Michelle Malkin Axed for Views

November 23, 2004

My good friend Michelle Malkin, as you may have read by now, was on the receiving end of a number of sins liberals famously decry. The only catch is, liberals, in this case, were the offending party.

The Virginia-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., canceled Michelle’s syndicated column “because she was ‘too stridently anti-liberal.'”

The paper’s apparently stridently pro-liberal public editor, Marvin Lake said “readers often took issue with her seemingly mean-spirited rantings and suggested she be dropped. Well, she’s outta here, silenced for being ‘too stridently anti-liberal,’ the assessment of the editorial board.”

Maybe some of you readers haven’t experienced this phenomenon, but let me try to relate, since I was once dropped by a liberal paper allegedly because I was too partisan. My experience, both as a columnist and an observer of life, is that liberals consider any bold assertion of conservative political thought “mean-spirited.” Indeed, the liberals’ favorite charge against conservatives is that they are intrinsically mean, uncompassionate people.

Given Michelle’s uniquely gifted manner of expression, of course liberals are going to react adversely to her. But free speech and the open dissemination of diverse ideas is only something they pretend to care about. This paper dumped Michelle not because she is strident, but because she is effective at skewering liberalism’s sacred cows. And as we’ve seen from their hysterical, mean-spirited and fundamentally dishonest reaction to Rush all these years, they cannot tolerate dissent. They can’t stand it when someone — especially a skilled communicator — knocks them off of their lofty, sanctimonious perch.

But the Malkin episode gets even better. Listen to what another of the paper’s editorial writers, Bronwyn Lance Chester said:

I think she habitually mistakes shrill for thought-provoking and substitutes screaming for discussion. She’s an Asian Ann Coulter. I also think that, like Coulter, she says outrageous things just to get TV appearances and book deals. She’s the worst of what’s wrong with punditry today. She adds absolutely nothing to genuine political discourse.

Again, when liberals are exposed to cogent conservative writing like Michelle’s, their response is: “This isn’t logical,” or “This is shrill.” I’ve experienced this myself so I know — to a limited extent — how the liberal mind works. If they don’t agree with one of the premises upon which you base a chain of logical thought, they dismiss you as illogical, as opposed to one with a different view of the facts.

For example, I’ve been called illogical for my premise that neither George W. Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice, nor any other members of the Bush team lied about Iraqi WMD. That is my opinion, based on the facts available to me. When I build other arguments using my assertion that they did not lie, liberals say I’m being illogical — simply because they insist on believing, as an article of perverted faith, that the Bush team did lie about Iraq. If they didn’t cling to that phantom postulate, their entire wall against the war would tumble down around them, as would most of their stated reasons for hating President Bush. The irony here is that they are the ones being illogical in this instance. The available facts indicate that President Bush genuinely believed, based on the best intelligence available to him, congressional Democrats, and other foreign governments, that Iraq was producing WMD. (And by the way, we still don’t know that it wasn’t and may never know.)

Excuse the diversion. My point on this is simply that liberals throw out the bogus argument that conservatives are illogical just because they say things they (liberals) don’t believe. To the illogical liberal mind, to disagree with them even about a matter upon which reasonable people may disagree, is illogical, just as to forcefully and effectively communicate the conservative case constitutes mean-spiritedness.

But I was saving the “best” for last. Michelle, says Chester — the editor who hates shrillness, screaming, and outrageousness — is an “Asian Ann Coulter.” While I’m sure Michelle is both rightly proud of her ethnicity and a friend of Ann Coulter, she should not have to be subjected to such a racist slur.

“Come on now,” you say. “You know better than to accuse a fine liberal of racism.” That’s not the point. I have no idea whether Chester is a racist or even what he meant by the disgusting remark. What I do know is that if you hold these clowns to the same standard they always exact against conservatives, Chester would be due for a reprimand, a censure, a suspension, a firing, or something. His actual intent would be irrelevant. His remark, on its face, is offensive and unacceptable.

But liberals don’t hold themselves accountable for the things they condemn in others. You see, it’s perfectly ok for libs to use racist epithets because they are liberals — that presumptively benevolent class of people inherently incapable of harboring racist feelings.

Tell it to Condoleezza Rice. Tell it to Michelle Malkin. Michelle has been writing about this subject of liberal racism lately, so it’s ironic that she’s now been victimized by it. Shame on this paper and it’s unshrill, open-minded, logical, compassionate editors.

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