Howie Kurtz is shocked. SHOCKED!

From Glenn Greenwald's fingers to Howie Kurtz's feverish brain.

On Wednesday, Greenwald took note of the faux outrage on the right to a smattering of comments on left-leaning blogs with regard to the attempt on Dick Cheney's life in Afghanistan. Some anonymous commenters expressed disappointment that the assassination attempt failed.

Greenwald wrote the following:

It is only a matter of time before Brit Hume and Matt Drudge begin hyping the scandal of how liberal bloggers were expressing dismay that Dick Cheney wasn't killed, and Howard Kurtz will write a drooling profile of the Blogging Warriors who exposed this scandal and join in with stern condemnation over how terrible it is that the Left is so filled with venom and rage. Maybe ABC News' Terry Moran can even join his right-wing-blogging brother again and chime in about all the terrible Hate Speech on the Left.

I guess it's time for Glenn to add "Demonstrated Psychic Ability" to his Curriculum Vitae. In this morning's Media Notes column, Howie Kurtz writes:

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."

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?

Indeed it does. In fact, all it says is that some yahoo without the courage to sign his or her name to it decided to make a nasty comment on somebody else's blog. Period.

That is, that's all it says unless and until somebody else implies that those handful of anonymous comments are characteristic of an entire side of the American political spectrum. Those ugly, anonymous comments are nothing more than that until, for example, the media critic for the Washington Post gives one of this country's most infamous pundits the platform to say something like this:

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.

When that happens, despite the media critic's willingness to give "credit" to the Huffington Post for removing the comments, the clear implication is that the broader community of Bush administration critics genuinely regrets the continued breathing of the vice president.

And putting the Dick Cheney incident aside for a moment, why would anybody give credibility to Michelle Malkin, who is responsible for some of the most inflamatory spewings in the body of American political writing?

Malkin's history of extreme rhetoric and of using generalizations to smear entire groups of people is well documented:

• In media appearances on August 9, 2004, promoting her book In Defense of Internment (Regnery, 2004), Malkin advocated racial profiling; defended the internment of Japanese-Americans (and other ethnic minorities) during World War II; and called for the removal of then-Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, claiming that he couldn't be objective on the issue of racial profiling because of his personal experience as an interned Japanese-American.



• During the May 8, 2006, edition of The O'Reilly Factor, Malkin agreed with host Bill O'Reilly's claim that, under a California state bill that would require textbooks to recognize the accomplishments of historical lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender [LGBT] figures, "if you are a teacher ... you're not going to be able to say bad things about [convicted mass murderer] Jeffrey Dahmer," because Dahmer was "a gay cannibal."



• On the June 1, 2006, edition of Fox News' The Big Story with John Gibson, Malkin blasted the media coverage of alleged killings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops in Haditha, claiming that there are "puddles of drool in the offices of the L.A. Times and The New York Times."



• On December 4, 2006, Think Progress noted that a video was being propagated on Malkin's Hot Air website of an anonymous C-SPAN viewer who called former President Jimmy Carter "a bigot and a racist and an anti-Semite," and accused him of "cozying up with every dictator, thug, Islamic terrorist there is." Like the story on the Edwards campaign bloggers, that story was picked up by the mainstream media, being aired MSNBC.

One could certainly make the case, not convincingly in my opinion, that these examples are not representative of Malkin's work, and that they unfairly portray her as a bigoted demagogue.

The point is that one can also, much more convincingly in my opinion, make the case that a sprinkling of mean-spirited, anonymous blog comments are not at all representative of the broader views of critics of the Bush administration. Despite Kurtz's pro forma disclaimer, his presentation of them with commentary by partisan bomb-thrower Michelle Malkin serves to accomplish nothing more than to suggest guilt by association. This is the precise reason that Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservative mouthpieces seized on the comments with such vigor. For Kurtz to wallow in this filth, all the while pretending he is above it all, goes beyond dishonesty into self-parody.