I normally have a policy not to give a crap what Michelle Malkin has to say, much for the same reason I ignore Ann Coulter: at some point someone becomes so stupid you just can’t let their stupidity bother you.
This time, though, Malkin did something so monumentally dumb that it serves as a reminder of What Not To Do as a blogger, pundit, commentator, and journalist. Recently Arkansas Democratic Party chairman Bill Gwatney was shot and killed, which is a terrible tragedy. Malkin, however, found a way to focus the attention on herself.
Her evidence is, get this, a single email which she produces, complete with full name and email address, in which someone says: “You should be in jail. Your hate turns people to murder.” Based on one dumb email, Malkin turns the murder of another man into a big ol’ post about herself. For the moment I’m going to ignore “posts full name and email address of person who says her posts result in murder.” I doubt it even occurred to her.
Folks, if bloggers took every single stupid email and turned it into a post like that, there’d be no time to make other posts. I’ve been blamed for all kinds of things in the abstract, and my audience isn’t even close to Malkin’s (sadly). Try and imagine the kinds of emails Markos and the guys at Crooks and Liars get.
Notice that the email doesn’t really blame Malkin specifically. It says “the hate you and folks like Hannity spew,” meaning the emailer was just blaming all right-wing hate speech, not Malkin herself. It’s not like it said “because you did X, a man was shot.” And believe me folks, if I had a nickel for every time I got something like “liberals like you are getting our men and women killed in Iraq”, I’d have enough to keep this site running from now until doomsday.
So here’s the lesson: if you get an email or message of some kind that says “people like you made this bad thing happen”, and your first thought is “I’m to blame for this event? I must tell the world!”, then you’ve drifted into Crazy Town. Come back, please.
“So here’s the lesson: if you get an email or message of some kind that says “people like you made this bad thing happen”, and your first thought is “I’m to blame for this event? I must tell the world!”, then you’ve drifted into Crazy Town. Come back, please.”
Unless of course you just want to post buckets of your hate mail to mock the people.