

A bachelor’s degree is no longer proof that any graduate can read critically or write effectively. National college-entrance-test scores have generally declined the last few years, and grading standards have as well. …

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It can make your hair hurt, but getting the story straight on the West’s understanding about Iraq’s WMD’s is going to be a point historians will find important. Peter Berkowitz of Real Clear Politics reviews Judith Miller’s new book. Miller was in Pickings a few days ago introducing her book.

… That is where Miller almost ends her book.

In the epilogue, however, she discloses that she now believes she gave incorrect testimony in United States v. Libby and that she did so because prosecutor Fitzgerald—who declined to respond to written questions about the case—withheld crucial information from her.

Of the nine journalists who testified at Libby’s trial about conversations with him—including Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Times reporter David Sanger, and syndicated columnist Robert Novak—Miller was the only one to say that Libby voluntarily revealed Plame’s CIA employment. She writes that her testimony “was also crucial to Fitzgerald’s assertion that the vice president had been involved, since Libby had told the grand jury that Cheney had approved his suggestion that he discuss the intelligence estimate [the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate] about Iraq and WMD with me.”

Before she appeared before the grand jury in the autumn of 2005, Miller writes, Fitzgerald led her by pointed queries to believe that a four-word question contained between parentheses in her notebook—“(wife works in Bureau?)”—was the smoking gun that proved that Libby, in a June 23, 2003 conversation, had told her about Plame’s CIA employment. She so testified to the grand jury in 2005 and at trial in 2007.

Three years later, while reading Plame’s book, “Fair Game,” Miller was astonished to learn that “while working overseas for the CIA, Plame’s cover were jobs at the State Department.” This threw “a new light” on Miller’s notebook jotting, because the State Department has “bureaus,” while the CIA is organized into “divisions.”

Miller saw that she must have begun her conversation with Libby wondering whether Wilson’s wife worked at the State Department. Moreover, had a seasoned Washington insider like Libby sought to reveal Plame’s CIA job, Miller realized, he would not have referred to the place she worked as a “bureau,” but rather as a “division.” These revelations, according to Miller, shattered her confidence in her recollection and led her to believe that Fitzgerald misled her into providing false testimony.

The prosecution had the classified file of Plame’s service and Fitzgerald knew, or should have known, of Plame’s State Department cover. But despite his obligation to provide exculpatory evidence to witnesses as well as to the defendant, he withheld this information not only from Judy Miller, but also from Scooter Libby’s lawyers even though they had requested Plame’s employment records.

It would have been easy for Miller to take her knowledge of her mistaken testimony to her grave. Who would have known? Who would have cared?

Nevertheless, as she had done with the prewar intelligence failures, Miller investigated.  In addition to finding injustice to Libby she also revealed that Fitzgerald’s three-and-half year pursuit of him damaged American national security.

In a 2013 interview, former Vice President Cheney told Miller that but for Fitzgerald’s sidelining of Libby, the Iraq War might have turned out differently. In 2003, Libby was the principal figure in the White House arguing for the counterinsurgency strategy that President Bush only embraced in late 2006 after many wrong turns and much carnage, and which Gen. David Petraeus successfully implemented in 2007. It is painful to contemplate how many lives—American and Iraqi—might have been spared had Libby, the foremost champion within the White House in 2003 of stabilizing Iraq through counterinsurgency operations, not been hindered by, and eventually forced to resign because of, Fitzgerald’s overwrought federal investigation and prosecution.

Serendipity, a biased press, and a fanatical prosecutor combined to yoke together the fates of Scooter Libby and Judith Miller. Elite left-wing opinion demanded that the Bush administration pay for its supposed lies about Iraqi WMD. The left wanted to take down Bush or Cheney and when they couldn’t destroy either, they settled for Libby.

At the same time, the left had no interest in toppling their beloved New York Times, but relished the newspaper’s guilt offering of Miller. That the only lies of consequence were those they promulgated about Libby and Miller does not yet seem to have registered in, much less troubled, the left-liberal conscience.

Miller’s sobering book, which demonstrates her devotion to getting the story right, makes a major contribution to correcting the record.

For another back-story that exposes the lies of the left, The Daily Caller shows the link between the obama administration and the fraudulent Rolling Stone article about UVA.

A top-ranking official at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has emerged as a potentially key figure in Rolling Stone’s false article, “A Rape on Campus.”

Catherine Lhamon, who heads the Department’s civil rights wing, was identified in a letter sent last month by University of Virginia Dean of Students Allen Groves to Steve Coll and Sheila Coronel, the two Columbia Journalism School deans who conducted a review of the Nov. 19 article, written by disgraced reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Groves’ letter was included as a footnote to the Columbia deans’ report, which was released on Sunday and cataloged the failures and lies that led to the article’s publication.

In the letter, Groves wrote that he has suffered “personal and professional” damage as a result of Erdely’s reporting and comments Lhamon made about him which were included in the article.

