The Pink Flamingo :: Malkin, Bad Manners & Demonizing Those She Dislikes

I’ve seen and read some vicious, cruel, and vindictive attacks before but I think this one by Michelle Malkin
ranks up toward the top ten. We all know how much she claims to honor our vets. Her blog is a glowing example of patriotism. She demands the same of others as seen in this example of her blog. Fortunately Medved caught her little act and put up an excellent column countering what he calls Six Big LIES About John McCain.

“Malkin is a true Cundit,” observed one anonymous poster. “A highly paid media ‘ho’ getting richer by throwing red meat to the loons.” God help me, I LOVE IT.”

One of my regular readers emailed this to me this morning. It’s nasty, but right now I feel a bit nasty. My regular readers know that I usually don’t take personal swipes at people. I will take them out on issues and their actions, but I seriously try not to go farther than that. I am also trying to be decent about all the candidates. I think my opinion of Mitt Romney is well known. I think he is the plastic two cent version of John Kerry, only he has a big bank account. I do not like doing what I am going to do, but I think it is necessary. I don’t care who the candidate is, it needs to stop. “Writers” like Malkin and celeb talk show hosts like Rush are hurting the Republican Party. As I wrote last night I think that’s the whole idea. These sorts of conservatives will be completely marginalized if Giuliani, Huckabee, or McCain were to win. It would prove that the American people have rejected their increasingly shrill and extreme version of what they perceive Ronald Reagan’s conservative ideology to be.

We are seeing what I believe to be the death rattle of a once great movement. The movement is still alive, but I think the average American is rejecting this version of “conservative”. They are as conservative as they ever were, but the ideological movement has gone so far right, it’s heading left. There is absolutely nothing conservative about the extreme big brother anti-immigration nativist reform Malkin embraces. It calls for government intervention in every business in the country. It calls for open confiscation of private property. It calls for the “round up” and removal of everyone who isn’t here legally, the economy be dammed. I’m not even going to touch on the abject morality of the situation, nor the tawdry and vile people promoting it. I go back to my Grandmother Froehlich’s saying, “You lie down with dogs and you get fleas.”

Michelle Malkin has become a flea on the backside of all decent Red Dog Republicans. I don’t know if she is just an irritant needing to be scratched or if maybe we just need a flea collar. I’m not sure. All I know is right now she has irritated more than a few of us with this completely over the top attack on a good and honorable man.

I’ve often wondered if her links to Vdare in the Brimelows is by accident. Is her anti-hispanic and anti-immigration stance honest politics or just plain old down-right ugly. I’ve given her the benefit of the doubt, but I’m about ready to toss her into the Ron Paul category, all squirmy, wormy, slimy, and fake. She no longer has the benefit of the doubt. You don’t go around treating people like this and not deal with repercussions. All gloves are off. Since Malkin likes to slime John McCain, let’s see how she likes it. How does she like having her life twisted and turned? I’m not going to repeat the rumors that are personal, just professional. They aren’t nice but neither is she. (And yes, my conscience is bothering me for doing this.)

But, there’s one vet Malkin refuses to honor, John McCain. Ironically she honors Stormin’ Norman, who has just endorsed Big Mac. In her column today
she had the audacity to write…

“…But what if that mother had stolen an American citizen's Social Security number to work here illegally? What if she had been previously deported, re-entered illegally, and had been convicted of previous crimes? What if she were part of a human smuggling ring? What if she had been working in a sensitive area -- airport security, a military base, a port? Would he still refuse to abide by his constitutional obligation to provide for the common defense and secure the blessings of liberty for law-abiding Americans?

If McCain refuses to enforce immigration law against illegal alien parents of soldiers, what about illegal alien soldiers who used stolen or fake identification to get into the military? And why only illegal alien parents of soldiers? Why not illegal alien parents of police officers, teachers, doctors and store owners? McCain's selective enforcement policy is the exact recipe for immigration anarchy that we have today….”

