Monday, March 14, 2005

Michelle Malkin: Lowering the level of right-wing intellectual discourse, one sleazy, dishonest article at a time.


Now, this is delicious. Conservative lunatic and deranged wingnut Michelle Malkin (shown in fine form here) attacks her own gender here.

Regarding murder suspect Brian Nichols, who is accused of killing an Atlanta judge with a gun he took off of a female police officer, Malkin reprints the comment of reader "Wayne L.":

The killer of an Atlanta judge is shown being taken into custody by a woman cop, after this same killer took a gun away from a woman court cop to go on his killing spree. Isn't there something wrong with this photo?

To which Malkin (bless her self-loathing, anti-feminist little heart) writes, "He's got a point." Oh, my. And just how many ways is Malkin's post unspeakably dishonest? Let me count the ways.

First, despite what reader Wayne writes, the suspect is not "being taken into custody" in that picture -- he is already in custody. As anyone can see, the suspect already has his hands cuffed behind his back, and even the linked-to AP article writes that he is being "led to a waiting vehicle by an unidentified police officer at the FBI office in Atlanta ...". In short, it's clear to even those with simian intelligence levels that the female officer in the photo is not necessarily the one who captured the suspect. But wait. It gets so much better.

If you look at the pic at Malkin's site, you can see an indistinct man at the left but it's hard to tell what he's doing there. However, as Malkin admits in her short update, it's a lot more obvious in this picture, isn't it? He's another agent of some kind, so it's now clear that Nichols wasn't under the control of just this solitary female officer. Yeah, that kind of makes a difference, doesn't it?

And if that's not dishonest enough, in both pics above, if you look closely, there is, behind the suspect, what can only be yet another officer, wearing what looks like a bulletproof vest. Yeah, I think the three of them (if not more) have the situation well in hand, despite lying, sack of crap Malkin's insinuations to the contrary. But I'm not done yet, oh no.

Malkin's (and reader Wayne L.'s) attitude here seems to be that, since the suspect took a gun off of a female police officer, it shows that female police officers are somehow not capable of handling themselves. One wonders -- if Nichols had wrested a gun away from a male officer, would Malkin now be making the case that male officers are not qualified to do that kind of police work? Oh, yeah, that's gonna happen real soon now. And, no, I'm still not done.

What you don't read at Malkin's site is what the suspect did after the shootings, but you can read it here:

Another deputy was later killed outside the Atlanta courthouse when he confronted the suspect, Dreher said. The deputy shot while leading Nichols to court survived, but details about her condition were not immediately known.

Authorities said Nichols then pistol-whipped a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, stole his green 1997 Honda Accord and sped away.

Wow. So, if one were to apply Malkin logic here, men shouldn't be allowed to drive cars since they can't prevent themselves from being carjacked. Delightful, isn't it? But here's the absolutely best part.

After Malkin initially agrees with reader Wayne L., she has to acknowledge the additional information in the AP photo and writes:

Update: This photo shows at least one other agent to Nichols' right, but Wayne's observation is still salient.

In other words, she pulls a Jinx McHue which, as regular readers of this site will know, consists of:
  1. Making an initial claim.
  2. Being proven wrong.
  3. Refusing to retract the claim, and insisting that you're still correct, anyway.
And I think I've spent just about as much time at Malkin's site as I can handle in one day. Frankly, I have an overwhelming urge to take a shower.

FREE AT NO EXTRA CHARGE: Not surprisingly, I'm not the only one ripping Malkin a new orifice for being such a dishonest lowlife. There's Atrios, and John over at AmericaBlog and many others, I'm sure. God bless us, every one.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I stopped on Fox news while channel surfing for about 2 minutes on saturday night. Curiosity gets the better of me sometimes. In that span of time, I heard not one, but two "commentators" (one of which was female) blame the superiors in charge for giving this lunatic a female guard. They continued outright to say that females arent capable of handling men like him. Had to change the channel before I blew a gasket. Malkin here isnt alone perpetuating that vicious cycle that is gender discrimination.

CC said...

In a funny way, I agree with the Fox News people, but not in the way you think. The only way Nichols could have taken the female guard's gun away initially is if he wasn't handcuffed at the time. That was clearly a stupid situation: the man was a rape suspect -- why on earth wasn't he handcuffed as he was being led to court?

Under those circumstances, Nichols could just as easily have taken a gun away from a male officer. The superiors were in fact at fault, not for assigning a female guard, but for not making sure Nichols was safely restrained as he was being taken to court.