your exactly correct...spent a little time at the pennlive comment thread last night where over 270 Central Pennsylvanians commented on the Paterno's pathetic attempts at legacy retoration. it isnt pretty for them, at all. The overwhelming response there is for them to just shut up. pretty much everyone but the true die hard joepa cool aid drinker realizes that this misguided attempt is only making it worse for Joe.
Which leads me to believe that the Paterno lawyers have helped unbalance the Paterno's already tilted judgements in favor of this diastrous plan, and to noones great surprise, it is a plan which will suck many of the retirement dollars that ole Joe and his co-conspirator, Spanier, funneled into the patriarch's bank account at the 11th hour and out of the families greedy little hands, into their lawyers bank accounts.
there is a certain karmic irony here. the Paterno's, half blind with the power crazed ego lust that propelled their dead patriarch, are duped into believing a transparently flawed "expert" investigation will magically resurrect the legacy of the fallen despot. and it is the lawyers who pull them over the edge with legalistic arguments, which are fine in the controlled American courtroom, which heavily favors the guilty, as long as they have enough money to keep paying the lawyers, who are intimately aware of ALL the courtroom slight of hand and smoke and mirrors they use on a daily basis to hide the truth from unsuspecting and easily duped jurors.
but this isnt court. this is the court of public opinion, where the truth stands a much better chance of being recognized. Lawyer tricks in the court of public opinion are more easily seen for what they are. They are not given the pompous gravitas at large in the community that they are afforded in the hamstrung, criminal-friendly court room.
consequently, when a Paterno lawyer argues that an email which refers only to "coach" is ambiguous and doesn't refer to "the" Coach, well that is fine in the criminal coddling court room, and a measure of doubt may cloud the mind of juries who are constanly bombarded with the ridiculously flawed "beyond a resonable doubt" instruction.
but in the light of day, in the court of public opinion, when the Paterno lawyer makes that ridculous claim, it is easily seen as the courtroom trickery it is. The whole world knows that when the President of Penn state university changes his mind on a policy that would out Sandusky, which he has already agreed upon with Curly and Schultz, and which, by the way, would solve the problem and put an end to the Sandusky reign of terror, and when he does so unilaterally, at the last minute, after talking to the "coach"....well the whole world outside a courtroom knows which coach Spanier is talking about.
But inside the courtroom, the Paterno lawyer can create maybe a tinge of "resonable doubt" in at least one jurors mind. ( dont forget the jurors have been hand picked by defense experts, highly paid professionals who know what signs to look for in potential jurors that show them to be the most vulnerable to the atty's slight of hand arguments).
but not in the light of day. here the truth is not so easily obscured. and when the lawyers assure the Paternos that for a few million dollars (they hardly put it THAT way) they can turn reality into fantasy, and joepas legacy back into the fantasyland the Paternos want everyone to believe....well, that plumb is just too ripe for the state-made-weathy Paterno's to reject.
but all its going to do is solidify in most folks minds what is becomming more and more obvious every day. It turns out, the Paterno's are no better than their dead patriarch, and by attempting to pull the wool over our eyes with lawyer slight of hand arguments, they are actually making our vision clearer. Now, maybe, even more folks in Central Pa. and happy valley and the penn state "family" will more clearly see who and what was in charge of their University for the last 40 years.
and its the greedy lawyers who are egging the unsuspecting Paternos on. oh well, they end up with some of the ill got Paterno millions, and there is a certain justice to that after all.
