Yesterday, in another one of her spit-fleckled posts about the rich little bastard Graham Frost, Michelle Malkin veered perilously close to an actual argument:
Like the Frosts, the new spokesfamily has a tragic personal story and is a curious example of the supposedly pressing need for S-CHIP expansion…because the family already qualifies for the existing program and nothing President Bush or the Dems propose to do would change that.
This was quickly dropped to once again begin frothing about human shields and evil Democrats and the like. For a fleeting moment, though, it looked like an actual argument was forming, but it was lost in the red meat for the masses in yet another unabomber manifesto.
Bonus Malkin: “Look at me! I’m a victim! Again! Leftosphere! RARARRRAGGH!“
Decided FenceSitter
Of course it fails if you read Frost’s actual words:
But I’m just preachin’ to the choir.
John Cole
I am merely pointing out that it is an argument. That is progress.
NickM
Nobody puts the pie on the countertop like Malkin.
Zifnab
Even the blind squirrel occasionally trips over a nut. I wouldn’t get your hopes up. This sounds more like a typo than a step towards rational thinking. But we can always hope.
Side Note: Does Malkin now have an irrational fetish for Geraldo Rivera’s mustache? She’s got the man’s upper lip in about half her posts now.
chopper
indeed. life’s little victories.
Punchy
This promises to be good.
If she stays true to form, she’ll now have to smear McConnell and his aide. GOP Leader McConnell.
They really will eat their own. Enjoy.
Andrew
It’s an argument that is, not surprisingly, factually wrong.
Bush’s SCHIP funding proposal would restrict eligibility for new families who are near the Frost’s income level. The CRS estimated that $15 billion over five years would be required to maintain current coverage levels, but Bush only requested 4.8. HHS Secretary Leavitt says that the Bush budget would cut 400,000 SCHIP enrollees by 2012.
So, John, care to revise your statement?
John Cole
To what? That her statement is no longer an argument?
I am merely pointing out that she came close to making an actual argument. I am not judging the merits of the argument, just that it is not “ZOMG THEIR NEIGHBORS THINK THEY ARE DERANGED” or “ZOMG THEIR KIDS GO TO PRIVATE SCHOOL.”
I am really not sure what you think I need to revise.
Wilfred
So the right-nut tactic are settled as:
1)Adults get the Full Beauchamp;
2)Kids, the Little Lord FauntleFrost, followed by a half-Beauchamp.
If challenged, take the Michele “Don’t hit me! I’m a hemophiliac!!!” Malikin defense.
Andrew
If I say ponies are going to fly out of my ass and so we need to spend $2 trillion dollars on anti-pony measures, is that an argument? No, it’s just silly and premised on completely incorrect information (I hope).
Malkin is also just silly and wrong (in addition to being a malicious bitch). What she is doing is veering from totally insanity to your typical right wing lies, and in doing so making the right wing lies look like an almost reasonable position because it doesn’t involve drooling or stalking or cock slapping.
In short, she is not making an argument. She is framing a lie as a reasonable position, and you’re buying into it.
Zifnab
Just apologize for saying Malkin approached sanity, and we’ll call it even.
demimondian
Actually, John, what MM and the peanut M&M’s offered before were also arguments. If, in fact, the Frosts had been as wealthy as they could be made to appear, then the value of the whole of the S-CHIP extension would have been called into question. They happened to be bone-headedly wrong, and they happen to have evoked Michelle’s inner brownshirt, but they were arguments.
What seems to be troubling you here isn’t actually the factual emptiness of any of their arguments, but the arrogance and folly of their presentation.
John S.
There’s a new kid to attack!
Say hello to Bethany Wilkerson.
I like putting the cost of things in terms of Iraq. “Insuring 800,000 kids costs one week in Iraq.” That really drives the point home, like a stake through the heart of a vampire.
Punchy
As usual, Andrew nails it.
BTW, I had NO idea anti-pony measures were that expensive.
Outsider
Andrew, that’s not an argument, that’d be thunderingly obvious nonsense to ANY lay outsider. A lay outsider does not know the fine points of SCHIP coverage and budgetary allocations, ergo John’s comment that it looked like something approaching an argument, however ill-founded or factually wrong it was/is.
I think the answer to the extremely malicious and gutterworthy tactics of the slime machine of the Right is not to keep demonising them even when they try to make an argument, however stupid and factually incorrect it may be.
Zifnab
You can’t have an argument (or, at least, a productive argument) that isn’t grounded in some basis of reality. If I state that we should stay in Iraq because no more Iraqis are dying, I’m not arguing, I’m making shit up. Likewise, if I state that SCHIP doesn’t work because the Frost family has a swimming pool full of money in its backyard, I’m not forwarding an argument, because I’m just spouting nonsense. Yes, if you could show that the Frost family did have a swimming pool full of money in their backyard, you could conclude that SCHIP was targeting the wrong family. And if you could show that the death count in Iraq really was down the 70%-80% percent that Petreaus claims, perhaps you could have an argument for staying the course. But since they don’t, we are not debating, we are just lying at each other.
Andrew
I think that this may be the best summary of politics I have ever seen.
jenniebee
John: Look, I came here for an argument!
Malkin: Oh, I’m sorry! This is abuse!
chopper
if families are willing to tell their stories and describe how SCHIP helped them, more power to em. they obviously want the program expanded.
i say, lets see a new family out every week. let the malkins of the world keep attacking injured/sick kids and their parents. see how much this strategy helps the goopers in the long term.
Punchy
Sadly, that’s supposed to be taken literally, no sarcasm intended.
D-Chance.
No, this is where she will smear the messenger. Talking Points Memo and LIBERAL bloggers are to blame.
Jake
From:
To:
What’s next?
