Michelle Malkin, right wing icon, intellectual giant
A recent comment by the always interesting DookofURL (aka Paladin) citing one of Michelle Malkin's columns put me in mind of one of her appearances on Hardball with Chris Matthews during the right wing campaign to lie their asses off and smear John Kerry for his service in Vietnam. (which of course, took colossal nerve and capacity for mind-numbing hypocrisy, considering Bush's shirking of even National Guard service)
This is the same woman, some may recall, who published a book in defense of the interment of Japanese Americans during WWII and a recent one accusing all liberals of being insane. A very lovely and charming woman, a self-hating racist, and a desperately striving right wing shill.
Matthews, not exactly one of Dook's pet "nutroots", couldn't tolerate Malkin's attempt to spew outrageous lies. Michelle acts shocked, shocked, that she'd encounter any resistance to her ridiculous lies. After all, she and dozens of others had been free to spread it unchallenged by talking heads for months. She had reason to believe that lies against Kerry would never meet with resistance, poor thing.
But apparently, it was just too much for even Matthews to stomach.
While at YouTube, I also came across this example of just how on the money Malkin is in her analysis. Bill O'Reilly had to smack her down, for God's sake.
And lastly, here's an example of the humanitarian side of Malkin where she mocks the suicides of Guantanamo Bay detainees. (and wingers are the one's who accuse everyone to the right of Atilla the Hun of being "hate-filled". What a lovely crowd.)
posted by The Inside Dope @ 8/04/2006
7 comments
7 Comments:
Watch how often she looks up at the teleprompter during the O'Reilly videos. Malkin and Coulter are both hateful little puppets. If they didn't have their looks, nobody (including the right-wingers who drool over them) would give a rat's ass about what they had to say.
I'd like to associate myself with tiz's comment. I truly think that the right media machine decided some time ago to try to throw fluff-bunnies at the rubes, hence the initial crop of blondes.
It seemed as though if you were blonde and knew (or were married to) some right winger of prominence, you'd instantly be booked on 5 talk shows a day.
It was like they decided to trot out their bimbos to do the dirty work. It was almost bizarre.
But since they've run this huge media campaign as a corporation would run a marketing scheme, they knew that the trogs would eat up the eye candy. And they knew that the cable shows would rush to book them.
After all, that's all they want in a guest, sex and absolutely outrageous and inflamatory rhetoric. They produced that in spades.
Some have gone by the wayside, (and Babs Ohlson went down on a plane) but they all made a ton of loot, cranking out ghost-written screeds disguised as books, the more outrageous the better.
Malkin is married to some fat pant-load bajillionaire right wing lawyer I believe, and Kelly Ann Fitzpatrick, a sometime pundette on the right, ended up marrying one of the self described "elves" who worked in concert with Starr, Coulter, Goldberg, et. al. in passing Tripp's tapes around and fanning the flames of the worthless witch hunt against Clinton.
They're nothing but manufactured hateresses, trotted out to pitch the manure.
I detect that people are getting sick of it, other than the most committed rubes who simply enjoy all the hate and blaming a miriad of "others" for all the ills they see around them, and can't bear to give it up.
The rubes were told it was OK to hate, be proud of it, OWN it. They damn sure don't want to have to go back to being decent human beings.
But as these clips demonstrate, it's simply laughable to take ANYTHING Malkin says seriously.
I don't have a problem with Malkin, since I watch Fox News muted most of the day.
Coulter, on the other hand, is offensive even with the volume turned down.
I doubt Malkin is "self-hating". She got famous writing that interring Japanese Americans is OK. But Malkin is ethnic Filipina and many Filipinos have grudges against the Japanese.
Many of your fellow historians disagree with you, Nico.
I don't care if the camps were freaking day spas (which they were far from)- I don't see how the presence of intelligence rings in an area that wasn't even a state (and was 2,300 miles from the nearest state) justifies removing people from their homes and lives. Especially when 99% of those interred did absolutely nothing wrong. Do you think those lives/jobs/whatever were just magically there for them when they returned? The executive order to start all of this was one of the worst decisions *any* president has ever made reguardless of the letter after his name. Malkin wants to re-hash this issue so we can do the same to Arab-Americans (look at the cover of the book). I wonder if she'd still write it if were 11 hijackers from the Philippines.
Nico I think you've stripped a gear or something.
I fail to see anything remotely racist about mentioning the fact that a person who writes a book in support of imprisoning innocent people based on nothing other than their ethnicity is herself a member of an Asian ethnic group.
That's kind of odd to everyone but you I guess.
Certainly no one went as far as saying that she couldn't write some idiotic book defending the indefensible. That's her right, of course.
But I think it's pretty clear from just the video clips alone that she's not exactly worth paying close attention to, whether someone's read her book or not.
I feel confident that if it contained anything remotely true, well reasoned, and rational, it would have gotten a lot more serious attention.
Rather, it was roundly condemened, panned, and dismissed by the majority of reviewers. Not one serious person defended it's premise or said, "Hey, Malkin makes a lot of sense."
I might add that many of the facts that she bases her thesis on have been debunked or at least shown to be taken out of context and not historically accurate.
The book died the death it deserved after serving it's purpose of fleecing another few hundred thousand true believers for $15 or whatever they wasted on it.
Fleecing rubes is a multi-million dollar industry for the right and has been for years.
Not that you're a rube Nico.
Sorry.
I'll waste my time reading a Michelle Malkin book the same day you waste yours reading Al Franken's "historical" take on the 2000 election. I can argue the premise of the book without having read it - look at the title. Perhaps I should write a book called "In Defense of Hitler" and then refuse any criticism from anyone not willing to read it. Maybe Mel Gibson would be interested in writing it.
Malkin *should* recant because her book has been debunked by real historians, not because she doesn't "parrot" the status quo view that the interment was a very, very bad thing. I'm not holding my breath.
The race-baiting has no place here. It's offensive and frankly it's disappointing coming from you (there are others I'd expect it from). I simply pointed out that were one of the 9/11 hijackers to have the same ethnicity as her, maybe she wouldn't have written the book. Unless I'm totally missing something, the picture of Mohammed Atta (sp) on the cover kinda tells me why she's writing the book to begin with. I understand the history there well enough to know most "Asian-Americans" who weren't of Japanese descent around the time of WWII probably think we were too soft on the Japanese-Americans. A friend of mine from the area told me a while back that many people in Nanjing still loathe the Japanese. I could understand why someone of Filipino descent could have similar feelings, as Carl stated above.
Find a scholarly paper or a book not written by a pundit in the last 20 years defending interrment and I would be happy to read and discuss it. I read a few older papers as an undergrad in a class that focused on US-Japan relations in the 20th century, but I hadn't seen anything very convincing.
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