49s Fumbler Death Threats, Cat Murder and Lack of Perspective

In the continuing annals of people in this country who have no sense of perspective at all, I give you two new exhibits.

First we go to San Francisco 49s wide receiver Kyle Williams, who, during the NFL playoffs over the weekend, made some mistakes and help cost his team a place in the Super Bowl.

San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Kyle Williams shown here either
expressing his disappointment in his game performance, or
trying to drown out the yahoos who issued death threats againts him.

Williams feels bad, takes ownership of the mistakes, and I know he will keep plugging. That should be the end of the story. He's not exactly a mass murderer, right? Just a bloke who had an iffy day that had no bearing on the fate of the world.

Well, a lot of people would disagree. Williams has gotten a ton of death threats for his less than stellar performance on the field. People want his wife and kids killed for this too. Seriously. (That Williams does not have a wife and kids apparently is beside the point.)

Here's one typical example, cited by bleacherreport.com who found this charming message about Williams on Facebook from some yahoo identified as Cole Matthew Mitguard:

"Kyle Williams... you need to leave San Francisco forever, you should never be allowed to play in the NFL ever again... Your play and ypur post game comments should be enough to earn yourself a spot in 49ers history's... As the biggest POS to ever wear the red and gold. Lots of hope for next year, let's just hope that KW gets hit by a bus, eaten by a lion, or dies in some other terrible way so he can't ruin the 49ers season again... What a terrible piece of garbage you are KW, you ruined the game I have been waiting for over 10 years..

Really. So Cole, you've been waiting for the 49ers to win for a decade, you think Williams took it away from you and so he must die. Oh, you poor, poor victim.  Enduring your football team's loss has to be so much worse than minor inconveniences like terminal cancer, homelessness, rape, or all kinds of awful things decent people are forced to face.

Cole, I think you're being just a tiny bit melodramatic, no?

Williams is worse than a serial killer because he fumbled a football?f  I would love to confront the people who made the threats to find out what they were thinking. What other mistakes deserve the death penalty? Do I deserve to die because I wasn't paying attention this morning while walking along a sidewalk and almost bumped into someone?

Mitguard's Facebook post and the response it got is fascinating, as it presents a window onto the psyche of people who make these weird threats.  When confronted, they do back down, in kind of a sniveling way.   At first Cole says, petulantly, "Why is it that I should restrain myself from expressing myself."

Well, because you sound like a moron.

Mitguard goes on to concede that maybe, just maybe, the death threat was a little over the top. But he goes on and on about his anguish that Williams blew two plays. The horror! "Every 49ers fan is entitled to at least 24 hours of unmitigated rage," he writes.

True, sports fans are entitled to being annoyed by a losing team. And sure, if your friendly neighborhood NFL wide receiver does a crappy job, why not publicly complain and criticize? But unmitigated rage? So you're going to start a riot or something too? I guess that's whats behind those riots you get after a team loses a big game. Right, fine folks of Vancouver?

Further responding to being confronted, our buddy Cole writes this:

"Please do not try and take the moral high ground on someone in my position who is both drunk and frustrated at this evenings events. But at the same time, I find it infanelty (sic) more embarrasing that their (sic) are fans out there who don't put their beliefs out there."



Oh, OK. You're drunk and frustrated, so that gives you the right to offer threats, even if they're not serious. And you're saying that if your team disappoints you, you're supposed to go apeshit because a real person doesn't have a temper tantrum when the home team loses?

Like I said, disappointment and frustration among fans is perfectly fine when the team loses. But again I have to ask the question:  How is this melodrama a sign of being a real man, a real team player?

Toward the end, Cole's Facebook friends talk him down. He even finds it in his heart to see some  sunshine.   "Next year is going to be an awesome year to be a 49ers fan."

Atta boy, Cole!

I don't mean to pick exclusively on this one poor soul, but his Facebook post was so readily accessible that I couldn't resist analyzing it as a textbook example of being a little over the top.

It looks like Cole has calmed down, but what about the rest of those members of the wacko death threat brigade?  Maybe killing a whole town of people is OK, but screwing up a football game is grounds for swift capital punishment?

Somebody please explain this to me.

Next we go to Arkansas, where the campaign manager for a Congressional candidate came home and found somebody killed his cat and scrawled "liberal" on the cat's corpse.

Apparently, if you're a liberal, your cat needs to die.  Because it's the cat's fault your liberal. Or something.  And which animals should die if somebody is deemed too conservative?

Ken Aden, the Congressional candidate whose campaign manager had to deal with this, naturally condemned this and said he knows that his opponent, Steve Womack, and Womack's campaign, had absolutely nothing to do with the disgusting incident.

Womack for his part, said in no uncertain terms that the idea of brutalizing an animal to make a political statement is beyond any standard of decency.

So at least the political candidates are behaving like sane adults here.

But still, some loser is out there, thinking the logical thing to do with a political candidate you don't like is torture and kill his pets.

I guess in the name of being an "American" the torturer decided to instill fear in a legitimate political campaign. Being a terrorist is OK if it fits your own political views?

Oooh, I hope they catch more of the people who did this, and the people who made death threats against the football player, and make their names public. Not because I want any physical harm to come to them. But because they need to be publicly embarrassed all to hell.

But these miscreants are probably too stupid to learn anything from this.
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