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God bless PA Gov. Tom Corbett

The New York Times reports that Gov. Corbett, who launched the grand jury investigation of Jerry Sandusky when he was the Pennsylvania Attorney General, knew that the bomb was going to go off at some point. He was elected governor in 2010, and as the state’s chief executive, is a member of Penn State’s board […]

The New York Times reports that Gov. Corbett, who launched the grand jury investigation of Jerry Sandusky when he was the Pennsylvania Attorney General, knew that the bomb was going to go off at some point. He was elected governor in 2010, and as the state’s chief executive, is a member of Penn State’s board of trustees. He couldn’t tell the trustees everything he knew about the case, the Times reports, but apparently it was he who leaned on them hard to throw Spanier and Paterno overboard. Check this out:

Raised in blue-collar Shaler, Pa., a town of 28,000 where a high school football game is a major event, Mr. Corbett spent most of his career as a prosecutor. A Roman Catholic, he was struck early on in the Penn State investigation by the similarities between the university’s failure to report allegations of sexual abuse involving Mr. Sandusky and the church’s failure to report pedophile priests, according to several people who work with him.

The Penn State case also had echoes of a prosecution Mr. Corbett had led as a young assistant district attorney. Mr. Sandusky is alleged to have used a foundation he created for disadvantaged children, called the Second Mile, to prey upon young boys. In the case earlier in Mr. Corbett’s career, he prosecuted a serial pedophile who ran a club for troubled children called the Children of the Wind.

In 2004, Mr. Corbett was elected attorney general, and quickly created a special unit to investigate child predators. He privately cited the Children of the Wind victims as the reason, saying he remained haunted by victims in the case, Mr. Harley recalled.

He knew what was at stake here, because he had prosecuted this kind of scumbag before. And as a Catholic, he knew what gutless, vacillating leadership in such cases had done to his own church, and he wasn’t going to put up with it in an institution he had a say in running. Amazing. Finally, a good guy in this story.

UPDATE: My wife says, “Can you imagine a Pennsylvania politician willing to take down Joe Paterno, and not care about the fallout, because it was the right thing to do? That’s a man.”

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