What is going on at the New York Daily News?

First, the economically-challenged newspaper publishes its "God Isn't Going to Fix This" front page in which Republican candidates are mocked for offering prayers for the victims of the two San Bernardino terrorists.  

Then New York Daily News columnist Linda Stasi writes a despicable column describing one of the victims of the bloodbath as a "hate-filled bigot" and comparing him to his killers. In a column that will make your flesh crawl, Ms. Stasi 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.

 Make no mistake, as disgusting and deservedly dead as the hate-filled fanatical Muslim killers were, [casualty Nicholas] Thalasinos was also a hate-filled bigot. Death can’t change that. But in the U.S., we don’t die for speaking our minds. Or we’re not supposed to anyway.

Nicholas Thalasinos was a Messianic Jew, which means that he was a Jew who believed that Christ is the Messiah. He argued about religion with killer Syed Farook, which traditionally in the U.S. has not been considered a reason to kill somebody. Quoting from his Facebook postings, Stasi goes on to say:   

Thalasinos was an anti-government, anti-Islam, pro-NRA, rabidly anti-Planned Parenthood kinda guy, who posted that it would be “Freaking Awesome” if hateful Ann Coulter was named head of Homeland Security. He asked, “IS 1. EVERY POLITICIAN IS BOUGHT AND PAID FOR? 2. EVERY POLITICIAN IS A MORON? 3. EVERY POLITICIAN IS RACIST AGAINST JEWS?” He also posted screeds like, “You can stick your Muslim Million Man march up your asses,” and how “Hashem” should blow up Iran.

His Facebook page warns that “Without HEALTHY PREGNANT WOMAN (Democrats) would have NO SOURCE of BABIES to SACRIFICE and SELL!”

Strong stuff to be sure, and you'll likely find some of his postings offensive. But a columnist for a large daily newspaper honestly can't make a moral distinction between posting such things on Facebook and killing fourteen people?   Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine notes:

Stasi is getting an earful from all over the place and on a very obvious level, she deserves it. WTF, really?

This sort of observation is not simply poorly timed but grossly wrong in its basic conception: Speech is speech and bullets are bullets. That's not a difficult distinction to maintain and given the willingness of high-level politicians (such as Hillary Clinton, who publicly blamed the Benghazi attack that ended with the death of a U.S. ambassador on a ridiculous YouTube video) and college administrators and activists everywhere to police every jot and tittle of micro-aggressive punctutation, it's never been more important to maintain.

The New York Daily News is floundering, a recent, much-publicized attempt at selling it having failed, but even a desperate, flailing newspaper cannot be excused for having editors and writers who think like the jerks at the Daily News.