Is That Legal?

At least you appologized! Most people on the left don't seem to know how to do that.

Nice of you to apologize for this. For what it's worth, I know Jesse and Michelle, and the suggestion that Jesse is responsible for any more than a "handful" of her posts is ridiculous. It's fine to disagree with Michelle's views, but to assume based on her ethnicity that somebody is putting her up to this is borderline racist.

[ELM: I have said not a single word that even implies that ethnicity has a thing to do with this, and I have tried, over the last 18 months, to censor any comment on this blog that has ever been submitted drawing attention to her ancestry. To the extent that you're implying that my attention to the authorship of Michelle Malkin's work is racist, you are quite wrong.]

Not exactly the sincere apology I was hoping for, and you still seem to have completely missed the point in what exactly you did - how fundamentally immature and petty it was.

But it's a start. Thank you.

It's still too bad you took the focus entirely off her ideas and instead put it squarely on your own motivations and behaviors.

-------------------------

An aside: actually it occurs to me that maybe you're being disengenuous and this was all done very intentionally - to create a little controversy and drive traffic to your site.

In THAT case ... well, bravo. If the sole intent was to boost your readership without consideration to morality or ethics, you succeeded.

[ELM: No, it wasn't. I'm quite content with my blog and its traffic as they are. In any event, anybody who wants this sort of traffic needs their head examined.]

You may not have written anything about her ethnicity, but you linked to a blog post that seemed to imply something to this effect: http://www.liberalavenger.com/ghost-blogging-the-michelle-and-jesse-malkin-story/ ("in today’s personality-driven politics, would even right-wingers be as willing to swallow this kind of thing from a white male PhD as from a photogenic minority woman?") Perhaps you didn't read the post, or perhaps you interpet it differently, but I find the suggestion that she is a front person for a white man pretty objectionable.

I'm am stunned by the immaturity of most of the commenters on that last post. Name-calling? Accusations of being disengenous? Attacks on your professionalism? Ranting tantrums? More name-calling?

Those comments are the worst kind of public discourse -- when you can't defend on the merits, attack the person.

Debate is one thing, but the venom and invective being spewed suggest that many of the commenters are simply pursuing a personal vendetta rather than engaging a rational, adult dialogue.

To the friend -
you mean that suggesting that a married couple could be considered a partnership is ethnically motivated?

Boy, lucky that very few of Malkin's devoted readers (what a joy it was reading them on the previous post) would actually think that a married woman would allow her husband any sort of respect as an equal human being, worth listening to or discussing things like politics. I used to think the people that read Malkin's stuff were great believers in what they consider 'traditional' American values, but it is nice to see someone who seems to clearly believe that a man's place is in the house, keeping the home fires burning, without any thought in the world apart from how to raise his children and waiting for his wife to come home - the puns and double entendres are just too easy, so I will stop. ('Feminazis for Malkin' is just too funny though - sorry.)

Sometimes, I get the strangest feeling reading the acrobatics required to keep all the contradictions whirling around so that no one can actually take the time to point them out.

Now the only question - who needs to get a life this time?

Cool.

Oooh, she writes a lot of posts about Air America and Hillary? Jeez, that makes her the only blogger in the world who concentrates on a topic!

I agree that the stalker charge is a bit much. But you should have just left this post as a simple apology rather than trying to justify it.

Fixation about Air America? Since the MSM refused to carry the story of the nonprofit organization of Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club and Pathway $875,000 loan to a commericial radio station, Michelle was doing sound investigative journalism. Gloria Wise receives federal, state and city public funds to serve inner city youth of NYC. What would the MSM reaction be if this nonprofit would of lend money to Rush?

Malkin referred to Eric as a creep on her web site with respect to this episode, so any cordiality that may have existed in their relationship is vanished, I'd say.

One of the painful lessons I have learned in my life is that sometimes when we are in a dispute with another person, we cross the line that separates civility from hostility by saying (or writing) something that cannot be taken back... unless both sides are willing to forgive and forget.

