by digby
You've already heard about this revolting tweet from Wall Street Journal writer James Taranto from David yesterday, but here's a reminder.
After much hemming and hawing about only wanting to "provoke discussion" he finally issued a lame mea culpa in which he says that the women can never repay the gift they were given so they must live good and happy lives.
I bring this up not to revel in the musings of a first class jerk for a second day, but because some of our readers responded to David's exhortations to write to the Wall Street Journal and copied us on their letters. I thought this one was particularly good:
Mr. Taranto’s comment regarding the heroic actions of of the men who saved their loved one’s lives draws unwanted disrespect to your paper and insults your readers.
I’m a clinical psychologist who’s spent my professional career trying to understand incomprehensible behavior but the reason for his unfeeling remark continues to elude me. I guess I'll give his thinking some analysis - mind you only the first and last lines would be actual ‘thoughts’, the panicked-reflexive-projection in between would be what he’s trying not to think of.
Those guys did in Auroroa something really brave
Would I have done that?
Who am I kidding - I would NOT have done that
Does that make me a coward?
I can't be a coward
I’m not a coward
If I wouldn’t do that it must be someone else’s fault
My sucky girlfriend's fault that's whose fault
If she were worthwhile I would be brave
because obviously I’m brave
she’s not worth saving.
ERGO
I hope those chicks were worth saving.
Finally, his comment makes sense.
Heidi Perryman, Ph.D.
Lafayette CA
Sounds right to me.
So much of the right wing response, including the sociopathic clown Ted Nugent's, seems to me to stem from this obvious insecurity. Ask any soldier and they'll tell you that even with hardcore rigorous training, nobody knows exactly how they'll react under fire and the idea that these armchair commandos believe they could have saved the day reveals a deep seated fear of their own impotence. These little men with big guns who are all pretending that they could have been the cowboy who saved the day says much more about them than they realize.
You want proof? Get a load of this:
BECK: Nobody I hear is talking about this except people like us: If you had more people carrying a weapon. If people had a gun in their back and they were -- and they were licensed to carry it, that guy wouldn't have gotten off more than four shots.
NUGENT: And I'm sure you've covered it because there was a shooting like that in a church in Aurora this year earlier.
BECK: Yep.
NUGENT: That was stopped because the guy had a gun. And I know the hysteria about teargas and it was dark in the theater. Glenn, I am not making this up. Last week my wife Shemane and I were filming a segment for our Spirit of the Wild show and we were shooting at watermelons surrounded by human silhouette targets just as kind of a competition and from 20 feet and from 20 yards and we were shooting from every imaginable angle, under SPACE cover, from sitting, from squatting, from prone position, from behind cover and from in the open, and we never hit an innocent and we never missed the watermelon. And I'm just a guitar player. If a guitar player can neutralize a watermelon from 20 feet -- and this is with live fire, by the way.
We would shoot while the other would take the target shots. So there was that tension of live fire. And this was done in a scenario -- and I understand it wasn't real bullets coming at us and it wasn't people screaming, running around.
GLENN: Please.
NUGENT: But dear God in heaven, doing nothing is not an option. Training, having a firearm to neutralize an evil gun maniac is a way to go, and we train for that. And I wish I would have been in the theater that day.
GLENN: So do I. So do I.
Sure, it wasn't in the dark and there weren't under live fire and there was no tear gas and no screaming, panicked people. But folks,