Why is it that the same people who claim to stand for diversity and the dignity of the individual manage to deride their political opponents in the most bigoted and degrading terms?

I understand that many people do not find Michelle Malkin to their taste. Michelle is fearless, passionate, and unrelenting when covering stories or writing columns. She writes in an aggressive and provocative style which attracts certain readers and repels others. I put myself foursquare in the former group, but others can and do fall into the latter, and that's fine. Michelle can take the criticism, just as we all do.

However, what we find is that Michelle's critics continuously reveal themselves as immature, chauvinistic, and sexually frustrated. Like clockwork, when she started v-blogging, a blogger had to make a reference to it as some sort of pornography, only this time the blogger is Alex Pareene, one of the new writers at the professional blog Wonkette. Rather than find something significant to criticize, rather than opposing one of Michelle's pieces with actual argument, Pareene instead decided to post this exchange:

wonkette: OMG I AM WATCHING MICHELLE MALKIN’S INTERNET VIDEOS FOR THE FIRST TIME operative: she has internet videos? operative: does she do the thing with the ping-pong balls?

Yeah, yeah, that's the highly original Wonkette for you. Alex can't even be bothered to come up with a new smear; instead, he just exhumes the tired cliche of referring to Michelle as a whore. The only humor comes by accident as Wonkette's commenters refer to Michelle as a hater.

What people who engage in these kind of tactics -- on either the right or the left, it's all the same -- is that the attacks reveal themselves as haters, not the object of their scorn. If they dislike what Michelle says, then they should counter her arguments with their own, or contradictory facts. Pareene shows what happens when the critics have neither. They engage in ad-hominem attacks designed to humiliate their opponents and to either get them to respond in kind or to withdraw from the debate althogether. It's a cowardly tactic besides being immature and (in this case) misogynistic.

None of this comes as any surprise, of course. The only part of this that amazes is that the pattern keeps repeating itself over and over.

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