Yesterday much of the leftie blogosphere came down on James Taranto for dismissing efforts to curb sexual assault in the military as a “war on men” and an “effort to criminalize male sexuality.” I mentioned this at the end of this post. Now Taranto whines that the feminazis are picking on him.

Taranto had expressed approval of a clemency granted to an officer who was convicted of aggravated sexual assault. Today he writes,

Our argument infuriated feminists, yielding hundreds of tweets and perhaps a dozen posts on various leftist websites. Particularly noteworthy was a tweet from @Invisible_War, which promotes a documentary described as “a groundbreaking investigation into the epidemic of rape in the US military.” The tweet read: “Appalling: @WSJ’s @jamestaranto thinks we’re criminalizing male sexuality by prosecuting military rape.”

That is an utter falsehood. Our column discussed sexual assault but made no specific mention of rape, a distinct and more serious offense under military law. Herrera was not accused of rape.

It was aggravated sexual assault, which sounds a whole lot like rape to me. If military law doesn’t consider aggravated sexual assault to be that big a deal, then there’s a problem with military law.

Taranto also complains that some of the comments made about him were “abusive.” Seriously. Saying unkind things about him on the Twitter is “abusive.” But aggravated sexual assault is just boys being boys.

I feel an urge to demonstrate to Taranto what “abusive” means. But he’s not worth the effort, frankly.

Update: It gets worse. See Digby and also Think Progress —

Taranto followed up his op-ed with an appearance on Wall Street Journal’s video channel, where he argued that “female sexual freedom” is responsible for a “war on men,” and that war is embodied in allegations of sexual assault. During that interview, he also said that a woman alleging assault and a man denying it “differed… on whether she consented.” Taranto also cast doubt on the report because someone present “didn’t even hear this going on.”

“What does female sexual freedom mean?” Taranto added, “It means, for this woman, that she had the freedom to get drunk and get in the back seat of a car with this guy.”

I feel like declaring war on James Taranto. This monster needs to be out of a job.