Dumbledore, Snap and Fudge

[thomasmwall <thomasmwall@yahoo.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 50484


"Scott:
Wow, that was great! I have a question though- how many people 
actually know that Lockhart was a complete moron? Besides anyone 
who's ever met him, I mean. The general wizarding public has no idea 
he's a liar and a fake, at least not from what I've read in the 
canon. "


That is an excellent point. I guess, in my own head, I have a 
tendency to just *assume* that what the general student body and 
staff of Hogwarts know, the rest of the wizarding community will find 
out by necessity. It'll be interesting to find out whether or not JKR 
brings Lockhart up again. You'd think that the disappearance, or even 
the memory-wiping of a notorious heartthrob and prolific author would 
cause some stir in the WW, even if Dumbledore managed to keep the 
whole affair hush-hush.

"Scott:
And as for Crouch Jr. escaping Azkaban and masquerading as Moody, 
well, as far as we know, the only person who knows about it outside 
of the regulars is Fudge - and we know Rita Skeeter won't be writing 
articles any time soon." 


Also an excellent point. I again assumed that this information would 
necessarily be spread in OotP. You've got the regulars (which 
comprise a fairly large and extended group,) Fudge, and Moody, unless 
you're counting Moody as a regular. Fudge himself may deny that 
Voldemort has returned, but somehow the MoM is going to have to 
address the havoc at the Triwizard Tournament, right? How will they 
do all that (account for the Portkey, Cedric, Crouch Sr's death) if 
they don't reveal the truth?

In CoS Fudge says "I'm under a lot of pressure. Got to be seen to be 
doing something." (CoS 261) And the tournament's a big deal, right?  
Karkaroff's already promised to lodge complaints against the MoM. It 
just seems like there's going to be an inevitable fallout from the 
whole thing that we haven't seen yet, on account of GoF concluding 
shortly after the TWT ended.

As a side note, since GoF picked up very shortly after PoA, I think 
that OotP will go the same way. If there's fallout or any kind of 
comeuppance for Dumbledore, it'll happen early on in the fifth book.

"Scott:
Dumbledore could probably be forgiven for Quirrel- I was always under 
the impression that he had been working at Hogwarts for at LEAST a 
year before SS/PS, so I don't think he was evil when he was hired."


Yep, I think you're right. Quirrell is definitely a forgivable 
offense for Dumbledore... although I don't remember if I was clear on 
whether or not he worked for the school before PS/SS. Don't we hear, 
at some point in that book, that the position is jinxed? Or does that 
come out later on?

I guess that my point was that any one by itself would be forgivable, 
and you could chock each alone up to a simple mistake. But not all 
four of them. And definitely not all four of them plus all of the 
other stuff. In fact, the more I think about it (and even though I 
like Dumbledore tremendously) he does seem to have a spotty record as 
Headmaster. In our muggle world, wouldn't you consider someone who 
kept making mistakes and lapses of judgement of this magnitude to be 
incompetent? And the people who support him unflinchingly, well, 
aren't they the ones that are in his fan club already? I mean Hagrid, 
Harry, Lupin, the Weasleys and so forth. The people who support him 
like that are the ones he's helped in some way.

But we also know that there are people who do not approve of 
Dumbledore, and who would like to see him gone. Draco says at one 
point: "Father's always said old Dumbledore's the worst thing that's 
ever happened to this place."  (CoS 222)  Surely there are others who 
share that sentiment.

As Lucius Malfoy says in CoS: "We shall all miss your - er - highly 
individual way of running things."

I guess it's just one of those things we'll have to wait to see, eh?

-Tom