Hopefully Michelle and Eric can make that leap.

After all your brouhaha yesterday you were WRONG about the schedules? LOL!

It took you only "about 15 minutes to throw together the post"...how much of that time was spent checking the schedules you based your accusation on?

That's hilarious.

I love how the narrative always ends up for Malkin apologists...

Jesse Malkin, conservative activist in college, Rhodes scholar and RAND Corporation analyst/economist disappears from the public eye and spends all of his time as Mr. Mom cleaning up juice spills after his two kids along with the Malkins' two nannies.

Michelle concedes that Jesse has contributed to the blog a "handful" of times in the past yet Malkin supporters in the blogosphere insist that he's 100% hands off the blog in any other instance.

I like the sound of that.

Meanwhile Regnery brings a book to market advocating the rounding up of brown people based on their race and supporters decry the idea as "racist" that Regnery might have seen an advantage to having a minority behind this very book.

And from today's headlines, a black Democratic congresswoman's "unhinged" behavior is solely derived from her membership in the moonbat/liberal club with no chance whatsoever that the color of her skin may have caused her to be treated differently at the Capitol security checkpoint.

You've got to love conservative consistency.

i say bravo, prof. muller! it's beyond me how you've received such vitriolic criticism just for exercising some journalistic aptitude. don't worry, though, michelle probably enlisted her friends just to comment on your site. though your apology was very honorable, i don't think it was necessary at all. cheerio!

Isn't it just like a liberal to post an apology? That's the problem with the left -- when you mess up, you feel bad. You'd never see something like this from Red State or Powerline. What a wimp; a real man would stand his ground, right or wrong.

"Michelle concedes that Jesse has contributed to the blog a "handful" of times in the past yet Malkin supporters in the blogosphere insist that he's 100% hands off the blog in any other instance."

Actually Malkin supporters couldn't care less whether her husband posts on her blog. We accept her word for it that he hasn't except for a few times.

What I suspect this really gets down to is the racist belief that a minority woman couldn't be doing all this on her own; that it's really her white husband pulling the strings.

Brainster,

It's admirably honest of you to acknowledge that Malkin's fanboys don't care who's writing her posts, or if Malkin is being honest about it.

re: her "white husband pulling the strings." The contention is that she's the public face of a joint operation, not a puppet. You may think that every white/minority relationship boils down to master/slave, but I doubt that Prof. Muller shares that view.

Why even mention her husband?
She can do anything with him if she wants...

"so readers never really know for sure whether a particular idea or turn of phrase is hers or her husband's"

Maybe you forget the whole idea of being married.
It's not just a legal term- you don't get married to make life easy.

You get married to spend your life together.
(this even includes sharing thoughts, opinions, trusting, etc.)

BTW, I'm not even married, but it's pretty damn obvious to me.
I don't read Michelles blog (not that it's bad), but I got a link from Murdoc Online and was confused as to what motive you had for this.
(only one I could think of was that you were in some way jealous - any chance of enlightenment?)

Hiding behind the skirt of "The Liberal Avenger," eh?

This sort of "she can't possibly have the time to do this" argument is precisely what I found so unconvincing about your debunking of her internment book. That, and the approving links to racist photoshops of the book cover. I figured if you couldn't get past lame arguments and ad hominems like that in Part *One*, there was probably little point in reading the rest.

Oh well, you've suffered some embarrassment, and that's good. Hopefully you'll learn from it -- though from the tone of the post, it seems unlikely.

it's beyond me how you've received such vitriolic criticism just for exercising some journalistic aptitude.

I think the word you're looking for is ineptitude.

This sort of "she can't possibly have the time to do this" argument is precisely what I found so unconvincing about your debunking of her internment book

Right, because that was the main crux of the critique - photoshop and speculation.

http://www.isthatlegal.org/Muller_and_Robinson_on_Malkin.html

But that's kinda long and detailed. So boring! Forget that stuff. Much easier to just call people asshats.

