Idiots On Aurora: Pt. Trois(t)

We are almost perfectly sure Wall Street Journal resident douchebag James Taranto didn't mean to call down the Vengeance of the Internet last night, when he tweeted about the three women whose boyfriends died shielding them from the fusillade in Aurora, "I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice."

Let us repeat that, in case you were skimming that first graf: "I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice."

In fact, for serious, we can pretty much see his turgid thought process rolling around his echoing, cavernous skull. His intention, we think, was to sound a wise and somber note; we believe he thought it would be a tender and sensitive tweet for the ages, a noble "tribute" to the heroes who died, the kind of vacuous, pious, pompous thing that everyone says about "heroes" and "the troops," on the same thought-free but sadly uncontroversial order as a twitchily hand-scrawled Independence Day yard sign we once saw that said "Your freedom belongs to THE TROOPS," as though our freedoms had not been handed down as inalienable rights from God but instead had been beneficently bestowed by a generous Pinochet or something. My, that rankled!

The fact that Taranto devotes about 40 acres of WSJ column space per year to the perils of feminism and sexual harrassment law, (and like the greatest minds of the 1950s even has a hard-on for The Pill, as if he's never even heard Loretta Lynn explaining it) makes his tweet more, er, problematic . (WHAT WE ARE SAYING IS THAT JAMES TARANTO DOES NOT LIKE WOMEN.)

A follow-up tweet, mid-shitstorm, tried to plead that he says the same thing every Memorial Day about the nation and its troops -- as if calling on a nation to be worthy is the same as calling out three specific women whose boyfriends were quite recently, oh, murdered on top of them .

Well we say, "good on you, James Taranto!" A pre-shaming is probably just what those women needed, before we commit them immediately for like a month of intensive meds and therapy to help work through the feelings of inadequacy and the guilt they would be feeling even without the mitzvah that is James Taranto reminding them! Maybe now they will be able to properly consecrate themselves to their boyfriends' memory, Miss Havisham style, and, as is only right and proper, never feel joy or comfort again.