Vile: The Atlantic Smears James Taranto

Today, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal published his thoughts on the issue of campus sexual assault; Taranto noted that often a male is assumed to have committed criminal act when both he and the woman involved are intoxicated during the incident in question.

Shamelessly, Mr. Bump twisted Taranto’s words to imply that he wrote an intoxicated woman resisting the advances of an intoxicated man might be at fault. Of course Taranto, not a psychopath, said no such thing.

Here is Taranto’s passage:

If two drunk drivers are in a collision, one doesn’t determine fault on the basis of demographic details such as each driver’s sex. But when two drunken college students “collide,” the male one is almost always presumed to be at fault.

And here is Bump’s analysis of the above passage, under the execrable headline “James Taranto Will Tell You When You’ve Been Raped, Ladies”:

In other words, if a man and a woman are both drinking, and the man sexually assaults the woman, if he rapes her, they’re kind of both at fault, really. That’s Taranto’s argument.

No, it isn’t.

Taranto deserves an apology and a retraction.