histrionic fishwife deluxe

Michelle Malkin does NOT have a posse. 

We have an update on the "Nobody Sits With Johnny Kerry at 4th Period Lunch So He Must Have Cooties!" controversy that's been emanating from over in Righty Dumbfuckistan since yesterday like a cloud of noxious gas.

My sources at Senator Kerry’s office just sent over this statement from Frank Lowenstein, Senator Kerry’s foreign policy staffer who was with Kerry in Iraq. Lowenstein serves on Senator Kerry’s Senate staff, and is a longtime Kerry national security advisor.

Statement from Frank Lowenstein:

“It’s a weird feeling seeing this photo of Sen. Kerry debated and decoded like some artifact out of the DaVinci Codes. It’s strange to me because I was there when the photo was taken. I traveled with Sen. Kerry throughout his Middle East trip. I’m his foreign policy staffer. Myself and Major McKnight were sitting right there when this photo was snapped.

Snubbed? Alone? Hardly. Sen. Kerry isn’t eating alone. In fact that photo is at an off the record breakfast meeting Senator Kerry conducted early Sunday morning with the very real Marc Santora of the New York Times Baghdad bureau and his younger colleague from the newspaper. The man shown in the green shirt across from Sen. Kerry is Marc Santora. Right after that interview was completed, Senator Kerry videotaped a message expressing his and the country’s support for the troops, to be shown on the armed services network in Iraq. Just the night before, Sen. Kerry was in that very same mess hall at a table where he ate dinner with about 10 U.S. soldiers.

MalKKKin sez, "But-!  But-!  There's still four empty chairs there!  I know nobody likes John Kerry.  My readers in the army wrote in and told me so!  It must, must, MUST be true!!  I refuse to accept any other explanation for those four empty chairs!  SCREEEEECH!!  AWK!!  AWK!!  SQUAAAAAAACK!!"

Miserable little turnip.

But you know, no one captures the total loony essence of the hissing, snarling fact-free Missus MalKKKin quite like David Niewart in his 2005 essay, "The Unbearable Lightness of Malkin": 

Malkin is especially hypocritical in discussing the Dean remarks, which she calls "the old I'm-not-saying-it-I'm-just-posing-the-question card". As TBogg points out, Malkin finds this card perfectly suitable to play when it comes to her own purposes, including smearing John Kerry by suggesting — groundlessly — that he wounded himself intentionally in Vietnam in order to obtain a Purple Star. What leading Republican would lend even a shred of credence to such a baseless theory?

Rewriting history by omission, of course, is a Malkin specialty: It's what she did, as I've explained in depth, with her pro-internment book. Any facts or details that might count as evidence against her thesis have no chance of being any more than briefly and dismissively mentioned.

In discussing this propensity of hers earlier, I described this missing element, in journalistic terms, as "fairness," but I don't think that fully describes what's lacking in Malkin's work; it goes beyond mere fairness. This is a matter of simple integrity — intellectual and otherwise.

Malkin isn't being openly dishonest with these omissions. There's very little in Unhinged that you can say is actually false. It's more a matter of being unhonest: not letting her readers get the whole picture so they can judge for themselves. It's one of those things conservatives love to whine about with the "MSM" so much.

Unhinged lacks the fundamental honesty — the integrity to consider countervailing facts and then factually counter them, if possible, to defend your thesis, rather than simply pretending they don't exist — to be worth anyone's reading time.

The only people who will find this book useful are blinkered ideologues who just want more grist for their liberal-hating mills, the facts be damned. Certainly, it will be of little to use for any serious-minded person who is concerned about the state of the national dialogue — except, perhaps, as Exhibit A regarding the source of the problem. Because Malkin's little contribution to the growing mound of liberal-bashing books is only going to make that dialogue incrementally worse.

Fortunately, it's so lightweight, that may be a rather small increment indeed.

Clearly, absolutely nothing about MalKKKin and her perpetual state of spitting, screeching manufactured outrage has changed.  She's never met a fact she liked too much to distort, never met a rumor or spiteful fabrication that it was beneath her to wallow in and spread like cholera.  She's a veritable Typhoid Mary of Misinformation, yes sir, that's our Anchor Baby, Queen of Righty Blogland, the last Coulterite Standing, that Missile-Hugging Miss Mendacity herself, Michelle Malkin.  Let's give her a hand, everybody!  Here's to your health, you fascist pinhead!  Without you, whose mistakes would I lampoon to such delicious comic effect?  Who else besides Matt Drudge is quite so quick to throw themselves down with their legs in the air for a malicious story, no matter how petty, dubious, or far-fetched?

Thank God for you, Michelle.  You make my job so much easier and well, fun. 

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