Medved counters with the following:

“….Alone among Presidential candidates, McCain has shown the courage to stand up against such simplistic sloganeering. No President will ever succeed in driving out all 12 million illegals – the greatest forced migration in all human history. Illegals represent more than 5% of America’s work force and the cost of firing and, ultimately, deporting for forcing out every one of those people would cripple the economy far worse than any recession. The immigration bills McCain supported (along with President Bush and the Senate Republican leadership of Mitch McConnell, Trent Lott and John Kyl) never granted “amnesty” or automatic citizenship for undocumented aliens. Instead, McCain’s idea of immigration reform always emphasized “earned legalization” and assimilation– not automatic privileges – in an effort to separate the immigrants who wanted to begin playing by the rules and to enter the American mainstream, from those who continued to defy those rules and have no long-term stake in the country. It’s not amnesty to charge $6,000 in fines and payment of back taxes, to require background checks and mastery of English, and to demand registry with the government and acknowledgment of wrong-doing before an immigrant received legal status. Before an illegal could become a citizen, the process required at least nine years (and in most cases fourteen) of cooperation, commitment and patience. Moreover, two crucial elements of last year’s immigration bill received almost no attention: under the bill any immigrant who attempted to enter America illegally after the passage of immigration reform would be apprehended, identified, finger-printed and biometrically recorded, and forever banned from receiving legal status to work or live in the United States. Second, the unfinished (and ultimately unsuccessful) compromise bill included a “trigger provision”: no illegal immigrant would receive legal status until after Congress certified that the border had been effectively secured. McCain emphasizes this provision in his current proposals: insisting we secure the border first, before we make arrangements for future guest workers and give a chance to some (but by no means all) current illegal residents to earn legal status in the U.S….”

ALL THE DIRT
The title Malkin's piece journalistic mendacity is John McCain the Geraldo Rivera Republican. Funny, but Geraldo Rivera is a heck of a lot better Republican than Michelle Malkin will ever be. I think we need to remember that this smear piece against a genuine American hero was written by a woman who wrote a book that defended the forced internment of the Japanese during World War II.

Dave at Oricus wrote this about her book, Unhinged. Now I’m being a little smug. My books may be published by a very little company out of Roswell, New Mexico, the UFO capital of the world, but at least they aren’t published by a cult. I may not sell many, but my book Travesty had over 500 pages and nearly 2200 footnotes. It’s not what you call lightweight.

“…The first thing you notice about Michelle Malkin's new Regnery book, Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, is how lightweight it is. It practically floats off the shelf and up into the ether, whence it appears to have originated.

That's not just because of its physical thinness. At 172 fluffed-up pages of actual text, it actually clocks in ahead of the 165 pages of text she devoted to In Defense of Internment -- though the latter was then fattened out to over 300 pages with Malkin's appendices containing a number of government archival papers. Unhinged just feels thin in the hand, and it's even thinner in substance when you open it and start reading.

And it's not just the hurried feel to the book. There are typos and typesetting screwups aplenty, which always attests to a rush job in the publishing biz. (What exactly is the last half-sentence of Chapter Two? Perhaps we'll find out in the paperback edition. Speaking of which, where's the paperback of In Defense of Internment?)

No, the reason reading Unhinged feels like breathing helium really comes down to content: There's only half the story there. It's like a piece of Swiss cheese -- anyone can see it's full of holes.

Everywhere you turn in Malkin's book, you'll find lurid descriptions of liberal ugliness, looniness, and viciousness. Most of what she reports is accurate, though in many cases what she defines as looniness is, shall we say, a matter of perspective.

The problem is what she doesn't report.

This is true of the book on a larger, thematic scale: Nowhere in Malkin's fluffy little screed is there ever any recognition that ugliness, looniness, and viciousness are every bit as preeminent on the right as they are on the left, if not more so. Nor is there any recognition that the right might have played a significant role in dragging the national discourse down into this gutter. …”

This is a choice comment that is perfect.

“…As Malkin depicts things, the vast majority of ugliness is emanating from the left, from those same Internet jibes about Republicans to Howard Dean yeaaaarghing. In other words, covering the same range of participation that Malkin describes coming from the right.

Ah, but the way Malkin explains things, you see, it's the sheer volume of the left's unhingedness that is worth examining. So her text is mostly dedicated to cataloging this ugliness -- while studiously ignoring the question of whether a similar volume might exist on the right. Indeed, other than these two "minor" instances, you won't find a single instance of Malkin describing (let alone denouncing) "unhinged" behavior on the right….”

Just who is this person who can be so vile and vicious, showing such abject disrespect toward her betters? From a profile of Malkin

“..Tying every issue to a leering swipe at the physical appearance, personal style or intimate life of a prominent figure — especially those with a high sex-appeal quotient — was becoming Malkin's trademark. It didn't matter that the subject had done nothing to invite focus on her personal life. Even Elizabeth Dole didn't escape Malkin's radar. In “Is Bush a Liddy Dole Republican?” (Mar. 17, 2000) Malkin snipes, “She's baaaack. Elizabeth Dole has been buffed, polished, and pulled off the Republican trophy shelf by Texas Gov. George W. Bush in a lame attempt to attract liberal women voters,”. Malkin even seemed to hint at a bit of sexual chemistry between Dole and Bush. “She cooed that Bush was ‘my kind of conservative.’” She sexualizes Dole with the gratuitous observation: “The woman nicknamed ‘Sugar Lips’ has been wading inside the Beltway for decades, like a giddy queen bee in a bottomless pot of taxpayer-subsidized honey.”

