Today’s New York Daily News cover looks like a cry for help. Subjected to entirely appropriate criticism — including from yours truly— for its coverage of the San Bernardino shooting, its attacks on prayers and those who offer them, and for ridiculously calling the head of the NRA a “terrorist,” it seems the paper has finally snapped:
This is like a tantrum from the college kid at Thanksgiving Dinner who doesn’t understand why everyone is arguing with him about climate change. “Fine! You think everything is great and you don’t think the environment matters and we can keep poisoning Gaia. Everything is just awesome!”
The problem in both cases is the same. Nobody said everything is awesome. Nobody said “nothing’s wrong.” This kind of strawman argumentation is precisely why people got so angry with the Daily News in the first place. The upshot is, unless you define the problems and the solutions pretty much exactly the way the Daily News does, then you’re the one in denial.
Far better proof, however, that the paper is out of its gourd came over the weekend with this bizarre item by Daily News columnist Linda Stasi. She writes:
They were two hate-filled, bigoted municipal employees interacting in one department. Now 13 innocent people are dead in unspeakable carnage.
One man spent his free time writing frightening, NRA-loving, hate-filled screeds on Facebook about the other’s religion.
The other man quietly stewed and brewed his bigotry, collecting the kind of arsenal that the Facebook poster would have envied.
She goes on at great length playing moral-equivalence games between a mass murderer and someone whose views Stasi didn’t like. It sounds like I wouldn’t like some of Nicholas Thalasinos views either, but so ‘effing what? He didn’t deserve to be murdered and he didn’t deserve to be put on the same level as the fanatic who murdered him. Stasi even refuses to count this man among the victims. See where she says “Now 13 innocent people are dead”?
There were 14 victims, but, for Stasi, the Jewish guy doesn’t count because he was mean on Facebook. Talk about blaming the victim.
There was a time when the Daily News would never have allowed this kind of filth in its pages. But now, it seems, everything it does is awesome.