i’m sorry. who is the conservative intellectual? Malkin? lol.

Malkin.

They are not.

She also says She is apologising for her statement that Irons “had engaged in similar activities before”. The actual words were “By the way, this was not the only time Irons engaged in these sort of shenanigans.”

She did not refer to this statement again, to offer any explanation of the source of the allegation or to give the retraction of this larger claim the same weight as the smaller.

The basis for the whole attack is very trivial. The original source only said that permission was not granted because the relevant official was off sick – not that the government was deliberately concealling the papers. So, he is accused at most of a minor procedural irregularity.

What is Malkin attacking him for? Wanting access to documents which “provided proof for the first time of Justice Department misconduct in the cases that upheld the exercise of presidential war powers under the Constitution”, as Fujita-Rony puts it.

The executioner is a bad, bad man. He had dirty shoes.

For the record, Gary asked the question “What is it about Malkin that inspires mean-spirited, personal attacks?” My response, in a nutshell, was to point out that mean-spirited personal attacks are pretty much what MM does for a living. It may be inexcusable, but it’s certainly not unexpected.

Malkin’s really no different than those idiotic, hateful commenters you dredged on some blog or other…except for one crucial difference. Somehow she gets to go on TV and act like somebody worth listening to.

And still you piss and moan about some mean things somebody or other said, and then expect me to join in your little display of pique.

Second, “Uncle Kvetch” repeats Chris Matthews’ incorrect accusation that Malkin or the book claimed that Kerry wounded himself deliberately.

In the transcript in question, Matthews invites her repeatedly to back away from the charge. She refuses to do so. We don’t know, she says. We don’t know if John Kerry shot himself in the leg. We don’t know if John Kerry participates in Hillary’s satanic covens where they feast on the flesh of aborted babies, either. We just don’t know.

Yeah, she’s a class act, is our Michelle.

“What a total worthless loser and Asian Ann Coulter want-to-be. . . . What’s the deal, Fraud O’Neill tired of smelling his own BS doing these daily talk shows for his buddies George Bush and Tom ‘Going to Prison’ DeLay, so he has to hire this SBVT ho and scumbag to do his dirty work! Boy, these SBVT scum of the earth can sure dish it out but they cannot take it when it comes to the facts and the truth. I say round this GOP paid for ho up, and send her over to Iraq for a year and let her have a taste of the ‘Bush life’ so she has a clue what she is talking about!”

“Also, if the kind of immigration controls Ms. Malkin advocates were in place when her parents came to this country, the only way she would be interacting with Americans on the Internet would be as a webcam girl on IFriends.”

Is there anything personally offensive in calling a woman a whore and scumbag?

Also, two quick corrections. First, I misstated the title of the book that Malkin was citing—it was “Unfit for Command,” not “Unfit for Service.” Second, “Uncle Kvetch” repeats Chris Matthews’ incorrect accusation that Malkin or the book claimed that Kerry wounded himself deliberately. The book’s charge is that Kerry received one Purple Heart for a wound that he accidentally inflicted on himself, not that Kerry wounded himself deliberately.

If you think I’m going to rush to the defense of some comments on some blog that I haven’t read, you’re mistaken. If you think I’m going to express sympathy for poor widdle Michelle because people are being mean to her, you’re equally mistaken.

We still haven’t been told just what those “bigoted and offensive responses” were, by the way…only that Gary and you found them to be so.

And he most certainly was, in that corner of the space-time continuum where I’m the Dutchess of Windsor.

Indeed. I don’t believe anything I hear from the Pentagon, either.

Hard to say. I mean, it couldn’t have anything to do with things like her going on Chris Matthews’ show and insinuating that John Kerry deliberately shot himself in order to get a Purple Heart…because that’s certainly within the bounds of reasonable political debate, isn’t it?

Must be that liberal racism again.

There’s something strange going on in the degree of hatred displayed toward Malkin by the left. Except at sites like the Democratic Underground or Atrios, where irrational expressions of over-the-top hatred are common, this degree of personal animosity toward a conservative intellectual opponent is unusual. What is it about Malkin that inspires mean-spirited, personal attacks?