‘Sas good a time as any to affect
An appearance that may quicken this site.
We have no reservations, and the table
Is not set, for more dire endeavors,
Like bottle bottoms of Manischewitz,
Vow and vie for the rare currency of
My attention. Could this be confused with
Softness t’wards My Shell? Perhaps it will. She
Wrote with the ghost, never owned up, ‘cept to
Status shield with proportionality:
“It was less than fifty-fifty. Promise!
More like the sum of one to one hundred!”
I shall now return to my absence, but
Carry on watching the Malkins finger and
Dig their holy (and wholly glorious) holes.

‘Tis a brittle, long limb to tarry on.
To wit, for those drawn by sweet carrion:
They will fall victim to evil self-contrived.
Thus ends act four, I may return in five.

MALKIN

Am I late? Why am I even here?

[Bryan Preston enters.]

MALKIN

Bryan! What are you doing here?

PRESTON

You can’t do this, Michelle! It’s just too dangerous for such an angel of God! And if something happens to you, who’s gonna tie my shoes and give me daily sponge bath?

MALKIN

Shove it, you imbecile. I’m meeting a source — someone I trust.

PRESTON

Yeah, I know. You’re meeting with your mole inside La Raza! [Takes pompous pose.]

MALKIN

How do you know that?! Have you been looking through my closets again?

PRESTON

Uh huh… [Drools on himself.] But I also found this in my inbox yesterday. [Hands her a note, which she quickly scans.] They’re going to kidnap you and put you in a work camp for non-illegals.

MALKIN

This is written in crayon. And it’s in your “handwriting.” [Expressed with air quotes.]

PRESTON

At least let me put on your coat and hat until we can make sure it’s safe for your sweetness, Miss M.

[Michelle sighs heavily and acquiesces. He dons her hat, coat, and handbag. Michelle hides. Enter La Raza Mole (LRM).]

PRESTON

[Clears throat. Poorly imitating Michelle’s voice.] Hiya there. Are you my source? Wow. You’re almost as cute as my friend Bryan.

[LRM, immediately recognizing Bryan Preston wearing Michelle’s clothes, draws a large calibre pistol, shoots him once in the chest, once in the head. He drops a newspaper clipping (the beginning of this column) on Bryan’s corpse. LRM exits. Malkin approaches and spits on body. She picks up newspaper clipping and begins reading aloud.]

MALKIN

“Welcome to the revolution.

“There’s no point in hiding it any longer. The more observant members of society have already figured out that there’s a secret Latino movement under way to evict every last Anglo-European American from the Southwest and reclaim the land that Mexico lost in the Mexican-American War of the mid-1800s.”

The evidence I’ve been looking for! I’ll expose them tonight on The Factor for sure! People will take me seriously again.

[Michelle retrieves voice recorder from the coat on Bryan’s body and presses the record button.]

Note to self: Have Janet Murguìan framed for Bryan’s murder. Replace favorite trench coat.

[Michelle exits.]

The national movement to gain reparations for the descendents of enslaved Africans was a fast-rolling bandwagon until slowed by events of 9/11. Well, it’s accelerating again.

In truth, it’s been picking up momentum since Hurricane Katrina blew the cover off this nation’s well-camouflaged race/class divide. The distress revealed in that storm’s wake moved even President George Bush to urge redress of poverty’s racial disparities. He quickly moved past that urge, but the national conversation continues.

As I see it, the question of reparations for racial slavery and Jim Crow apartheid is one of the nation’s most substantive issues. It’s also one of the most disparaged.

Editorials like this one give me solace, and by my estimation they’re getting more frequent. If you’re into emailing or IMimg links to fellow political junkies, be sure to get this one out.

Marse Arse says: “I ain’t nevah heard a payin’ no n––––– fuh no work!”

Michelle & Jesse were not reached for comment.

I haven’t heard of a couple of the guestbloggers she’s chosen as fillings, but the others are certifiable lightweights who bang forth respective litanies of wingnuttery to satisfy the synapses of thousands of tens of lazy warmongers.

Expect limited Malkin blogging around these parts. Not that I’ve ever promised you guys anything anyway…

Blacks worth $6k; whites $88k
…
African Americans that favor reparations should stop allowing discussions to be guided by perceptions that: 1) reparations are unlikely ever to be awarded; 2) reparations are undeserved by African Americans since all ex-slaves are dead; 3) today’s white Americans have not injured African Americans and should not be required to pay for sins of their forbears; 4) it is impossible to determine who should get what and how much; and 5) African Americans must become self-reliant and determine their own fate and stop waiting for relief from external sources.

Don’t be deceived; opponents of reparations have benefited from a system of white privilege that is imbedded in American society. Let’s stop acceptance of a system of white privileges and Black disadvantages that has accrued advantages for whites for fifteen generations.

Or as Malcolm X, that stalwart of the civil rights movement, put it:

If you are the son of a man who had a wealthy estate and you inherit your father’s estate, you have to pay off the debts that your father incurred before he died. The only reason that the present generation of white Americans are in a position of economic strength…is because their fathers worked our fathers for over 400 years with no pay…We were sold from plantation to plantation like you sell a horse, or a cow, or a chicken, or a bushel of wheat…All that money…is what gives the present generation of American whites the ability to walk around the earth with their chest out…like they have some kind of economic ingenuity. Your father isn’t here to pay. My father isn’t here to collect. But I’m here to collect and you’re here to pay.

It appears to be getting more shrill as the group grows. This week saw a raising of stakes of sorts: paranoia of media manipulation in the coverage of the continuing slaughter in Lebanon, Joe Lieberman’s primary loss to a political fish, and the arrests of alleged violent jihadists in Britain.