From what I have read of Michelle Malkin's columns, she finds the frequent playing of the "race card" to be abhorrent and ridiculous.

How ironic then that the defenders of Mrs.Malkin on this thread should be the ones to play the race card against Prof. Muller, especially when there is no evidence of such. [As he states, he never even raised the issue of ethnicity.]

This is what Muller chose to put in Part *One*, Josh. If he chooses to *lead* with something that weak, he shouldn't be surprised when most readers are disgusted and unimpressed, as I was.

[ELM: Patterico, welcome to blogging. I was live-blogging my reactions to Malkin's book as I encountered it, simultaneous with its publication. So it's not really that I "chose" to lead with that point, or any other point. It's simply that that's what I was wondering about first, before I'd had a chance to reflect on the book's substance.

Of course, if she'd had the decency to send me a copy of the book -- not an unreasonable request, given that she quotes me in the book, and has said that my blogging was among the things that led her to write it -- I might have been able to respond first with substance. But she didn't; she only sent advance copies to right-wing bloggers whom she thought would support the book and receive it uncritically.

One last thing: if you think it's weak to suggest the implausibility of researching, writing, and publishing a book completely revising the historical account of a multi-year episode like the Japanese American internment in nine months, while also being a full-time columnist, TV personality, and parent, then you don't have the faintest idea what goes into historical research and writing. Not the faintest.]

Oh, that's right. I forgot that part of your Part One was also whining about not getting a free advance copy.

You needn't welcome me to blogging. I have been doing it for years. And if I'm going to do a post that leads in to a multi-part series on a topic, I'm going to try to make that post compelling. Not a bunch of whiny mocking and ad hominems.

I am not defending Michelle's book here. I have not read it, and tend to be suspicious of what I understand to be its thesis. It was exactly this suspicion that made me interested to read a criticism of it.

But I found Part One of your critique terribly off-putting, and your silly and embarrassing post from yesterday reminded me why.

Great argument, Patterico! "If my opponent makes points A, B, and C, I am free to ignore B and C and assess his entire argument on the basis of A." Maybe you should just stick to calling people "asshat."

{ELM: Yes... and there was a D, and an E, and an F, and a G, and an H, and ...]

Too bad "A" was so lame.

Life is short. If an argument goes on for pages, and page one is whiny, self-satisfied, and packed with ad hominems and references to inappropriate humor, nobody should be surprised if most readers fail to turn to page two.

[ELM: Patterico, perhaps you can write a follow-up to Malkin's book: "In Defense of Short Attention Spans". If you do, I'll be sure to read the first page.]

ELM, right-minded Americans don't have a problem with you liberals always speculating with your trademark "implausibility” fanfare all the time; I mean, that’s what your movement has been reduced to: speculation, doom and gloom, attack the author and not the content, nay saying and the seriousness of the charge being worse than the conviction itself.

You folks continue to lose in the arena of ideological debate and it shows. Your bitterness to attack without substantiation, without corroboration has become standard operating procedure for you and your party’s leaders up on Capitol Hill.

Date time stamps, three hour flight, I mean, bravo Tatoo, and yet you balk about the lost art of intellectual debate. See the satire there? You couldn’t debunk her book, her blog and its related posts so you just resort to page three of the forty year old four page DNC playbook: drive by, shoot into the blog crowd, hope people get hurt and drive away.

I mean, seriously, this website of yours makes about as much sense as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest. Doubtfulness isn’t worthy news, it’s political pornography.

Eric,

Everything is someone else's fault, huh?

Part One of your argument included, among other things: 1) whining about not getting a free advance copy of the book, 2) linking to stupid photoshops of the book's cover, and 3) a screed about how the author couldn't possibly have done the work in the allotted time -- an argument remarkably similar to that made in your recent embarrassing post about Malkin's posting habits. Yet, when a reader is disgusted by this puerile nonsense and refuses to read further, it is *their* fault for having a short attention span, and Michelle's fault for forcing you to mock the book before you could possibly discuss its substance.

