The opinion piece is gone now, but Wednesday the Boston Globe published a piece by contributor Luke O’Neil which suggested waiters and cooks might serve America by peeing in the food of Trump officials like former Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen. From the Washington Post:

The roughly 1,200-word op-ed that appeared on the Boston Globe’s website Wednesday began with the author looking back on one of his “biggest regrets” in life — “not pissing in Bill Kristol’s salmon.”

“I was waiting on the disgraced neoconservative pundit and chief Iraq War cheerleader about 10 years ago at a restaurant in Cambridge and to my eternal dismay, some combination of professionalism and pusillanimity prevented me from appropriately seasoning his entree,” wrote Luke O’Neil, a Boston-based freelance journalist and regular contributor to the Globe’s opinions section…

The final lines of the column, which bore the headline, “Keep Kirstjen Nielsen unemployed and eating Grubhub over her kitchen sink,” appeared to take things a step further. “As for the waiters out there, I’m not saying you should tamper with anyone’s food, as that could get you into trouble,” O’Neil wrote. “You might lose your serving job. But you’d be serving America. And you won’t have any regrets years later.”

It seems pretty clear to me what he’s suggesting, i.e. I really regret not doing this disgusting thing and maybe you’ll regret not doing it too. After some pushback from conservatives, the Boston Globe removed the final two lines of the piece suggesting waiters would be “serving America” by peeing in someone’s food. They also changed the wording of the opening line so that instead of saying he regretted “not pissing in Bill Kristol’s salmon” it said he regretted “not defiling” his salmon. Nice.

At some point though, the Globe just gave up and removed the piece which really upset Luke O’Neil who tweeted, “Absolute brain genius move by the Globe to edit my story three times and then take it down altogether and put up a note saying I’m not on staff instead of perhaps standing by a long time contributor and siding with labor instead of bad faith critics who would hate them no matter what.”

Here’s a bigger brain genius move: Write a piece telling waiters to pee in people’s food and then, when the outlet that publishes it takes the heat, attack them for not standing up for you. I’m sure they’ll be eager to have you back. But it probably won’t matter because O’Neil told the Post he won’t be back:

“They completely cut my throat on this,” he told The Post. “I will never write for them again.”

I’m sure they are reeling from the loss. Really though, O’Neil was just doing his schtick, which is apparently being outrageous in a way that appeals to the resistance crowd. If he deserves to be thrown under the bus so do the editors involved in publishing his piece. Honestly, I think it would just be better if the Globe left it up so they would have to defend it in perpetuity. As it is, the Globe gets off easy and can just pretend this never happened.