Last week, St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page director Tod Robberson affixed his byline to a remarkably bad column — deploying a columnist's bag of tricks to argue that protesters are hypocritical law-breakers and that acts of civil disobedience enable violence.
The twisting logic and selective memory involved in Robberson's April 26 op-ed, "There's no constitutional right to commit mayhem," quickly drew pushback from state Representative Bruce Franks (D-St. Louis), whose rebuttal was published by the St. Louis American on Friday.
But while Franks took on some big fallacies in Robberson's argument, he didn't mention one of Robberson's grossest errors: Namely, the way Robberson tries to use the unrelated death of a Bosnian immigrant to bolster his case.…