Rick Santorum is Right!

I… agree with Rick Santorum (emphasis mine):

I actually read the Freeh Report. I don’t know if you did or not, but I did. And, my concern with the Freeh report, a lot of the conclusions in the Freeh report aren’t matched by the evidence that they presented and so I’ve been talking to a lot of folks at Penn State and they say, ‘you’re just gonna have to wait for the criminal trial of these two guys at Penn State.’ I think there is going to be a whole new line set on what really went on there. So I’m sort of sitting back and waiting for the facts to come out as opposed to at least I’m being told is a version of the facts. … Let’s get the truth. 

Yes, exactly. The report’s conclusions were not supported by the evidence presented. The evidence could be read the way Freeh read it, yes, but it could also be reasonably read in other ways. The alternate, less damning conclusions, which the evidence would support equally strongly, were not presented or discussed in any way. The article I pulled Santorum’s quote from concludes:

Contra Santorum, the Freeh Report’s central finding — that “nothing was done and Sandusky was allowed to continue with impunity” by Penn State’s leaders — has been treated as conclusive by most observers of the scandal. There’s a good reason for that: the report parsed3.5 million emails and conducted around 430 interviews. A number of emails arrayed in the report’s timeline of events confirm that Paterno, Spanier, and others had been presented with strong evidence of Sandusky’s actions and yet still decided to sweep the events under the rug — enabling multiple instances of abuse to take place. Unless Santorum has reason to believe these were falsified or somehow insufficient, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he’s in denial about what took place at his alma mater.

Apparently, the fact that Freeh read a lot of documents proves him right. Well, OK, so he read 3.5 million emails. What was in them? We don’t know, because they weren’t presented in the report. It’s entirely possible that, if one were to read all 3.5 million emails, one would arrive at the same conclusion as Freeh. But we can’t read them. Our only evidence is what is presented in the report, and as I said it is far from conclusive. I don’t believe the emails were falsified as suggested, but the ones that were presented are most certainly insufficient to arrive at the conclusion Freeh arrived at. 

Santorum is just objectively right, here. 

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