Eminem
My first instinct was to join Patterico, Spoons, Captain Ed and almost everyone else on the right side of the Blogosphere, and bash Chris Matthews for being such a jerk to Michelle Malkin Thursday night. My second instinct, after following this link from Duncan Black (who is white), was to email Malkin and inquire as to why she brought up William Zaladonis and Patrick Runyon, both of whom appear mostly to have corroborated Mr. sKerry’s accounts, as examples of veterans who supposedly backed up the SwiftVets. My third, after not (yet) receiving a reply, was to suspect that Dale may be right that Michelle did indeed “fumble” this one.
My fourth, and final view until at least next Tuesday, is that Malkin fumbled, in that she walked into Matthews’s trap and implied that Kerry had shot himself. Here’s the part that I can’t seem to shake, much as I’d like to:
MATTHEWS: No. No one has every accused him of shooting himself on purpose.
MALKIN: Yes. Some of them say that.
The rest of the exchange consists largely of Matthews repeatedly trying to bait Malkin into saying stuff she never intended to say, by switching the subject again and again from self-inflicted wounds to Kerry having shot himself (with a grenade?!). But there are no two ways about that last line. You can’t say “yes” if the only truthful answer is “no.” Having done so inadvertently, the only responsible thing to do is to come back and correct that later, which she also didn’t do. So while it is clearly true that Matthews acted like a jerk, and while it is probably true that he tricked her into saying something she didn’t mean to say, it was still up to her to correct that, unless she can actually point to a place in the book (Unfit For Command) where he really is accused of having shot himself. [As a side note, I also don't buy the "I am not raising these questions myself, but others have," argument. Malkin, like Gore or anyone else, should speak for herself, or not speak at all.]
None of this is to let Matthews off the hook, however. Between this incident and the other meltdowns on recent shows, I think we can safely say that while Malkin may have suffered a minor setback, Matthews has truly jumped the shark (and I say that with full knowledge that the phrase “jump the shark” has itself jumped the shark). Having baited Malkin into a “gotcha,” he had no business turning around and self-righteously kicking her off the show, let alone following up by treating viewers and readers to smarm like this:
One of my jobs on “Hardball” is to cut through to the truth. Tonight on “Hardball,” one of our guests pushed the idea that John Kerry had won his Purple Heart by deliberately shooting himself. The charge was without merit and baseless, as our guest under close questioning herself admitted.
Horse poop. A more honest statement would have been something like this:
One of my jobs on “Hardball” is to maintain ratings that aren’t quite as miserable as those of this network overall. Tonight on “Hardball,” I managed to con Michelle Malkin into finally saying “yes” to my repeated badgering over an allegation against John Kerry that no one, including her, had made, and which I myself had actually made up. Boo-yah! By so doing, I earned myself a face-saving reason to kick her off the show before she had a chance to say word one about the topic she had originally planned to talk about, which was the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
So basically, I agree with both sides on this one. Malkin did fumble, but only after Matthews egged her on and basically conned her into saying something she probably did not intend to say. Getting the other team to fumble is great if you are playing on the other team, but coming from an allegedly objective journalist, it is completely uncool. Five yard penalty against Malkin, 15 yards on Matthews, advantage Malkin. [Yes, I know I'm mixing metaphors, so sue fisk me.]
Dishonorable mention goes to Keith Olbermann, who offered this brilliant insight:
Michelle Malkin, the unfortunate and overmatched author of a self-loathing book that attempts to justify our World War II internment and robbery of Americans of Japanese heritage, became the harbinger of the next mucky smell of low tide.
Self-loathing Michelle is, of course, of Philippine extraction. I know, I know, Filipina, Japanese, what’s the diff?
August 21st, 2004 at 10:36 am
Matthews Is Right
Matthew Yglesias: Go read Chris Matthews on why it’s not okay for a journalist to turn himself into a conduit for misinformation even if he isn’t directly doing the misinforming himself, followed by Keith Olberman on why a second-hand smear…
August 21st, 2004 at 11:14 am
OP_MALKIN_SWB_93: WRAP. REPEAT: WRAP. OPER_KOLBMN OVER PLAYED HAND. NO “OPEN VEIN”. REPEAT: NO “OPEN VEIN”. WRAP OPERATION.
