Michelle Malkin: 'Outrage Over Racism Is Outrageous'

Posted by Gavin M, Sadly, No! at 3:20 PM on July 20, 2008.

Here’s Malkin on her latest rampage:

NAACP race-monger: Obama was "lynched" by a cartoon!

By Michelle Malkin • July 17, 2008 08:58 AM

Geez, I thought that the two Texas dunces who protested the phrase "black holes" had won the grievance-mongering morons of the year award.

They've got competition.

Enter Myrlie Evers-Williams, NAACP official and widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers. She is decrying the New Yorker cartoon of the Obamas as a "lynching." Hey, never mind that it's the critics of Obama who are the subject of the cartoon's "lynching." Evers-Williams' cartoon comprehension score: F-. Some people to need to be kept away from the microphone.

Naturally, we looked around for about ten minutes and found a major conservative blogger advocating the vigilante killing of black crime suspects, i.e. lynching. It’s a smug, thoughtless blar-har of a post that will bring no criticism from the right — especially from Malkin, who is in her best element beating up on Medgar Evers’s 73-year-old widow. (Myrlie Evers-Williams, as it happens, retired from the NAACP board in 1998, and was speaking to a luncheon group.)

The situation is classic: A young black man is accused of molesting, or as the local FOX affiliate had it, of ‘grabbing the butt,’ of a 12-year-old girl. When the girl’s father confronted him, he and seven (young, black) friends allegedly brutally beat the father.

The incident, at a Shakopee, Minnesota amusement park, was apparently very nasty, and seven of the eight young men arrested are reportedly facing felony assault charges.

And then John Hinderaker of Powerline (still and forever Time Magazine’s 2004 blog of the year) posts a picture of the main suspect, descends into archly quote-marked terms like “homies” and “men,” and asserts that it’s time to start shooting people:

Initially, the local media downplayed the story, presumably because of the race of the criminals. But today, the Minneapolis Star Tribune broke down and covered it. [...]

The story is an infuriating one in several ways, but what strikes me most forcibly is that it would have been a good thing if a few armed citizens had happened by while the assault was in progress. It’s no surprise that the victim’s wife and daughters couldn’t protect him from eight “men,” and apparently [the Valleyfair amusement park's] security force is unarmed. So the optimal outcome here would have been for one or more normal citizens to pull a firearm, shoot a couple of the criminals, and hold the rest until the police arrived. Criminals who carry out outrageous assaults in public do so on the assumption that passersby will not be able to stop them. Absent firearms, that assumption is reasonable. So let’s hear it for concealed carry.

[...] Against a gang such as the one that is now on the loose in the Twin Cities, only armed citizens can be effective.

Except “on the loose” means “in police custody,” since all eight suspects were duly arrested. Maybe Hindy and his friends can work out a midnight deal with the jailer. I believe the standard routine was to have suspects ‘transferred’ under light security, such that unforeseen, spontaneous events would often prevent them from reaching their destination. We know of someone who can help explain the procedures.

In all seriousness — and not to make too much of Hindy’s arrogant typing — it isn’t malice or thuggism that makes right-wing blowhards keep deciding, year after year and incident after incident, that it’s time to overturn the legal system and mete out rifle justice; and in any case, they’re unlikely to wheeze up from their couches and actually do anything, instead of just endlessly talking about it and egging each other on. It’s the notion that the world is divided into ‘good people’ and ‘bad people,’ and that they can always tell, by metrics as simple as reading a story in the newspaper, which ones are which. They expect the world to be simple, and when the world disappoints them, it is the world’s fault and problem and none of theirs. Suspects are guilty; the guilty should be punished.

Black suspects, though, are also guilty of acting in the way that liberals always try to convince us that blacks don’t necessarily act, which just goes to show you, and oooh doesn’t that just get you boiling, and we ought to show them a thing or two, etc. If the young men had been white — and here is the eternal, bleeding rub — no Hinderaker would have appeared to suggest that they be executed on the street.

But back to Michelle, with her shriek against the word, ‘lynching,’ used in a figurative sense by a woman whose husband was ’slain,’ i.e. literally lynched. Evers was reported as saying that “political spin masters and the news media are painting the Obamas as unpatriotic and dangerous radicals.” Malkin smugly remarks:

And that, dear readers, is what we call self-satire.

Obama needs to grow a pair. This woman needs to grow a brain.

Insert snarkily sprightly rejoinder. It looks like Malkin is at that point in her cycle where she’ll keep saying more and more poisonously vicious things until a general uproar roars up against her. It’s always educational to watch her later, when she goes around feigning innocence and everyone seems to forget how evil she’d gotten, how utterly off the map of sane discourse. This woman needs to grow a soul.

Tagged as: obama, wing-nuts, new yorker cover

Gavin McNett is a writer and designer in the New York area.