Ah, but this crazy world can sometimes bring about the most gob-smacking ironies.  There are times when it feels like the sheer preposterousness of what one is seeing and hearing may actually open a hole in the space-time continuum and we will all be crushed to our component atoms in a universe-imploding Black Hole of Suck.  

In previous eras of human history, prior to the Limbaugh-ification of the laws of physics which govern the national discourse, the very notion of Michelle Malkin appearing on television in conjunction with something that calls itself the "No Spin Zone" would be enough to set things a-wobble.  Nowadays, of course, this kind of sense-defying dark matter is par for the course and it takes something like this last Friday to even arouse one's attention.

To wit!

When examining an episode of The O'Reilly Factor from Friday, we get to watch close-up as Michelle Malkin confronts a Mr. Malik Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and executes a picture perfect Reverse Malkin, the rhetorical maneuver that I have named for her, by which one launches a particularly vicious ad hominem attack against another person and then cries victim when they push back.

Malkin says (sneering): Mr. Shabazz, you and your so-called party, how many members do you have, 15?  Have made a career out of stoking racial demagoguery.

Do what, now?  As TBogg points out, this is the author of In Defense of Internment speaking.  Never mind that she's doing it in the tone of voice of a spoiled eleven-year-old talking back to her parents.  Never mind how fringe-y the New Black Panther Party may or may not be.  These are supposed to be adults talking, not fifth graders scuffling on the playground.

And let's just take a look at a day in the life of Malkin's blog, shall we?  In the 24-hour period from April 10th to 11th, Ms. Malkin posted about the evils of black music, the "evil" black woman who pressed false charges against the Duke Lacrosse team (complete with her full name and photo so her readers know where to direct the hate mail and highly sexualized threats of violence they are known for), the inherent savagery of Arab Muslims, the "racial grandstanding" of a black legislator's desire for a portrait of Coretta Scott King to hang in the Georgia State Capitol, and the dangers of programs that provide sanctuary and amnesty to Mexican immigrants in major cities.

Still, I'm sure if you asked Michelle, she would insist that she was being perfectly poite with Shabazz and asking him a reasonable question.  TBogg, what do you think?

She starts out in Robo-Malkin mode slowly reading her talking points off of a 3×5 card but then she loses control of her face and the crazy starts to leak out of her and she ends up with a tie.

Sigh.  It's true. 

Shabazz hits below the belt: 

Shabazz: Will you apologize for being a political prostitute for Bill O'Reilly, a white-male-chauvinist-racist, as a woman of color?

Oh, get the smelling salts, here we go.

Malkin: You want to call me a whore on national TV?

Shabazz: Yes.

Oh, my god, Michelle!  Can you believe that?  Who in the world would ever, ever, ever call somebody else a whore on national TV?

You would.

Malkin: There is only one whore on this split-screen and it's you Mr. Shabazz.

And this is why the world is going to hell.  Because our political discourse has been reduced to:

A: Whore!

B: Am not!

A: Are too!

B: You're a whore!

A: No, you are! 

Tsk.  Tsk.

Shabazz: As a woman of color, you should be ashamed of yourself…

Actually, Mr. Shabazz, you should both be ashamed of yourselves.  You responded to her racism with a big double handful of misogyny.  That doesn't exactly win you the moral high ground, here.  You couldn't think of a better way to call her out?

TBogg: Fox gives Michelle Malkin some prime time air and sets her up with an opponent representing a group that's small enough to be seated at a corner booth at Applebee's, (and let's face it, the guy is an inconsequential sad case who is only invited on to be a punching bag) and all she has to do is let the guy talk and she wins.

But no.

Sigh.  No, indeed.  As a David Mamet character once famously opined, "These guys could fuck up a baked potato."  Malkin went to pull the big guns on Shabazz and merely fired squarely into her own foot.  Everybody loses.  Game over, man, game over.

This is good, though.  The more feverishly Malkin tries to tear the tiara off Ann Coulter's head, the more apparent it becomes to the rest of the world that she's Not Ready for Prime Time, just a pretty face with an ugly message, and not even a particularly firm grasp on the latter. 

Ohhhhh.  The stupid.  It burnses us, it does! 

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