Howard Kurtz profiles Michelle Malkin

[dancingme]

"She's a very tough lady," says Bryan Preston, her business partner in the daily video blog Hot Air. "You've never met a happier person than Michelle when she's in the thick of a fight. She enjoys the combat of ideas."

That persona is a far cry from the self-described "geek" of her youth. Michelle Maglalang grew up outside Atlantic City in a Reaganite, conservative Catholic family, was not politically active, and failed a fifth-grade public speaking class. As a college student, she was so naive that when a married Republican congressman invited her to live in his home during her internship with then-Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), she thought it was a generous offer until her parents straightened her out.

It was at Oberlin College that she began working on an alternative newspaper founded by Jesse Malkin, her future husband. When they co-authored an article questioning the value of affirmative action -- and outraged students dumped bundles of papers in the trash -- "it was an awakening" for Michelle, says Jesse. She soon converted him from a Michael Dukakis supporter to the conservative side.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/15/AR2007021502065.html

[n2doc]

1. I couldn't get through the first page

I have a question, though. If Malkin said the sorts of things she said about Jews or Blacks, instead of Democrats, she would be quickly villified by the MSM and we would never hear from her again. Yet somehow it is fine, even glorious in the MSM, to say horrible, terroristic things about Democrats. What a F**ked up country we live in.

[Jackpine Radical]

11. That's only fair.

After all, you're born into your race or ethnic group but being a Democrat is a choice, like being gay.
:sarcasm:

(Jackpine's first-ever use of the sarcasm thingie in an effort to head off a public pummeling)

[acmavm]

2. One of the things that has always mystified me. How anyone

can ever think of themselves as being a follower of Jesus Christ and being a Reaganite is, to me, mind boggling.

[dancingme]

3. more

Sometimes, though, Malkin seems to use the same howitzer against every provocation. After she started crusading against the "Girls Gone Wild" culture as a "liberal assault on decency," the satirical site Wonkette received -- and posted -- a picture of Malkin's head on the scantily-clad body of a college student, whose image had been plucked from the Web. Malkin denounced what she called the "hate-filled cowards" at Wonkette's parent company for "repeatedly smearing and attempting to humiliate me."

After being contacted by Malkin's lawyer, Wonkette ran a snarkily worded semi-retraction. The site's West Coast bureau chief, Ken Layne, says he doesn't know or care whether the picture is real and calls Malkin "incapable of getting a joke."

"People send us dumb stuff all the time, and if it makes us laugh, we post it," he adds. "Malkin responds in such a predictably psychotic way whenever we mention her."

What some might have dismissed as a prank became another salvo in the culture wars. It is as though eternal vigilance is the price of being Michelle Malkin: No slight can go unanswered, no insult allowed to stand. Blogging is an addiction, she says, but not one she is looking to kick.

"You have to accept that you'll never have many friends," Malkin says. "It's a lonely existence."

[Tin Man]

4. How long can someone's soul operate on hate alone?

How soon until Malkin spontaneously combusts?

[Vinnie From Indy]

5. Hey look at that! One hooker profiling another.

If Kurtz included Jeff GuckertGannon in the column it would have been a prostitute Trifecta!

[Toots]

6. Just another "typical" right wing "Hate-Monger"

The right wing is so full of hatred it is hard to distinguish one from the pack unless you go way over the line which she and others like Coulter and Limbaugh do all the time...They love the attention it brings...

[blogslut]

7. Howie Kurtz is a tool

Why, of all the people to profile, does he profile this hate-filled hater?

[Paladin]

8. "She Enjoys The Combat Of Ideas"

Even though she's unarmed?

[sniffa]

9. Let's give her some choice quotes from this thread

you know the piranha is foLLowing this thread.

maybe she'LL construct some sort of threat against her Life based on some insuLts.

[dancingme]

10. "predictably psychotic"

so true!

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

13. I will now use the Ann Coulter Stardard for Acceptable Humor

Somebody should put poison in her crème brulée.

[dancingme]

12. Atrios shows Malkin lies about her past

TBogg writing on Eschaton about Malkin's husband's "conversion" to the conservative side:

Thanks to a link from the lovely and talented Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged, we see that the not-so-lovely and she-wishes-she-were-talented Michelle Malkin, in her interview with Howard Kurtz, might have inflated her dazzle the minds of men superpowers (except in Howie's case) when it came to her husband. From Kurtz:

It was at Oberlin College that she began working on an alternative newspaper founded by Jesse Malkin, her future husband. When they co-authored an article questioning the value of affirmative action -- and outraged students dumped bundles of papers in the trash -- "it was an awakening" for Michelle, says Jesse. She soon converted him from a Michael Dukakis supporter to the conservative side.

How things have changed:

Toward the end of her Oberlin career she signed on with an independent campus newspaper that was being started by a Jewish student named Jesse Malkin. Malkin would later become Maglalang's husband. He also had an immediate and lasting impact on Michelle's political views. Jesse Malkin had attended Berkeley High on Martin Luther King Boulevard in the town his future wife would later label “The People's Republic of Berkeley”. In addition to being a top student, Malkin was a distance runner who captained Oberlin's cross-country team. That combination, as well as his strong political views, helped him win a Rhodes scholarship to study for a year at Oxford University in England.

By the time Jesse Malkin started the newspaper, his conservative leanings had been well enough established for him to receive funding from an organization calling itself the Collegiate Network. The Network had formed in 1980 as a union of college newspapers funded by a neo-conservative group called the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA). IEA had been founded in 1978 by Irving Kristol and William Simon, a leader of the modern neo-conservative movement. As Nixon's Treasury Secretary, Simon had shaped the administration's tax policy.

IEA was dedicated to “seek out promising Ph.D. candidates and undergraduate leaders, help them establish themselves through grants and fellowships and then help them get jobs with activist organizations, research projects, student publications, federal agencies or leading periodicals.” It was, in essence, an affirmative action program to help restore right wing influence on college campuses.
So Jesse's conversion was more the result of a check slipped under the door to his dorm room than it was a meaningful stayed-up-all-night-and-talked-I-mean-really-talked conversion supplemented with coquettish glances and a demonstration of the ability to tie a cherry stem into a knot using just the tongue and teeth.

By Jesse, I mean. That guy can flutter his dreamy eyelashes like no other...
http://atrios.blogspot.com/