If you’ve never seen the meat of Michelle’s “Swift Boat” appearance on the August 19, 2004 episode of Hardball with Chris Matthews, please take a look.

Long-time reader Rev. Mykeru (that’s “Mike-a-roo”), sent the following in an email as part of a discussion we were having concerning our favorite blogger. I’ve done a bit of editing and added links, none of which are absolutely necessary for context or continuity.

One of the things you have to get used to when dealing with Malkin is something that is common with all purveyors of nonsense, and that is the breathless padding around a non-claim.

I’ll give you an example. I remember distinctly the unusual treat of actually having the chance to question one such purveyor of bullshit. The guy’s name was Pasqual Schievella. He wrote a piece defending Erich von Däniken’s book Chariots of the Gods. Von Däniken was the premier cherry-picker of data, provided it supported his a priori claims. So this way he could publish a picture in the book of a section of the Nasca Plains lines and assert that some rounded etching with lines coming off it was the hub of a UFO landing port. In fact, what it was was the stylized knee of a bird the Nasca Indians had created for their ritualistic purposes. That never stopped von Däniken from claiming the same thing in subsequent editions of his book. With these guys you disprove something on Monday and they are back saying the same thing at least by Friday.

So, anyway, in Patrick Grim’s book Philosophy of Science and the Occult* there’s a defense of von Däniken by Schievella, who happened to have the same musical connections as my professor. They played in a jazz band together, I think. So Schievella was more than happy to come in person and bullshit to a bunch of neophyte philosophers.

I remember distinctly that in the defense the guy had written that the Nasca Plains lines were so straight that it was “as if [they had been] cut by a laser beam from on high”. This is, of course, not true. But you will notice something else. It’s not actually a claim. Schievella said “as if”. He didn’t say they were. I spent ten minutes going around in circles with the guy trying to get him to actually make they claim that they were cut by laser beams, which is at least a testable assertion. But he wouldn’t do it. When asked “well, were they or weren’t they”, he would do a little tap dance. Obviously he wanted to give the impression that they were cut by a laser, without actually sticking his neck out enough for the claim, when it became a claim, to be disproved. It’s a typical tactic.

Remind you of anyone? Yeah, that’s right: Michelle Malkin running in circles with Chris Matthews trying to imply John Kerry’s war wounds were “self-inflicted” without actually making the claim that he shot himself: Just giving the impression without actually making a claim. It’s the safest place for people trying to sell nonsense to be.

Well, Malkin is doing it some more with her post on Haditha. She wants to claim that children are used by insurgents. This may or may not be true. But she wants to give the impression that the children shot were insurgents without actually having the guts to make that claim. With the non-claim claim one can just let the fetid stink of the accusation hang in the air without ever having to get down to providing  evidence.

If I were Mike Stark from Calling All Wingnuts and managed to catch Malkin on someone’s radio show I would quiz her on this non-claim claim, I would ask her outright if she thought the child shot execution style while praying was an insurgent and, if so, what information does she have to back up that claim. But before that, you would have to have her actually make an assertion, which she will assiduously avoid. [Ed. Many news accounts have included eyewitness testimony regarding an older male’s being shot while praying (e.g.), shortly after which several women and children were murdered.]

Then watch her do a little Mr. Bojangles tap dance number because she’s not making any assertion, although she wants people to make conclusions without them.

It’s more of her racial profiling logic, really. She just can’t live without the fallacious thinking that has defined her wingnut pundit career. In a flawed mind like Malkin’s it makes perfect sense that IF some children were insurgents, THEN these children could have been insurgents too. And stating that they could have been is good enough to justify their killing. Without actually having the guts to come out and say it like that. She has no evidence for this. Nothing to back it up, except for her tendency to keep confusing members of a subset for the whole damn set. Therefore all kids are insurgents. All Japanese were potential saboteurs. Palestinian children, Iraqi children, what’s the difference?  And the only exception, of course, to her racial and ethnic lumping, where the attributes of the smallest number of members of some group are ascribed to the group as a whole, is she, who is just deeply offended over any question of whether she has some carry-over Manila bar girl talent for being a human ping-pong ball cannon.

She’s a pitchman for political pseudoscience, what we commonly refer to as a propagandist.

Heh. Indeed.

*[In the initial posting of this piece, the book was given incorrectly as Ronald Pine’s Science and the Human Prospect. I had included a link to an online outline of this book, as well. Apologies to Prof. Pine for any undue association with Malkin this may have caused.]

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If you got this far, you may want to check out Michelle and Jesse’s response to Michelle’s Hardball flop here. My favorite part:

The feedback e-mail for Hardball is hardball@msnbc.com.

Chris Matthews’ phone number is listed in the Spring 2004 News Media Yellow Book as 202-885-4600.

Just keep this in mind: She’s not afraid of you.