"I want to know what anybody wants to know. You see these two schmucky looking guys in baseball caps and one's just outta high school..."

"...and a kind of a not-so-great college student. One kid is 26 and is a boxer, and people know them. You want to form a picture. You want to understand. This is not a question — I was getting hammered on Twitter by some right-wing groups that somehow I was sympathetic with them.  This is ridiculous.  I wasn't sympathetic with people who do something so horrendous and cruel and kill people and had plans for more.  But there's the human impulse to want to try to understand the — maybe something that's impossible to understand."

Said the New Yorker's David Remnick to PBS's Charlie Rose, in audio played by Rush Limbaugh, who proceeded to do the very thing Remnick sought sympathy for: hammer him from the right:

You know what's rooted in this wanting to understand?  'Cause, frankly, I don't care why people commit crimes.  I frankly am not interested.  They're perverts, they're psychopaths, they're sociopaths, I don't care why they did it.  I want 'em punished.  But these guys want to find out because in their minds there must be some justification for it.  There's gotta be some reason they did it that makes sense.  And then they make the move into what is it about us that they hate?  Or what is it about America that they hate that would justify this?  And we do seminars, "Why do they hate us?"  Seminars, trying to examine why sociopaths, psychopaths hate us.  Or, in this case, a couple of radicalized Muslims.