Nothing is *your* fault.

Except that, of course, it is. It was entirely your choice how to begin the series. If, as you claim, you actually had some valid points to make, you screwed up royally by leading with the pablum.

I guarantee I wasn't the only reader who expected to find something of substance in your critique and gave up early on, put off by the garbage cited above.

Your strange post from yesterday further confirms for me that reading your critique would have been an utter waste of time. You are obviously obsessed with discrediting Malkin on a personal level, rather than in engaging her on the level of ideas. And you're none too careful in how you go about it.

[ELM: Let's address the merits of what you consider the "garbage" part of my reactions to "In Defense of Internment," then, shall we, Patterico?

Of course, you didn't actually read "In Defense of Internment," so I recognize that sets you at a bit of a disadvantage.

Still, would you please describe for me the sorts of work that you imagine a person needs to do in order to develop, from original sources, a new account of a three-year historical episode? When the relevant archival records are in, at a minimum, Washington, DC, College Park, Maryland, the Library of Congress, the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, the FDR Library in Hyde Park, and several other key repositories? And the documents aren't sitting there waiting for you when you arrive, but you actually need to sift through box after box of old records to find the relevant documents?

I mean, if you think my claim that what she purported to have done is actually impossible is "garbage," then please tell us what her project should have entailed.

Then maybe we can discuss whether it's "garbage" to claim that a person can't be a full-time columnist, a TV personality, and a parent of young children, AND, at the same time, in a span of nine months, do the work that's necessary to prepare and publish such a manuscript with even a measure of competency and trustworthiness.]

Boys, boys, boys. Just give it a rest.

Eric, I respect the apology. Next time, just turn off the comments and let it stand.

Michelle is basically a superior individual, one of millions in the country, I'd wager, who has the energy, intellect and passion of any ten of the rest of us. I'm thankful she parses some of that energy for blogging. I'm very thankful she has a conservative perspective. I am energized and inspired by her example.

Life is short.

You could probably have read the entirety of the Muller-Robinson analysis in the time it's taken you to post these defenses of your decision not to.

"It took me about 15 minutes to throw together the post linking to them"

No wonder you're not in private practice

[ELM: Right ... then I could have billed an hour for it!]

"How ironic then that the defenders of Mrs.Malkin on this thread should be the ones to play the race card against Prof. Muller, especially when there is no evidence of such. [As he states, he never even raised the issue of ethnicity.]"

Correct, but the Liberal Avenger's post which he links (under "did not originate with me"), does indeed raise the issue of ethnicity:

"This is important because, for me, it calls into question Malkin’s motivation. If her husband is a partner in punditry, where do Michelle’s opinions end and Jesse’s begin? And, in today’s personality-driven politics, would even right-wingers be as willing to swallow this kind of thing from a white male PhD as from a photogenic minority woman?"

I would have started the critique with whether she actually got the facts right, not whether she had time to.

And if I had written a post as stupid as the one Muller wrote about Malkin's posting schedule, I would have given an apology without a) further mocking the person to whom it was tendered and b) continuing to try to quasi-justify my silliness by hiding behind the skirts of others who have made similarly ridiculous accusations.

In other words, a real, unabashed apology.

But Eric Muller knows better, on both counts.

It's been fun. But life is indeed short. Too short for this.

[ELM: Duly noted, Patterico, that you backed out of the discussion right when I asked you to justify your assertion that my doubting any person's ability to do the work Michelle Malkin claimed to do in the amount time she claimed to do it in was "garbage."

