Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
Sabotaging the “Telephone” game.
Okay. I jumped the gun a bit on the Randi Rhodes "mugging" story. My bad. (This is something you’ll never see from a serial liar like Michelle MalKKKin, wingnuts. Pay attention. It’s called responsible blogging. You might want to look into it sometime.)
Something else you won’t see from the MalKKKinites: evidence of reading comprehension skills. Consider the following from my original post on the subject, when I believed (past tense, wingnuts!) that a mugging had taken place:
It’s too early to tell if this was just an ordinary mugging, or a politically-motivated assault. However, in light of the above, and given the right’s history of violence, repeated death threats and stalking aginst people they don’t like, I would not be surprised in the least if this was caused by someone from the Unhinged Wingnut Brigade in an effort to shut her up.
In other words, going on the information I had at the time (which later turned out to be erroneous), I STILL HEDGED ON WHETHER OR NOT IT WAS A DELIBERATE ASSAULT OR A RANDOM MUGGING. I also said that IF (there’s that key word again!) it was a deliberate assault, you could narrow it down to people who held a certain ideology, BASED ON the hateful, violence-inducing rhetoric that the right has been spewing non-stop for the last twenty years (like, oh, say, Ann Coulter referring to the 2004 DNC as the "Spawn of Satan" convention, Ann Coulter saying that the "best" way to "talk" to a liberal is to hit him/her in the head with a baseball bat, that sorta thing…), but especially within the last week. In other words, I was using evidence-based reasoning that happened to be predicated on a faulty premise. My bad.
Yet somehow, that was transformed into the claim that I accused Malkin herself of personally laying a finger on Rhodes, like some perverse game of "Telephone."
Also, a key fact that Malkin (conveniently) ignores is that Right Blogistan hasn’t been angelic in regard to the initial reportage, either: conservatives trolling on liberal blogs also bought into the story, if for no other reason than to rhetorically kick an outspoken liberal female while she was down. Take a gander at these geniuses:
The beating will probably improve her looks.
Hope the dog was OK. Please post something on the DOG!!
Making a crack about her looks and caring more about the dog than her. Classy-with-a-K.
Please stop calling her a dog! It’s disrespectful to Simon. She is a bitch, there is a difference. I hope Simon is OK.
Because conservatives only argue on the merits and never resort to ad hominems. 
Yeah, it must have been a right wing whacko, because nobody gets mugged in NYC, right? Wow, you moonbats are really off the deep end. I really don’t think it was one of the couple dozen listeners of Air America, but it could be someone that Rhodes owes money to, like her meth dealer.
Geez. A liberal gets injured, and all of a sudden, they’re a druggie? Does blaming the victim ever get old on the right?
Dear Randi,
It’s called Karma, get used to it. Remeber a couple of years ago when you went on the airwaves and hoped for the death of President Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld?
Well honey, karma is a funny thing.Just A Grunt, Michelle Malkin commenter
Apparently not.
Next up, Vodkapundit joins the "dogpile on the librul host" orgy:
I know this is hardly the time for cruel honesty, immediately after a brutal assault. But when you work for Air America, muggers are going to pretty much assume that you walk around unarmed.
Meanwhile, RightWingDuck at IMAO "jokingly" supports random acts of violence against liberals - in the vein of Ann Coulter "jokingly" wishing Tim McVeigh had blown up the New York Times building:
At the risk of sounding controversial, I have to say that I fully support the person or persons who mugged Liberal talk host Randi Rhodes. I know it may not be a popular choice to make, but I believe I’m making it for all the right reasons.
Violence against liberals = high comedy. Who knew?
Oy. I feel ill already. And I haven’t even started receiving death threats yet.
Ok, serious comment time. Do you honestly think I couldn’t go to ONE left wing site and not find worse comments about Michelle, Ann, and a host of others? Heck, you say Michelle’s a clansman (person?) here, with all that implies. And I also guarantee that a 2 minute search would reveal corrctions, mea culpas, etc at Michelle’s site. But checking something, rather than just spewing, would require some effort. Parotting left wing propaganda doesn’t.
Comment by RJ1470 — October 17, 2007 @ 1:01 pm
I dunno. It’s kinda hard to get much worse than repeatedly calling for the violent deaths of people you don’t like, as Ann, Michelle, Rush, Boortz and the rest have done. Secondly, Michelle has devoted a whole book-length screed to the ridiculous notion that ONLY liberals engage in eliminationist rhetoric, and that conservatives are perfect angels. The point of mentioning nasty comments by right-wingers is to poke holes in such patently ludicrous claims.
