Michelle Malkin Is A Virus

The Washington Post's Yen For Hot Rightie Lunatics: "Malkin is the field general for a squad of bitter pro-war dead-enders who lash out online against anyone who dares speak the truth about the war. She has been wrong about Iraq in every conceivable way, with a losing streak dating back more than 50 straight months. The consequences for having habitually botched the most important policy issue of the last decade? She's taken to lunch by a Washington Post reporter (the same reporter Malkin once derided as incompetent), who then splashes a friendly profile in the paper while carefully refusing to inform readers about Malkin's glaring ignorance and unhinged loathing. Malkin is the field general for a squad of bitter pro-war dead-enders who lash out online against anyone who dares speak the truth about the war. She has been wrong about Iraq in every conceivable way, with a losing streak dating back more than 50 straight months. The consequences for having habitually botched the most important policy issue of the last decade? She's taken to lunch by a Washington Post reporter (the same reporter Malkin once derided as incompetent), who then splashes a friendly profile in the paper while carefully refusing to inform readers about Malkin's glaring ignorance and unhinged loathing. "

Being a classless male, I'd fuck her, then yell at her, then fire her.

Here's a brief list of Malkin's recent lowlights:
During the 2004 campaign, Malkin appeared on MSNBC's Hardball and insisted that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were alleging that John Kerry shot himself on purpose while serving in Vietnam. Her slanderous appearance caused a media stir, since the Swifties had never made that accusation against Kerry. The following day, while blogging and appearing on C-SPAN, Malkin lied repeatedly about her Hardball showdown.

In early 2005, during the Terri Schiavo right-to-die controversy, Malkin embraced a dubious conspiracy theory and ridiculed The Washington Post for weeks. Malkin, who posted about the topic incessantly, was certain Post reporters had fabricated a key report about the infamous Schiavo "talking points memo" written and distributed by the GOP. In her April 1 post belittling the "Schiavo talking points memo mess," Malkin continued her attack on The Washington Post and demanded the daily start publishing a laundry list of retractions for its fraudulent coverage of the Schiavo memo. (Incredibly, Kurtz gave the bloggers a platform inside the paper to air their baseless allegations against the Post.) Malkin's claims were proven to be untrue when an aide to a Republican senator confessed to writing the Schiavo memo.

In April 2005, Malkin was leading the charge (i.e. "raising troubling questions") in accusing a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer with the Associated Press of working in concert with Iraqi insurgents to stage the public assassination of a Baghdad election worker. (The photog was tipped off by terrorists, Malkin claimed.) The allegations were proven to completely fictitious.
In October 2005, after a depressed University of Oklahoma engineering student blew himself up 100 yards away from a packed football stadium, Malkin hyped the story by linking to fellow bloggers who suggested the student, Joel Henry Hinrichs III, had an Al Qaeda connection. Malkin also complained the mainstream media were covering up the real facts in an effort to "whitewash radical Islam out of the news." Scores of law enforcement agencies quickly confirmed the terrorism conspiracy theory was pure fiction.

Last summer, Malkin led yet another angry charge against The New York Times after its Travel section, in a puff piece about an exclusive Maryland vacation town, published photos of weekend homes owned by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. Based on nothing more than a conspiratorial hunch, Malkin and company shrieked that by running the photos the unpatriotic Times had (deliberately) emboldened Al Qaeda and endangered the lives of Rumsfeld and Cheney by showing terrorists where the men lived. In truth, the Times received Pentagon approval to run the innocuous photos. Said Rummy's own flack: "I'm a little confused about why this has caused such an uproar." Join the club.

In January, Malkin experienced a particularly humiliating setback. For months, Malkin had been pushing a far-fetched media "scandal" by accusing the Associated Press of manufacturing a "phony" and "bogus" Iraqi police source who was reporting false stories about the daily carnage inside Baghdad. She claimed the phony AP source proved that all of the AP's Iraq reporting was suspect. (Malkin and company cling to the notion that the situation in Iraq is not as bad as biased journalists make it out to be.) In January, the Iraqi government confirmed the police source's existence, thereby ruining Malkin's press-hating conspiracy theory. (The Post remained silent when Malkin's Jamil Hussein allegation imploded.)

Let's face it -- if a liberal blogger ever stitched together a record of sloppy, Keystone Kops-style obfuscation the way Malkin has, Post editors wouldn't even know how to spell the blogger's name, let alone be interested in profiling them. And who would blame them? Any overexcited dolt can randomly make stuff up on the Internet, or link to others who do. Apparently, the fact that Malkin does that like clockwork and that it, in turn, gets people upset is newsworthy in the eyes of Washington Post editors.

Two years ago this month, Kurtz noted, "Many bloggers are careful and thought-provoking, others partisan or mean-spirited." The question is: Why has the Post has made a conscious decision to champion mean-spirited bloggers like Malkin at the expense of the thought-provoking ones?