I was out of commission all last week and this may have been commented on elsewhere, but it sure caught my eye just now. Apparently a peace protester in San Francisco fell to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge last week. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto tells it to us:

No Waaaaaaaaaaaa!
“A man protesting the looming U.S. war on Iraq fell to his death from San Francisco’s famed Golden Gate Bridge on Wednesday as he was hanging a banner,” Reuters reports.

Isn’t that the funniest thing ever? Now, it’s okay to disagree with people, but is it okay for Taranto to joke about someone’s death as he does here? (Even if the protester was being a dumbass.) This gets scarier the more I think about it. This attitude, this mindset that if a person is dumb enough to be a peace protester it serves him right to die and we can all laugh about it — I don’t know, but it seems to tie in with Orcinus’ recent warnings of a new tide of fascism, “one predicated on a coalescence of corporatist power with proto-fascist thuggery.” Here we have a mainstream business newspaper adopting a classic thuggish attitude toward a young man’s death in a manner that brings to mind Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer, which mocked the Jews in the most obscene and lurid manner. And I don’t think I am being an alarmist. Just think about it. And if you haven’t seen it already, go and read section 12 of Orcinus’ analysis of this very topic. He is not that far off the mark. Small but telling items like this convince me more than ever that he is right on target.