Malkin was becoming skilled at supplying back-door titillation to those who liked to heap righteous indignation on supposed immorality while leering at its sexiest exponents. Some observers thought Malkin was out to make herself an object of right-wing titillation. For her column's headshot she cultivated a put-together look that included parted lips coated with red lipstick, big wind-blown hair and a red blouse unbuttoned to expose a prominent V of flesh. “Malkin is a true Cundit,” observed one anonymous poster. “A highly paid media ‘ho’ getting richer by throwing red meat to the loons.” Malkin made frequent references to the background and credentials of her obviously non-Asian husband. To complete the picture of exotic flesh in bed with the right wing, she made a point of distancing herself from the perspective normally associated with her Asian ethnicity.

     In “Asian American Pity Party” (May 2, 2001), she writes, “Here are some of the racial epithets I've been called in my lifetime: Chink. Gook. Jap. Nigger. Slant eyes. Dog-eater. Those are just the printable ones. I'm an American of Filipino descent, but have been mistaken for everything from native Hawaiian to Caribbean. I've been blamed for the Vietnam War, attacked for stealing jobs and told countless times to "go back home" -- which usually means Bangkok or Beijing or some other exotic locale I've only seen on a map.”

     Despite having suffered racial slurs, Malkin asserts, she has risen above “self-pity.”, thereby shifting the onus for slurs from those who sling them to their victims — a familiar right-wing tactic….   Until the summer of 2004 Michelle Malkin might have been considered Ann Coulter's understudy, learning to sneer, snarl, attack and blow-dry hair. That changed with the publication of Malkin's second book In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror (Regnery, August 2004) The book's central argument did more than voice a belief that even the most rabid right-winger didn't like to utter on record. It turned Malkin into a sociological phenomenon.

     Had Internment been written by a white woman, it would have been studiously ignored as racist extremism — even if it offered up stronger evidence than does Malkin. But the titillation and political cover offered by an Asian female author was too good to ignore, even though the evidence Malkin offers had long been dismissed, by military as well as civilian experts, as too inchoate to justify the mass incarceration of 110,000 west-coast Japanese Americans. The decoded military intelligence intercepts (MAGIC) cited by Malkin's book proves that the Japanese military hoped to turn a number of connections with Japanese American business and cultural societies into espionage links. In fact, however, they never amounted to the basis for even one concrete espionage prosecution. The strongest evidence Malkin provides is the account of the help rendered a downed Zero pilot by a Japanese couple on the remote Hawaiian island of Niihau. None of it was new, but it was just enough fodder with which Malkin could make a publishing splash. The real attraction was the sideshow factor: why is this Asian American woman trying to justify Japanese American internment?...”

WHO IS THE BRAINS?
Because I am feeling extremely nasty right now, I’m going to repeat a juicy rumor that has been circulating for years. There are some sources who suspect that Michelle doesn’t really do her own posting. There are those who think her husband, Jesse is the brains of the operation and she is just the little parrot. There are also instances where entries appear on her blog, under her name, when, according to sources, she couldn’t possibly have posted them. He has also admitted to sending email under her name, when she was indisposed (hospitalized without access to the internet)

According to the Liberal Avenger

“…Malkin not only has a "gold-plated intern", it's her husband. Or to put it another way, Jesse Malkin has a great deal of influence on Michelle's writing, even to the point of posting on her blog, probably on a regular basis. I think it's very possible that the books were cowritten as well; In Defense of Internment was written over a period of sixteen months, the last six (or so) of which Jesse was at home.

Don't misunderstand; Michelle is clearly very capable - she wouldn't be able to handle the media as well as she does if she weren't - and certainly is responsible for much of what is written in her name. But it seems clear that her husband is more deeply involved in her career than expected.

This is important because, for me, it calls into question Malkin's motivation. If her husband is a partner in punditry, where do Michelle's opinions end and Jesse's begin? And, in today's personality-driven politics, would even right-wingers be as willing to swallow this kind of thing from a white male PhD as from a photogenic minority woman?...:"

I'm tired of this. If you want to go after someone, do it on policy. We all know how you feel about John McCain. Not only is your writing getting repetitive, it's getting old.