Signs of Intelligent Life

Only 53 hours after Derbyshire criticized the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting for not being enough like Batman and taking out the armed perp despite the fact that they were unarmed themselves, another Cornerite calls him on it (once again via Ana Marie Cox. John Podhoretz, who doesn't normally do much of anything to distinguish himself from the rest of the pack, brought some sanity to the discussion.

I have to dissent, in the strongest possible terms, from John Derbyshire's shocking posts on Virginia Tech. The notion that a human being or group of human beings holding no weapon whatever should somehow "fight back" against someone calmly executing other people right in front of their eyes is ludicrous beyond belief, irrational beyond bounds, and tasteless beyond the limits of reason.

"Why didn't anyone rush the guy?" Derb asks. Gee, I don't know. Because he was executing people? Because if you rush a guy with a gun, he shoots you in the head the way he executed the teachers in each classroom?

While he's there, he also recommends David Maraniss's reconstruction of events from Thursday's Washington Post. Entitled " 'That Was the Desk I Chose to Die Under,' " it's full of similar observations and responses from survivors. Extremely sobering, it's the best account of the events I've seen or read so far. Unfortunately, it took less than an hour for Kathryn Jean Lopez to upbraid Podhoretz for not understanding the actual point Derb was making, which was, ah, . . . um, . . . hrmm, well, I didn't get it, either.

But I don't think I was the only one. Run over to Crooks and Liars for a radio discussion between Derb and C&L's John Amato on the issue. It's from Alan Colmes's show, and Derb comes off even worse than I'd expect. To hear him talk, he has no idea what a rhetorical question is. He opened his original post with a rhetorical question, but when questioned about it insisted that he really did intend for it to be an honest question to which he didn't know the answer. The fact that the entire rest of his post was dependent on the answer to the question being no seems to have escaped him entirely. If that's true and Derb had no idea what he was doing while composing the entry, you've got to give him some credit--he did a pretty good job of instinctively constructing his piece if he has no basic understanding of how structure works.