And, as I explained before, when I first started blogging about the book, I hadn't yet had a chance to read it, and I was simply sharing with my readers whatever reactions I was having at that point. So I couldn't yet blog about the substance. Instead I chose to blog about a different, entirely valid point: that the entire project was deeply suspicious, because it wasn't humanly possible to do the sort of scholarship that she claimed to be doing in the amount of time she claimed to do it in. Was that the strongest critique of the book I ultimately made? No, of course not. Was it a bad way to start; that is, should I have just shelved any blogging about the book until I was ready to post a comprehensive critique in a single posting? No, I don't think it was a bad way to start, and no, I don't think I should have shelved the project until I was ready to post a comprensive review. If I'd been reviewing the book for an academic journal, naturally I would have handled the thing quite differently. But for blogging, I think that giving readers more of a stream-of-consciousness reaction to the appearance of the book wasn't such a bad thing. And my traffic count at the time would suggest that lots of people thought so too.]

Correct, but the Liberal Avenger's post which he links (under "did not originate with me"), does indeed raise the issue of ethnicity

But the contention is not that Malkin's race makes her incapable of doing what she does and that she must therefore be a white man's puppet. Rather, the thesis being advanced is that her race makes for good P.R. for someone advancing a right-wing agenda, particularly with regard to immigration, internment, and racial profiling. The quote makes that quite clear, and you're either arguing in bad faith or incapable of understanding that obvious distinction.

Michelle's opinion on the internment is not an entire re-writting of history as you imply, it's a defense of an opinion that has always been held by some people. She had access to the work of these other people in addition to published documents.

Until you can find some references to documents that could only have been found by travelling to Washington and spending weeks digging through archives, your claim that this was necessary is without merit.

You know, I occasionally post unfounded speculation on my blog too, but at least I recognize (and identify) it for what it is. You, by contrast, seem unable to distinguish between a genuine argument and wild supposition. And then you abuse people who try to explain the difference to you.

To Doc Rampage, if you had read Eric's blog regularly, you would see that he does cite documents he has located in archives of relavance to Malkin's book that she did not take the time to look for, even though one of the archives in question is but a short drive from where she lives.

Hey Patterico:

You know, you've got a point: the first section of Muller's rebuttal of "Defense of Internment" is indeed weak - far too concerned with personalities rather than factual debates. And I was one on the left who criticized his recent post obsessing over Malkin's schedule.

But you know what? After reading the bickering in the above thread, I got curious and read through *all* of Muller's thoughts on Malkin's book - and I found it well worth my time.

Like you, I haven't read her book - although I think I'll go find a copy now, to compare the criticism with the text.

My point is that if you did get past that first section, Muller's critique shifted to factual issues and historical debate. Interesting stuff. Fascinating actually. Personally, I'd love to see Malkin respond point by point (after I read her book, of course). It would be pretty enlightening.

So what's my point? My point is that YOU are doing precisely what you accuse Muller of doing.

Why not read - or skim - the rest of his arguments and then actually discuss the issues? In fact, why not forget Malkin's name altogether and just explore the historical context?

Just a thought. I know on the Internet that it's much more popular to just flame back and forth, and focus on people versus ideas. It's certainly easier.

All right, back to your bickering.

I guarantee I wasn't the only reader who expected to find something of substance in your critique and gave up early on, put off by the garbage cited above.

Well, you certainly appear to be the only one here . . .

H'mmmmmm, What's yer point?
nuf sed

Hey, I'm all for combating revisionism, but you realize by so doggedly fact checking Malkin, you contribute web traffic to the blog of an irresponsible partisan demagogue? To some extent you're fueling the very thing you combat. I've wrestled with this question, and I figure I can debunk bloggers like Michelle 'til I'm blue in the face, but I don't think it'll change anything because partisan warbloggers on any side of an issue rely on righteous indignation, justified or not.

Check out Matt Welch's Farewell to Warblogging" at Reason.com.

malkin (MO-kin, MAL-kin) noun

1. An untidy woman; a slattern.

2. A scarecrow or a grotesque effigy.

3. A mop made of a bundle or rags fastened to a stick.

4. A cat.

5. A hare.

[From Middle English Malkyn (little Molly), diminutive of the name Maud or Molly/Mary.]

A related word is grimalkin, referring to an old female cat or an ill-tempered old woman.