Malkin - Wrongly Arguing for More Dead Soldiers

Michelle Malkin is one of the pundits who most annoys me. She has attempted to stand out by following along in the Ann Coulter shock-and-shrill notice-me mold. From supporting internment camps to piling lies on Michael Schiavo, she is usually best ignored, or simply laughed at.

Today, let's laugh at her.

In her most recent column, she chooses Hillary Clinton to attack. This may seem kind of like shooting fish in a barrel for her, since the sort of people who read her column love to hate "Hildabeast". In reality, though, choosing Senator Clinton as a target is more challenging than one would expect, because that horse has been flayed to a skeleton in the fevered mind of the right-wing zealot. Going after Hillary (they prefer to stick with her first name - it makes her a little less scary) is big-game hunting, and, to borrow an old joke about Elizabeth Taylor's husband, the challenge isn't in doing the job, it is in making it interesting.

For whatever reason, though, Malkin (or her husband) decided to attack the motives of Senator Clinton in calling for hearings into the failure of the Pentagon to order side panels in soldiers' armor. She begins her attack with a bit of self-loathing sexism and misogyny:

Move over, Joan Rivers. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is vying for the title of undisputed queen of the cosmetic makeover. Having undergone a cultural warrior collagen injection with her recent crusades against violent video games and flag-burning, Hillary has traded in her ratty black pantsuit for a new politicized accessory to enhance her electoral figure: Body armor.

She then focuses her attention on a couple of soldiers who complain about how heavy armor is, and wraps up her piece with a final bit of sexist crap: "She is too busy playing dress-up to listen to the troops she says she cares so much about now."

All this garbage is made funny because it turns out that Malkin is wrong, and, amid the criticism stirred up by Senator Clinton and others, the Pentagon is shipping 230,000 side-protecting armor inserts to our troops in Iraq. While Malkin was having fun mocking Senator Clinton's femininity, Senator Clinton was at work, saving the lives of our troops.

In the coming months, we will not hear about the troops who survived an attack because of the inserts. Those victories will be both silent and meaningful. I only wish Malkin would choose to be one or the other.

(Update: To make matters worse, she committed plagiarism!)