Well, I don’t know if you could use a cheerful little development, on the coverage of the Lara Logan case. But I sure do suspect that you could!
Above, you will see a tweet by Nir Rosen. It was one of several, expressing a complete and entire lack of empathy for Lara Logan’s sexual assault! Looking at Nir Rosen’s Twitter feed, you will see him work through nearly every position in the Rape Apologist Playbook. His Tweets included golden lines such as:
- “look, she was probably groped like thousands of other women,” or, the “It Wasn’t RAPE-Rape” (it wasn’t a beating-and-assault beating-and-assault?) Defense.
- “its terrible, but you had millions of people on the street, its not exactly shocking,” or, the “She Should Have Seen It Coming So It’s Her Fault” Defense.
- “i’m rolling my eyes at all the attention she will get,” or, the “Bitches Do This For Their Own Ends, Don’t Pretend They Don’t, You Naive Hysterical Little Rape-Hater” Defense.
- My favorite moments, however, came when someone with a protected feed apparently did the “what if it happened to your wife” thing. At this point, things got GOOOOOOOOD. We got, ”my wife didnt dedicate her career to promoting america’s wars,” which apparently is the only reason Nir Rosen’s wife would deserve empathy if she were beaten and sexually assaulted by a gang of strangers (Lord help you if you disagree with your husband about McChrystal, Mrs. Rosen!) and “at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified” — Bitches Do This for Their Own Ends, remember — “we should at least remember her role as a major war monger.” This, of course, is the “I Am The Real Progressive Here, I Care About The Real Causes, Not Like You With Your Divisive Focus On Silly Girl Shit Like Rape” Defense. Which seems… familiar.
- And then, once he’d finally dug a nice, neat, six-foot-deep Nir-Rosen-shaped hole in the ground, he eventually realized it was a grave. And apologized. With this: “As someone who’s devoted his career to defending victims and supporting justice, I’m very ashamed.” This, of course, is the “Feminism Has No Greater Male Supporter Than Me” defense, otherwise known as “Olbermanning.”
None of this is terribly cheery. What is cheery? The apology wasn’t enough. Because it never really is, is it? Especially not when it’s dragged out with a lengthy, self-incriminating self-defense and then several non-apologies and then, FINALLY, an admission of “shame” that seems pretty calculated to get people to back off, and not founded on an actual recognition of the eight or nine or twenty ways in which his behavior was unacceptable in human society. The cheery portion is that, even after “apologizing,” Nir Rosen got his rape-apologist ass fired.
No, you don’t get to watch him clean out his desk. But wouldn’t it be fun? We could bring beer! And popcorn! And on the day of the “Is Lara Logan To Blame For Her Own Assault” WEB POLL, I think just imagining that is pretty fun.
