Mean liberals said bad things about Dick Cheney!

Posted by Joshua Holland at 10:14 AM on March 1, 2007.

Earlier this week, Eric Boehlert called out the Washington Post -- and specifically WaPo media "critic" Howard Kurtz - for having a (unrequited) love affair with right-wing bloggers in general, and Michelle Malkin in particular. This is the same Post that has whined incessantly about how "uncivil" bloggers on the left are.

Of course, Malkin and her followers would slit Howard Kurtz' throat as soon as look at him.

Well, today, Kurtz follows up by happily amplifying Malkin's latest bullshit non-scandal ...

This is really sick.

I know we're living in a polarized time. I know there are people who absolutely detest George Bush and Dick Cheney. I know they like to vent their spleen online, sometimes in vulgar terms, and hey, that's life in a democracy.

But some of the comments posted after a suicide bomber blew himself up at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Force Base, while Cheney was there--killing as many as 23 people--are nothing short of vile.

The comments appeared on the Huffington Post, which, to its credit, took them down. But some were preserved by Michelle Malkin, and I reproduce them here:

"You can't kill pure evil. Like an exorcism you have to drive a stake through it."

"If at first you don't succeed . . . "

"Better luck next time!"

"Dr. Evil escapes again . . . damn."

Says Malkin: "Whatever your partisan leanings, an attack planned on the Vice President of the United States is an attack on America. Some of our fellow Americans, however, can't put their sneering hatred of the White House aside."

Malkin also says that Mexico has a scret plot to annex the Southwest, that the internment of the Japanese during World War II was a great thing and that the media - including Kurtz' own paper - are in league with the terrorists and are actively trying to destroy America. Why does Howard Kurtz quote her like she's a serious voice and not a completely unhinged lunatic? I don't know, Ask him.

Says me: Don't people realize that openly rooting for the death of an American official says way more about them than their intended target?

Arianna Huffington says the right wing is making entirely too much of this:

"Let me be absolutely clear: No one at HuffPost is defending these comments -- they are unacceptable and were treated as such by being removed. They were not made by me, by our editors, or by our bloggers. They were made by anonymous visitors to the site -- visitors that make up a very, very small unrepresentative portion of our readers.

"Trying to balance the freedom and openness of the Internet with the desire to be responsible and avoid these kinds of outrageous comments can sometimes be challenging. But the fact remains: only a fraction of Huffington Post readers comment on news stories, and only a tiny fraction of those responded to the Cheney story in such an offensive manner . . .

"This tactic of digging through open comment threads to find outrageous comments that can then be cited as evidence of 'the angry left' has become a favorite of the swiftboat set."

I would agree that it's absurd to view these assassination fantasies as anything other than the rantings of the fringe, and that they shouldn't be used to tar an entire ideology. All I'm saying is that it's really sad that some loons feel this way, and that the Internet culture, however briefly, gives them a megaphone.

What an idiot. Seriously, this cherry-picking of comments on open threads is just ridiculous.

First of all, those who write for a blog have a responsibility to maintain some standards of discourse, but those who comment are ordinary people venting spleen. Would Kurtz consider someone who made a Dick Cheney joke in a bar necessarily a loon? Of course not - I imagine there were hundreds of thousands of bad Dick Cheney jokes uttered by hundreds of thousands of perfectly normal people following the assassination attempt. Hell, Jay Leno joked that the stock market fell after news of the attack because investors were scared that George Bush might end up running the country.

But more to the point, how does Kurtz know that the commenters in question didn't like Dick Cheney? I mean, given that the right has adopted the tactic of combing through comments to indict a liberal blog or blogger, and as long as there's a pretty good likelihood that some moron in the commercial media like Howard Kurtz will run with it - regardless if there's a there there (HuffPo did take down the offensive posts, so why is this a story at all?), then it's reasonable to believe that it's just as likely that some right-wingers who absolutely adore Dick Cheney wrote those comments to smear the left. I have no evidence that that's the case, but come on -- by buying into this crap like the lapdogs they are, Kurtz and his ilk make "seeding" a thread with "unacceptable" views a politically profitable exercise.

Lastly, of course. there's the double-standard. Lefty bloggers say 'shit' and are condemned as wild-eyed lunatics while righty bloggers spin outrageous fantasies of killing their ideological opponents, assassinating lawmakers, hanging reporters, etc. and get a pass. It's getting really tiring.

Tagged as: cheney, malkin, wing-nuts, kurtz

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.