Threats In The Blogosphere: How Credible Are Michelle Malkin's Claims?

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By MARC McDONALD

Possibly more than any other writer on the Web, right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin constantly refers to all the hate mail and threats she receives. In the eyes of her followers, this has enhanced her reputation and made her into a sort of right-wing hero for the truth, in her ongoing battle against liberals.

There's only one problem. Malkin isn't exactly the most reliable and trustworthy writer online. Frankly, I don't trust anything she writes.

The latest round of Malkin's claims of hate speech and threats began recently when Fox News' Bill O'Reilly compared the liberal Daily Kos to the Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

O'Reilly based his tirade on a tiny, cherry-picked handful of anonymous comments left on Daily Kos (a site with millions of daily visitors, all of whom are free to post comments).

Blogger Glenn Greenwald, among others, responded to O'Reilly's lunacy, pointing out that if you go to the site of Malkin (a frequent guest host on O'Reilly's program) you'll encounter loads of vile hate speech in her comments section. In Malkin's case, however, this really shouldn't be surprising. After all, as Greenwald notes, Malkin once wrote a book "defending the ethnicity-based imprisonment of innocent American citizens in internment camps."

In response to Greenwald's charges, Malkin has fallen back on a tactic that she's used before: she trots out the claim that she herself has been the victim of all kinds of terrible, violent hate speech and threats.

As she wrote in a July 26 piece:

"If you're going to get into it, the qualitative difference between blog comments on liberal blogs and my blogs is Grand Canyon-wide. A reminder: "Let's sexually torture, rape, murder and dismember the Malkin family."

I really don't believe anything that Malkin writes and frankly I have doubts about her claims of getting inundated with hate speech and threats.

Am I saying that Malkin and other right-wing bloggers basically make up anonymous comments to try to make liberals look bad?

Well, not necessarily. But I wouldn't put it past any right-wing site. And I simply don't believe that liberals are posting hate speech, or violent threats, on right-wing sites.

The fact is, we liberals don't do hate speech. We don't do racism. In fact, we're not big on threats or violence in general.

Hell, we're from the party of Jimmy Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, for God's sake. It's hard to imagine George W. Bush ever winning a Nobel Peace Prize.

I know a lot of liberal Democrats. And I know a lot of conservative Republicans.

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The creator of the progressive site, BeggarsCanBeChoosers.com, Marc McDonald is an award-winning journalist who worked for 15 years for several Texas (more...)

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