As the Rolling Stone article fell apart, Lhamon’s involvement has gone virtually unmentioned. But a deeper look reveals her ties to Emily Renda, a University of Virginia employee and activist who put Erdely in touch with Jackie, the student whose claim that she was brutally gang-raped by seven members of a fraternity on Sept. 28, 2012, served as the linchpin for the 9,000-word Rolling Stone article. President Obama nominated Lhamon to become the Education Department’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in July 2013. The Senate approved her unanimously the following month.

She has served as the Education Department’s designee to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault which Obama created on Jan. 22, 2014. Renda served on the same task force.

Besides that link, both spoke at a February 2014 University of Virginia event entitled “Sexual Misconduct Among College Students.” …

The above is not the first time Emily Renda’s fingerprints were found in the Rolling Stone disaster. The blog 28 Sherman posted on her involvement last December.

Even after my Erdely-Renda post from Thursday, the Rolling Stone article continues to unravel elsewhere. The Washington Post managed to do the yeoman’s work on the problems to the story. Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller has interviewed Jackie’s friend Randall, adding to the catfish elements to the story. Emily Renda’s still skating free from scrutiny except here. A really weird coincidence is found between Renda’s words and Jackie’s story in the Rolling Stone. This plays into who came up with Sabrina Erdely’s story details. The media should be asking Emily Renda deeper questions than the softballs NPR threw her way.

Jackie’s story to her friends differs from Erdely’s reporting. Jackie has accused Erdely of lying, people have accused Jackie of lying, and it is a tornado of lies. This is where Renda fits in. Emily Renda’s testimony to the Senate was in June. Here is a passage about a vicious rape on campus.

“One of the student survivors I worked with, Jenna*, was gang-raped by five fraternity men early in her freshman year. Despite the severity of the assault and injuries she sustained, Jenna still experienced a feeling of personal responsibility. Looking for affirmation, she sought out peers and told her story. Sadly, each and every one of the friends she reached out to responded with varying denials of her experience; these responses worsened her feelings of self-blame – that she must be confused because that fraternity “is full of great guys”; that she must have made them think she was “down for that”; questioning how no one else at the party could have heard what was going on if she was telling the truth; or discouraging her from seeking help because “you don’t want to be one of those girls who has a reputation” for reporting “that kind of thing.” These statements haunted Jenna. She told me that they made her feel crazy, and made her question whether her own understanding of the rape was legitimate.”

Sounds familiar? …

And the blog The Other McCain posts on the “coven of liars” that promoted the story.

… The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross reports that Lhamon and Emilly Renda are part of the same federal apparatus:

“[Lhamon] has served as the Education Department’s designee to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault which Obama created on Jan. 22, 2014. Renda served on the same task force.
Besides that link, both spoke at a February 2014 University of Virginia event entitled “Sexual Misconduct Among College Students.”
Lhamon has been invited to the White House nearly 60 times, according to visitor’s logs. Renda has been invited six times. Both were invited to the same White House meeting on three occasions. One, held on Feb. 21, 2014, was conducted by Lynn Rosenthal, then the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women. Twenty-one people, mostly activists, were invited to that meeting. Lhamon and Renda were invited to two other larger gatherings — one on April 29 and the other on Sept. 19.
It is unclear if both attended the three meetings. Renda did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Renda and Lhamon also testified at a June 26, 2014, Senate hearing on campus sexual assault. It was at that hearing that Renda cited Jackie’s story that she was brutally gang-raped by five fraternity members — a statement that was inconsistent with Jackie’s claim to Erdely that she was raped by seven men. According to the Columbia report, Renda first told Erdely about Jackie’s allegation on July 8, nearly two weeks after her Senate testimony.
During her testimony, Lhamon claimed that “The best available research suggests that 20% of college women, and roughly 6% of college men, are victims of attempted or completed sexual assault.” That “one-in-five” claim about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus has been heavily disputed.”

Now, read the second page of Chuck Ross’s report:

“In his letter, Groves wrote that he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking correspondence between Lhamon and Erdely. Likewise, The Daily Caller filed a FOIA request but expanded the inquiry to include emails Lhamon and her assistant sent to Renda.
In his letter to Coll and Coronel, Groves wrote that he was “one of the professionals vilified by name” in Erdely’s article.
He claimed that Erdely completely mischaracterized remarks he made at a Sept. 2014 meeting with university trustees about sexual assault and that Lhamon disparaged him with comments she made to Erdely. . . .
Despite the context provided by Groves, the Department of Education is not backing off of Lhamon’s comments to Erdely.
“We stand by the statement Catherine made during her interview with Rolling Stone,” Dorie Turner Nolt, the agency’s press secretary, told The DC.”

This is serious. Here you have Erdely misrepresenting a UVA dean’s words and a federal official disparaging the dean on the basis of that misrepresentation, and the Department of Education declares that it will “stand by” this smear? More than that, however, Lhamon and Renda appear to have a very close connection through the White House task force, and both were sources for Erdely’s now-discredited article. …