Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

"West Wing" creator: Moose-killing Palin no better than Michael Vick

I didn't have any good ideas for getting Philadelphia all riled up today, so thank God for Aaron Sorkin, creator of "The West Wing" and writer of both "The Social Network" and "A Few Good Men" (and, in the braver-man-than-I would-be department, reputed one-time dater of Maureen Dowd). Comes now Sorkin with the argument that Sarah Palin's moose killing depicted on Sarah Palin's Alaska was dispicable and thus that makes her no better than...well, guess who:

Like 95% of the people I know, I don't have a visceral (look it up) problem eating meat or wearing a belt. But like absolutely everybody I know, I don't relish the idea of torturing animals. I don't enjoy the fact that they're dead and I certainly don't want to volunteer to be the one to kill them and if I were picked to be the one to kill them in some kind of Lottery-from-Hell, I wouldn't do a little dance of joy while I was slicing the animal apart.

I'm able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don't watch snuff films and you make them. You weren't killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun. You enjoy killing animals. I can make the distinction between the two of us but I've tried and tried and for the life of me, I can't make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing. I'm able to make the distinction with no pangs of hypocrisy even though I get happy every time one of you faux-macho (expletive deleted)heads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face.

C'mon, Aaron -- what do you really think here? (We can handle the truth!)

Let me be clear, I'm posting Sorkin's piece here because I think it's provocative (and hey, it involves an "area man"!), not because I agree with all of it. The truth is that Sorkin has no idea what kind of suffering that his New York strip steak or his bomber jacket went through, and that makes it harder to claim the high moral ground, but he also makes a valid point in that Palin seemed to be killing a moose mainly to entertain people and make money, which is also the purpose of, um. dogfighting, no?

I think I'm going to have to let you guys sort this one out.