She came with in hailing distance of an argument but saw something shiny and got distrated.
And later still?
Well, she sounded semi-reasonable for .005 seconds and that’s an improvement on her old record of .0003 seconds.
John, go back and read her original Frost Bite. She does the same thing: Briefly mentions that what happened to the kids was horrible and in the next sentence is back to full freak-out mode. She isn’t being reasonable, she isn’t making an argument, she’s just trying to provide a defense for her next round of bile. “I’m not being mean to Graeme Frost! Didn’t I say the story was tragic? Why are you all so meeeean?”
Ass covering is not an argument.
jcricket
Little do you know the Pentagon is already doing this. There’s an anti-pony missile defense shield that’s secretly developed at a facility known as the “Double Entendre Military Base” in Deschutes, Wisconson.
The anti-pony spending is necessary because Bush’s approval rating is so low that everyone is getting ponies (the ones Bush and Cheney are shooting out their ass) these days. The pony glut is clogging our nations arteries (roadways) and slowing down commerce. Hence, the need for extreme anti-pony measures.
wasabi gasp
Adults Only
S-CHIP After Dark
Rated BS
Quackers
I wonder if Malkin was compelled to rant about ‘human shields’ when her hero surrounded himself with ‘snowflake’ babies as he vetoed stem cell research?
jcricket
Ah, the soft bigotry of low expectations. At least she wasn’t actually driving the car that injured the Frosts :-)
And all I’m saying is that if you take all of MMs postings, put a lot of … between some words, you might assemble a coherent thought.
Dennis-SGMM
Palin: No, it isn’t! Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.
Cleese: It is not!
Palin: It is!
Cleese: Not at all!
chopper
hey, if malkin makes a bit more money by helping drag the GOP into the dustbin of history, its okay by me.
think about how much extra traffic RW bloggers got out of the terri schiavo deal. and then consider the damage it did to the GOP. worth every penny.
libarbarian
I wonder if the bill would pass if they renamed the program “iCHIP”.
whippoorwill
From what I hear from dem lawmakers, the 5 billion Bush is proposing would likely not cover all the children that are eligible today. But that’s a futuristic assessment, and for Malkin to acknowledge the obvious that the Frost’s fell under the original S-CHIP regs, and are irrelevant to the dems 35 Billion proposal, is a modest capitulation on her part. You could call it an actual argument, but my description would be more like a measured surrender.
drindl
How long before the first winger actually kills someone? Remember the doctor who got shot through his kitchen window? Once you get bold enough to drive to someone’s house and peek through their windows, how big a leap is it to carrying a gun with you?
I really feel we’re coming to that. I read that Randi Rhodes of Air America, had the crap beaten out of her Sunday evening, in a safe area in Manhattan, by two men. It was reported on her show, from which she was absent yesterday. So I wonder if we’re there yet. Strangely enough, there have been no media reports whatsoever.
D-Chance.
Tampa Bay’s Most Photogenic and Heartbreakingly Unhealthy Baby
Yes, if Stalkin’ Malkin is in the area, can K. Lo’s House of Crazy be far behind?
All that’s left now is for Dan Riehl to post another one of his “why didn’t they just abort the brat” musings, and the circle will be complete…
Punchy
But that was different.
NickM
@ Drindl – I went and looked up Randi Rhodes’s web site, which contained no information. Air America’s web site says that she was mugged on Sunday night and that rumors that she was the victim of a “hate crime” are “unfounded.”
drindl
All that means, Nick, is that there are no suspects yet [there were two men] and no evidence one way or the other–so they are not jumping to conclusions. Which I admit I am. However, when you consider that the only talk radio host who was ever murdered was a lefty [alan Berg, murdered in his driveway by wingers] you do start to wonder. It may be, it may not be. I’m just saying it’s certainly a possibility, considering how very violently the wingers hate her.
And the level of bile and incitement of violence on the right is rising steadily.. they keep gettting away with it, and they keep jacking it up. Sooner or later one of their simple minds is going to give way…
Bubblegum Tate
But what is the countertop made of? That’s the real question, here.
That is just utterly perfect. POTD FTW!
jcricket
Does the name Eric Rudolph not ring a bell? Timothy McVeigh?
Dave Neiwart (Orcinus) has pointed out many, many (many) times before that the media’s ability to endlessly invoke the not-real “Islmofascist sleeper-cell” threat while simultaneously ignoring the very real threat of domestic terrorism by right-wing extremists is breathtaking.
Shade Tail
Uh, look guys, some of you are trying to claim that certain styles of argument are not really arguments. Just because someone backs up their claims with utter lies and completely made-up stupidity doesn’t mean they aren’t arguing. The purpose of arguing is to support your point of view against another. Using lies to do that is risky, since if they’re uncovered you’ve basically lost by default, but it is still a real method of argument. As long as you manage to come up with a wall that your opponent can’t break through, you can claim victory after a fashion.
Malkin’s problem isn’t that she’s not arguing. Her problem is that we all know she’s a compulsive liar, so we automatically start fact-checking everything she writes and says. At least, we do that when her lies *aren’t* so transparent that we see through them immediately.
jcricket
Forgot about this one, the case of Alan Berg (liberal talker gunned down by head of local KKK).
And Harvey Milk.
Sure, not all righties are members of the KKK, but they are proto-KKKers.
D-Chance.
So I guess Randi Rhodes’s lawyer is in on the conspiracy, too?
drindl
I didn’t say it was a conspiracy. I was simply telling what I heard from her sub at the station, whom I thought would have known what happened. But there’s several different versions. In any case, there are precendents… and the rightwing ‘mind’ is a ticking time bomb.
drindl
Aah, I see. Rhodes doesn’t know what happened, apparently.