Why They Can't Be Stupid

Okay, sure, some of them are. Hindraker certainly isn't evincing any sparks of intelligence, and Michelle Malkin's porn buddy Bryan Preston is a sack of rocks. Hannity's probably not all that bright, although he's making money by being a lying tool on national television and we're not, so there's some intelligence-like quality happening there--call it faux intelligence. And O'Reilly's stupid, but he's so testosterone-addled and batshit insane that it outshines his native stupidity.

But Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin...these two keep turning up. The allegedly liberal news media keeps propping them up, too, as if to try to prove both these malicious witches' legitimacy and their own. Tom Tomorrow nailed it, here (just watch the Salon ad and get over it).

A recent sampling:

• When the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times printed articles about the SWIFT international banking system--a secret only to those who know nothing about banking, and a system bragged on by the President only days after 9/11--Coulter, Malkin, and their ilk (let's just call them CMilk for short) began to propagate the outright lie that the two Times papers had publicized secret data. For one thing, the stories revealed no secrets. For another, CMilk are mysteriously ignoring the fact that the Journal published essentially the same story on the same day. Coulter's rhetoric about this non-issue has included proclamations that Timothy McVeigh should have bombed the New York Times building. Malkin's has included a series of Photoshopped World War II propaganda posters suggesting that the Times is deliberately getting Americans killed. There's nothing about these attacks that isn't hate speech. And the attacks are so outlandish, so unabashedly untruthful, that they cannot be the result of stupidity.
• After the New York Times published a travel-section puff piece about Saint Michaels, Maryland, a quaint Eastern Shore village known to anyone who whiffs around the Chesapeake Bay a little on the occasional weekend, various CMilk went nuts, claiming that the paper had posted the addresses of Vice President Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's vacation homes. For one thing, it's a lie: the Times provided no such information. There's only one road into Saint Michaels. A picture of a security camera in a birdhouse in Rumsfeld's driveway was posted with Secretary Rumsfeld's permission; CMilk claim the publication provided valuable information to terrorists. CMilk forgot that Newsmax, a right-wing news operation, published a similar story about the exact same location, noting the locations of Cheney's and Rumsfeld's homes. I don't see anyone picketing Newsmax to let us know that it's a Jihad-symp organization. Cmilk also conveniently forgot a 2001 Times piece--picked up around the country--naming the road in Chappaqua, New York, where Bill and Hilary Clinton maintain their primary residence. CMilk's publication of the address of the Times photographer who shot the completely authorized birdhouse pic (or, in the absence of such publication, strident defenses of those bloggers who did), coupled with their unashamed lack of a sense of irony about these facts, gives the lie to the notion that they're stupid.
• Our final presentation: Michelle Malkin, who has brutally assaulted everyone who disagrees with her worldview by calling them "unhinged," "moonbats," "deranged," and various other epithets, and who savaged notable dissenters such as Cindy Sheehan and some UC Santa Cruz students (whose phone numbers she published), headlines her call to today's protest at the Times' Washington Bureau thusly: "Dissent Is Patriotic." Is it possible for someone to be dumb enough not to understand that level of hypocrisy? I don't think so.

Smarter people than me have written about this. Check them out.