– DNCEN. AUTH EDW_MAR
August 21st, 2004 at 1:25 pm
That phrase “self-inflicted” contains the connotation of intent. I think there was no intent to harm himself — only the duck-on-a-june-bug opportunism to take advantage of a presenting situation.
Standing too close to something that you are blowing up and taking shrapnel from it is, technically, self-inflicting a wound. It’s also, technically, kind of dumb. But that’s not important now.
August 21st, 2004 at 7:40 pm
If someone says that a person died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, I’m going to assume that it was suicide. The expectation would be that if it is an unintentional self-inflicted wound that the person would say something such as “Kerry accidentally shot himself.”
Matthews was more than fair in the interview.
August 22nd, 2004 at 5:15 am
Matthews was more than fair, huh ?
Bitchslapping Michelle while preventing her from finishing a sentence must be a new form of the fairness doctrine.
August 22nd, 2004 at 12:02 pm
I guess I speak a really weird, unusual dialect of English, in which “self-inflicted” just means that you inflicted it on yourself. I agree that the usual inference where someone dies of self-inflicted gunshot wounds is that he probably committed suicide. That’s because most fatal, self-inflicted gunshot wounds were intentional; it rarely happens by accident. By contrast, non-fatal self-inflicted wounds, like those of Max Cleland, (allegedly) John Kerry, or just some redneck shooting himself in the foot, are often the result of simple negligence. By itself, the word inflict connotes nothing as to how you inflicted the wound; it merely acknowledges that you did.
August 22nd, 2004 at 8:14 pm
“Homicide” doesn’t mean “murder” but when a coroner rules an accidental death a homicide, the newspaper or other medium carrying the story will usually bother to point out the difference simply because a lot of people do make the wrong assumption.
Call me a cynic, but I think some of these folks were intentionally trying to leave the impression that Kerry intentionally caused his own injuries in order to get a medal. After all, at least one of them said Kerry had a “plan.”
What this really comes down to is that if you are a Bush supporter you give him the benefit of the doubt on questionable matters and likewise for Kerry supporters. The dynamic is that we often hold our foes to a higher standard than we do our friends, just as in campaigns there is a tendency to compare the best traits of the candidate we support to the worst traits of the candidate we oppose.
August 24th, 2004 at 3:48 pm
As to the point that Michelle can’t be self-loathing because she is Asian, that’s just plain dumb. There were Jews who sided with Hitler, some even hiding their background.
I don’t see evidence that she necessarily is self-loathing, but the fact of her race doesn’t prove the matter.
August 24th, 2004 at 4:33 pm
Joel, you completely missed the point. It doesn’t matter that she is Asian, only that she is not Japanese. It doesn’t take much “self-loathing” for an American of non-Japanese descent to defend the internment of Americans of Japanese descent, does it?
August 24th, 2004 at 5:09 pm
So if Hitler had decided to conentrate only Jews from Germany, France or Poland and a Russian Jew cooperated, then we wouldn’t have to worry about self-loathing?
I got your point.
August 24th, 2004 at 6:15 pm
I, on the other hand, am having a hell of a time understanding yours, assuming you do in fact have one. Let’s see if you can tell me what each of the following groups have in common:
1. German Jews
2. French Jews
3. Polish Jews
4. Russian Jews
Now, let’s shift gears. See if you can tell me what the following two groups do NOT have in common:
1. Japanese
2. Filipinos
August 26th, 2004 at 1:45 pm
They are both Asian peoples, that’s the point. Doesn’t matter what they don’t havew in common.
August 26th, 2004 at 2:16 pm
As to the part you can’t shake, the Hardball transcript is wrong. It should read “MALKIN: Yes. Some of them say that….” at which point Matthews interrupts her yet again. What she was going to say after that, we will never know.
August 26th, 2004 at 2:53 pm
Octavian: you’re right, but at the end of the day, “yes” means “yes.” Unless she said it in a sarcastic tone of voice, which I doubt, she allowed Matthews to put words in her mouth. That doesn’t excuse him for doing it, it just means she screwed up.
Joel: Of course it matters what they don’t have in common! We didn’t go to war against Asia; we went to war with Japan. To accuse a Filipina of “self-loathing” because she won’t condemn the internment of the Japanese makes no more sense than calling a Frenchman “self-loathing” because he doesn’t care what happened to Romania. I mean, gee, they’re both European peoples, right?