As for the Klan reference, Michelle has repeatedly made racially-charged comments vis a vis Hispanic immigrants and Muslims. How am I supposed to refer to her, if not as a racist? I’m calling a spade a spade here.
Michelle does Mea Culpas? Ha! That’s a laugh. When she was told (repeatedly) that UC Santa Cruz students were getting death threats because she sicced her camp followers on them, does she say “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that?” HELL NO. She gleefully resposts their contact information and sneers “Grow up.” When her claims that the Frosts are welfare queens were debunked, does she issue a correction? HELL NO. She posts pictures of the cars they allegedly drive and again implies that they’re “too rich” for S-CHIP. I can go on if you want.
But then again, facts don’t matter to you, do they? It’s much easier to troll lefty blogs with right-wing talking points.
Oh, and it’s spelled “parroting.” One t, two r’s.
Comment by J. A. Baker — October 17, 2007 @ 1:43 pm
Troll? Ahh, so one asks a serious question, and you don’t answer it? You’ll note I never said that right wing folks don’t post hateful comments. My point is, they come from both sides, and for either to throw them up like so many “And so’s your old man” comments is lazy journalism.
As for trolling, relax. The only reason I ever even heard of you, or your blog is because Michelle linked it.
No one likes a troll, and since you feel that’s what I am, I won’t bother hanging where I’m not wanted. I’ll leave you to the people who won’t question you.
Comment by RJ1470 — October 17, 2007 @ 7:38 pm
This was one half-assed mea culpa. You spend maybe 5% of it actually admitting you were wrong, and the rest of it trying to explain why your conclusion-jumping was justified. And what is this “…right’s history of violence”? If you’re crusading against those on the right who have actually committed physical violence against somebody for political reasons, you’d have probably less than a dozen targets. You’d be better off tilting at windmils. And if violence-humor is your beef, that’s not strictly a conservative phenomenon. Not by a longshot. I’ll agree it’s totally classless at its best, but the left does it just as well…including Randi Rhodes.
Comment by Sethery — October 17, 2007 @ 8:32 pm
RJ - Your question was itself a “And so’s your old man” comment. Those quotes, in addition to contradicting Michelle’s “only libruls are incurably violent reprobates” nonsense, were also cited to point out that it wasn’t just the left that bought into the “Randi Rhodes was mugged” reportage. Michelle acts like only the left jumped the gun when clearly the right was just as eager to use the story to feed their impulses. Also, many liberal blogs, like Shakespeare’s Sister, along with liberal talk hosts (Stephanie Miller), were hesitant to run with the story until further details emerged. So it’s not like EVERYONE on the left went tinfoil hat time, as Michelle claims.
Seth - Did you even bother to follow the links? Just the anti-abortion violence stats alone show that it’s more than “a dozen targets.” And BTW, David Neiwert compiled a study of eliminationist rhetoric and violence in the 2004 election cycle (BOTH DIRECTIONS), and he found that conservative-on-liberal eliminationism far exceeded liberal-on-conservative eliminationism - by at least 3- or 4-to-1. And as I’ve said before, my “half-assed” mea culpa is FAR more than you can expect from the likes of Michelle Malkin.
Comment by J. A. Baker — October 18, 2007 @ 12:07 pm
I did not follow all of your links, as there more of them than pepper grains on my morning eggs. I could tell by most of your excerpts that you were mostly picking individual posts from anonymous commentors on political blogs. You can’t even validate the sincerity of those posts because they’re anonymous! You act like someone who wants to peg the most outrageous statement you can find on an entire political party, even if it’s from an anonymous individual. That thought process inspired me to avoid wasting time checking all of your other links.
Regarding Neiwert, do you have any skepticism whatsoever about a single study with such skewed results posted by an avowed critic of the Right??? Or do you buy it completely because you like what it says?
Finally, perhaps instead of alluding to what you “expect from Malkin”, perhaps you could show where she actually was wrong and behaved as you did here, or worse. You tend to justify your words by alleging that others’ are worse. That’s not rational.
Comment by Sethery — October 20, 2007 @ 5:36 pm
Am I being blocked for spamming? ‘Cuz that’d be pathetic.
Comment by Sethery — October 23, 2007 @ 1:28 am
I guess I’m not blocked, but I can’t post a couple of URLs. I’ll try something else.
Thought you might want to post about these under “Eliminationist Fantasies”:
Neal Gabler jokes about Bill Kristol possibly dying in Iraq
Even better, commentor calls for thermonuclear reboot of society.
Comment by Sethery — October 23, 2007 @ 1:32 am