Yesterday marked the weakest blogging day out of Malkin Central in some time. (Discounting this past Saturday, of course.*) Not too surprising, because it comes after nearly 48 hours of vigorous updating wherein the troops she agrees with were given (con)textual backup (over an odious song). Maybe she’s been working on a post for The Immigration Blog, which hasn’t been updated since June 9th.

Then again the lag may be attributed, not to something as simple as “battle fatigue” a la 82nd Chairborne Brigade (cite), but to a barrage of fire coming from the Left-O-Sphere’s own A-List nasties. (We’ll know for sure if some not-so-glorifying emails find their way to the front page of MM.com later today.)

Warning: This post is long. If you find my prose tedious and boring, you may as well stop here.

Well-known lefty blogs (unlike this one) with widely disparate tones ranging from the comedic to the academic have recently published takedowns of the wannabe net celeb Bryan Preston. From the two examples given, one might conclude that unless Bryan’s face is plastered upon the medium from which his words are projected, the uninitiated audience can’t discern him from his paymaster(s).

Proposed classifications for this blogospheric discovery: “Royal We” Postulate (RoWP). Hiring of Tumescent Assholes Is Redundant (HoTAIR) Phenomenon.

The bottom line is that when Michelle/Jesse/Messe uses “we” anywhere, do not under any circumstances ever take it literally. So when Michelle says (with links removed),

***update: We’ve captured and posted the video of Hillary getting booed as she asks progressives to support the troops. Guess they won’t be helping out the….[blah blah blah]

she is most definitely referring to her band of merry blog freaks. Not that she was actually involved in capturing or editing the video.

In the three-star update presented, MM links to one of Bryan Preston’s more poorly executed Hot Air posts.

Honestly, most of the speech is pretty dull. But I found three points of interest that may shed some light on this fall’s elections and 2008.

First, Hillary! says we should support our troops…and the leftwingers [sic] in the audience boo her.

[His ellipsis, bizarrely.]

(As a point of reference, he liked Bush’s most recent State of the Union address, and made an ad hom attack against Gov. Kaine who gave the Dem response.)

Without even looking at the video in question, there are many problems with the formulation of these sentences. Y’know. On top of them being poorly crafted. The most blatant is the placement of the ellipsis. I don’t pretend to read minds, so my conservative interpretation is that the clauses, “says we should support our troops,” and, “the [left wingers] in the audience boo her,” are completely unrelated.

None of the videos are properly embedded into the Hot Air template as evidenced by the layering of the video object over the right sidebar. Technicalities aside, I don’t hear any booing in the first video aside from someone screaming, “Bring them home!”. But in the second there is: In response to Hillary’s faux pas of not demanding a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

Admission time: I’ve been following Hot Air since it launched, and I’ve read nearly every post. This one is only exceptional in its sloppiness. Allahpundit (the main contributor to HA) is far and away a better blogger than Bryan. I can safely conclude that the shitstorm I’m about to describe would not have occurred had Michelle not linked to Bryan’s post. Or at least had she not misrepresented his poor reporting. Again, she wrote, “[Hot Air has] captured and posted the video of Hillary getting booed as she asks progressives to support the troops.” Bryan didn’t say that. Just as the Swift Boaters never actually claimed that Kerry shot himself to avoid combat. This is the infamous Hardball appearance all over again.

Barbara O’Brien, a.k.a. maha, who attended the Take Back America conference as a member of the press wrote in response to seeing Bryan’s post:

What Malkin cuts off is that people were shouting “BRING THEM HOME!”

They were not booing the troops. They were booing Hillary for not supporting the troops.

I sat in that hall and know good and well no one in that crowd booed the troops. In fact, as I recall, during other speeches…the same audience applauded expressions of support for the troops.

The obfuscating detail here is that maha attributes the misdeed directly to Malkin, who has been known to correct posts at the behest of lefty bloggers. (Not that she’ll return my emails, of course. *snort*) This error propagated through a Crooks & Liars post, then on to one of Atrios’s signature snark posts.

Bryan, understandably, got very defensive about this. Some high traffic lefty blogs were attributing his hard-earned smear job to his boss. Regrettably, he didn’t choose professionalism, but escalation. Instead of shooting off a short-n-sweet email to the three bloggers mentioned above, he appended this to his post:

Michelle didn’t write it, nor did she edit the video. I did. Read the byline, people. If you have a problem with this post, take it up with me.

…I guess the lefties want to pretend that Michelle wrote the post and that she edited the video so that fools like Mahablog can call her a “shameless lying b*tch.” When the facts don’t favor you, resort to personal insults and profanity.
…Plus, the lefties can’t hear, either. Because Hillary did get booed when she said we need to support the troops. You fellas can spin it all you want, but it’s on the tape.

[All emphasis mine and denotes poor diction given the weight of the situation.]

Observations:

1. Bryan Preston admits unequivocally that he spliced the video in a highly selective manner. He and he alone. (Remember that RoWP Postulate?)
2. Bryan Preston doesn’t realize that popular liberal bloggers don’t know who he is and concludes they are attempting to smear his boss.
3. Bryan Preston doesn’t read popular liberal blogs. Otherwise, he would know that sites like Mahablog and C&L regularly use profane verbiage to express outrage. It has little to do with who the facts “favor”.
4. Bryan Preston clears up that mysterious ellipsis from the top of his post. He did mean to imply that the audience raucously booed Sen. Clinton’s call for supporting the troops.

The next morning, maha addressed Bryan’s updates adequately, including whose “back” Time Magazine has. (As if the Hot Air folks have a whole lot of love for Time right now.) My only revision would be to re-title the post “Bryan Preston Is a Shamelessly Lying Bitch, Too”, if only to emphasize that “bitch” should be a gender neutral epithet.

Now, I can only guess that Bryan didn’t anticipate someone posting the audio of the entire speech, from the audience’s perspective. Taylor Marsh did just that yesterday. Where Bryan hears “booing” following Hillary’s “…very best we have to offer,” there is clapping and screams of “Bring them home!” Booing only occurs when Sen. Clinton begins expressing her non-position on the occupation of Iraq. (Last I checked, disagreeing with a politician was something different from sabotaging the military.) Apart from that “boo bout”, Clinton seemed to work the crowd quite well, applause lines and all.

For this mischaracterization of an event they didn’t even seem interested in attending, Ms. Marsh calls out Michelle and Bryan for their extreme unprofessionalism:

Let me start by saying that if you had any morals or conscience you both would be ashamed for using the troops like this, even if it is to make a political point. That you can toy with our soldiers for your own benefit and gratification, not to mention the feeding of your large, over wrought and well fed egos, is typical of today’s Republican Party, but it’s still pathetic.

But let me slip you a little fact. If you were employed by any reputable organization you would be first suspended for your actions, then upon investigation you would be fired for purposefully and willfully manufacturing a story out of tape, by cropping and editing portions out so that the final product fit your version and vision of some truth that doesn’t exist in reality. For the collaboration of such fiction, which betrays the public trust, you both would be professionally shunned, deservedly so.

[N.B. Atrios linked to this Marsh post.]

As far as I know, there have been no public responses from the MM/HA camps. Based on my assessment of Bryan’s work over the last week, I admit that my recent prediction was woefully incorrect. For doing his boss so proud, I recommend that Bryan be promoted to full-time coblogger at michellemalkin.com. He’ll fit right in.