• On 7 August Michelle appeared on The O’Reilly Factor. She was given a platform to discuss liberal charges of bigotry against conservative politicians and pundits. [MMFA has the video; Link.] In a roundabout response with the apparent goal of plugging her lackluster book Unhinged, she came out in agreement with me and others who use terms like racist, xenophobe, bigot, Islamophobe conservatively and reservedly: “I call people what they are”.
• The “Hezbollywood” posts have also been pouring fuel on the bonfires of outrage demanded by Malkinites and Hot Airians this week. [The excruciatingly poor writing of Bryan Preston can be found here.] As with all “blogpiles,” individuals fail to step back and broadly analyze the situation:

  The obvious: Long gone are the days of Alfred Lord Tennyson. The digital age has brought us a culture of instancy. Fact and rumor don’t just spread quickly; we demand it to be on our screens two seconds ago. And, as it’s always been with wars, the propaganda must precede the facts, so as mentioned, there is no time to wait for a nationalist to write a poem to stir men’s hearts.

  Hezbollah, adapting to this age of instancy as everyone else has, is packaging the propaganda in with the facts. The U.S. military made it very clear on the run up to the invasion of Iraq that it would exploit embedded journalists for the twin purposes of information control: getting the right message to citizens and limiting the scope of that message.Therefore, “Green Helmet’s” cynical use of corpses as props is expected.

  What puzzles me is what the Hot Airians are proposing here. Surely they understand that Hezbollah’s propaganda campaign is aimed solely at those who would be sympathetic to their cause and that the only way to stop the media manipulation is to stop giving them the props. What exactly would they do to achieve their goal?

  If it’s a full-scale ground war with even more massive civilian casualties, it looks like they just got it.

• As always, one should check TBogg before coming to MW. He catches Michelle being her bigoted self by not informing her readers that about two dozen of the alleged violent jihadists arrested yesterday are British citizens.

  She repeatedly refers to them as men of Pakistani descent in a lame attempt to incite racial hatred.

  Blogging — although very nerdy and ultimately a grand waste of time — brings with it a sense of accomplishment and responsibility. It is this bloggers opinion that to consider the blog a broadcasting medium is to overestimate its utility. What is odd about the blogosphere phenomenon is that a handful of sites have large audiences.

  In the cases of Little Green Footballs and Michelle Malkin’s main blog, the responsibility to editorialize is blatantly abdicated. The content, usually in the form of news stories, can lead a moderately informed reader to infer a blogger’s political standing, but what Charles Johnson and Michelle/Jesse Malkin avoid is the explicit expression of policy positions.

  Michelle has long been an advocate of racial profiling. Her infamous In Defense of Internment extolled the virtues of locking up those deemed disloyal to the United State. Although she has never expressed her desire to intern American Muslims, I wonder strongly whether she would be against such a proposal. Where exactly does she draw the line? What would she do if she were manning the controls?

I am an active user of Wikipedia, but I tend to only edit typos; I’m not much of a contributor. I wouldn’t feel comfortable adding or subtracting from this particular article in any capacity, anyway. (Although sources have confirmed that Michelle or Jesse did perform significant editing of her Wiki article as an anonymous user.)

If you feel strongly about whether a link to MW deserves to be on MM’s article, and you’re an experienced editor, you know what to do.

Update: (8/13, morning) It has come to my attention that the title should be “Wikipedists Unite!” I think I’ll leave it as-is, though.

Thanks to everyone who’s contributing over there. If another debate begins in the Talk Page of the article in question, someone may want to point out that LGF Watch is in the external links (EL) list of the Little Green Footballs article.

That would be an interesting discussion of NPOV/Critics sections of the EL guidelines.

Update: (8/14, early morning) Just to be clear: I’m neither angry over this nor sending anyone off to further an agenda. I should also point out that “puerile” is one of those words that one should be able to spell in order to use it with command. (Hint: Search in the talk page.)

A member of the opinion class, [Michelle Malkin] makes her living by being perpetually irate.

In her column, she served up her usual dish of half-truths covered with a venemous sauce of sarcasm, ridicule and contempt for those whose ideas differ from hers. Her columns are meant to incite rather than provide insight. Given a pile of bricks, she’d throw them at others rather than build a bridge.

[Link]

NB — the specific column the reader refers to is listed at the top of the letter; not that it really matters.

I’ve found the following posts to be a good survey of my own thoughts on the topic.

• An LGF Watch Parody, Probably a photoshop…
• S,N!’s You Call This a Scandal?
• The Liberal Avenger’s In Defense of Reuters.

As with every blogswarm, there is something important to take away. The moral:

It’s journalistically unprofessional to alter photographs. If you get caught, you’re going to lose your job. (But if you can probably get away with it, because photo editors are overworked and underpaid. Increase your chances and your bankroll by cropping out limbless kids!)

Submorals:

1. Conservative bloggers are desperate for scandalous material pointing to international media bias. Anything to take the spotlight off of Israel’s total decimation of Lebanese infrastructure. (As evidenced by the posts linked above, this cannot be overstated.)
2. [Something to do with aerial dog feces. I haven’t fully derived this. Wingnut nutrition, I think.]
3. An impulsive and irrational contingent of outrage junkies is scouring the Prestigious Internet for photos that prove Capt. America was stabbed in the back with the dagger by Prof. Left in the library.

Of course the Second Universal Law of Political Blogging, the negation of Manshake’s tagline is true, has dictated the wingnutosphere’s behavior over the past few days. They are an amazing bunch; you’d think they didn’t have anything better to do.