Back around the beginning of April, Michelle Malkin and an assortment of other right-wing bloggers gleefully ripped into TRex & Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake along with several other liberal bloggers after they fell for an April Fools Day prank. The prank involved a photoshopped image of Karl Rove carrying a folder featuring the logo of an ISP called Coptix: a company which was rumored to be a front for many of Rove's mysterious e-mails.
Malkin referred to Firedoglake, Wonkette, a Kos diary and Guerilla Women TN as a "moonbat swarm" -- "fevered, tinfoil-hatted" (hatted?), and went on to reveal, "The photo was an April Fools' weekend prank. And the Rove Derangement Syndrome crowd fell for it hook, line, and sinker." She omitted her famously uncontrollable cackling noises from the text of the post.
For someone so adept at pointing out who fell for what, you'd think that Malkin would've realized that Sheryl Crow's directives about the dining sleeve and the single-squares-of-teepee... were jokes.
But yesterday, rather than defending her man Rove's petulant, entitled Giant Baby snit at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Malkin instead spent her time debunking the dining sleeve.
"Did you catch this? (Hat tip: Reader Wade) In addition to her one toilet square paper-per-sitting quota, eco-zealot Sheryl Crow also advocates "dining sleeves" to replace napkins. Seriously:"
[Cackling noises, again, redacted.] And...
"Uh, Sheryl. Have you taken into account the extra water and energy that would be expended to launder all of these dirty "dining sleeves?" Perhaps there are messy eater offsets for sale to take care of these added environmental impacts..."
To borrow a tired, overused word from Malkin's own Coptix prank headline: punked! As of this writing, Malkin hasn't admitted to being "punked" and hasn't posted a retraction similar to the ones she self-righteously demanded from Jane, TRex and the others. Malkin wrote:
"Like Wonkette, other left-wing bloggers are bitterly attacking Coptix for their "dirty trick" -- instead of owning up. You were had. Can you all swallow and make stand-alone corrections (here is how conservative bloggers make corrections, by the way)?"
Now that's funny. Time for one of your famously awesome conservative corrections, Michelle.
If you go back to the Malkin Archives, nestled deep within Minas Morgul, you'll find blog posts in which she once blasted Kramer's coffee table book about coffee tables, and several of the Jerky Boys' "Tarbash the Egyptian Magician" prank calls. See what I did there, Michelle? That was a joke about you taking jokes too seriously, though I'm pretty sure the Minas Morgul part is true.
It gets better. Malkin's Hot Air blog was pretty damn graphic about the single-square joke. Shocking since Malkin and her ilk are so high minded about blog decency -- routinely calling out liberal bloggers for being potty mouths.
"Green earth = brown hand! [...] Hey, it's "think globally, act locally," not "think globally, act locally except for your pooper." [...] Exit question one: Just how, um, tidy are Sheryl Crow's evacuations that one thin square of toilet paper is enough to do the trick?"
Brown hand? Pooper? Sheryl Crow's evacuations?! Excretory remarks from the pristine mouths of right-wing bloggers? Next thing you know, the vice president will go off and use the f-word on the Senate floor, and the president will utter the word "shit" in front of an open microphone. Doesn't 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 say something about "revilers" (along with gay people) not inheriting the kingdom of God? I'm not sure Paul had the word "pooper" in mind, but he might've.
What Malkin and the rest overlooked in their rush to debunk Sheryl Crow's flurry of wiping jokes is that one of our public servants, Mr. Karl Rove, refused to acknowledge that Crow and Laurie David pay part of his salary. He works for them and, like it or not, all of us.
But Rove, like many Loyal Bushies, has painted himself into a corner where he's increasingly marginalized and disliked by a majority of Americans -- not to mention the sobering fact that he's lost some of his luster as a political wizard.
That's a tough laxative to swallow (sticking with the pooper vibe) for a group who had it so good for about three or four years there. They were the ones who were always right... thanks to the deaths of 3,000 American civilians, without whom the Loyal Bushies would've been in this same predicament four years sooner. But now they're in a defensive crouch, blurting nonsensical counterpoints at anyone who opposes them, which is in stark contrast to two or three years ago when they would simply ignore or demonize the opposition with whisper campaigns, looking-too-French observations and hand-picked town hall meetings stacked with friendlies.
They've got nothing left. Ann Coulter can't adequately debunk the climate crisis, so she went after Al Gore's weight. Malkin can't defend Rove's bitchy-poopy-pants attitude, so she went after Sheryl Crow for an obvious joke about sparing a square.
They should all take a note from one of the remaining intellectually honest conservatives, Joe Scarborough who has, in recent years, taken on the administration and their propagandists. Why? Because he's smart and he knows the score. He knows how to bend when the facts dictate a course correction and he knows that this kind of knee-jerk loyalty can only last for so long until it becomes self-satirical, contradictory and silly.
Meanwhile, I have this great idea for slacks made of beef. Maybe I can get Malkin to invest.