Liberals are melting down over an anecdote about a dinner party prank from the memoirs by longtime NPR journalist Nina Totenberg.
Totenberg is promoting her book, “Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships,” but at least one story about the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative, provoked outrage.
Here’s the
account of the incident from Balls and Strikes, a progressive news website.
Antonin Scalia, whom she “loved,” figures in one of the book’s most disturbing episodes. Just days after
D.C. v. Heller, the 2008 case that ungrammatically discovered an individual right to bear arms in the Second Amendment, Totenberg and her husband hosted a dinner party with the Scalias in attendance. Totenberg’s husband placed plastic squirt guns in each soup bowl and later aimed a Super Soaker at Scalia. This, Totenberg recalls, “brought down the house” with laughter.
That snippet was cut and pasted to social media by those who were outraged that Totenberg would joke about such a highly charged subject as gun control.
“I listened to some of the Totenberg interview on Fresh Air today and honestly it made me sick to my stomach. There was a *funny* story about her liberal husband and water guns when Scalia came to her house for dinner Access journalism is morally indefensible,”
replied opinion columnist Will Bunch.
“I went into a rage stroke when she talked about how they invited the Scalias to dinner and played with squirt guns after Heller came down,”
read another response.
“This is genuinely disgusting. I cannot imagine that @NPR would tolerate this kind of unethical behavior from any *other* employee than Totenberg, and I cannot imagine taking her future SCOTUS analysis there seriously, in light of this behavior,” said another detractor.
“NPR has a responsibility to condemn these repeated, egregious examples of journalistic malpractice. This is obscene,” read another reply.
Ironically, many on the right were also incensed about the memoirs from Totenberg over her friendship with the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Here’s more about Totenberg’s book:
Author Nina Totenberg on her decades-long friendship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
www.youtube.com