Why Michelle Malkin Ought to Be Caged Like a Rabid Shih-Tzu (Corrections Edition):
Let us say, and why not, that you are friends with a married guy. Call him "Elroy." And let us say that someone in your office, call him "Jamie," tells you that Elroy's wife is fucking around on Elroy. Jamie's actually seen Elroy's wife (and, what the hell, let's give her a name - "Connie") actually blowing some other man in the front seat of her car in the parking garage at his apartment building. Jamie's detailed: he can give you descriptions of the man, of Connie, of how Connie moaned while taking long draws on said cock. Now, let's say you're really close friends with Elroy. So close that you call him on the phone, tell him you wanna meet for lunch; the next day, at some place you know Connie won't go, you drop the bomb on him: Connie's playing mouth music with the skin flute of some other guy.

Now, of course, Elroy's not stupid. He's gonna ask you what evidence you have, although, truth be told, things haven't been great for Connie and Elroy lately. In fact, they haven't really been fucking like they used to. And oral action? Forget about it. You tell Elroy about Jamie, and Elroy says he wants to talk to Jamie himself. He accuses you of listening to a liar. He says it can't possibly be true. Fuck it, you say, call Jamie. Problem is, timing being shit, Jamie's gone on vacation. This sets Elroy off. He says you want to undermine his marriage. He tells you that you've always hated Connie, been jealous of their relationship. All of that may be true, you say, but that doesn't mean that Connie ain't fucking another guy.

After lunch, Elroy becomes obsessed with Jamie. He wonders if Jamie's even real. He can't find the name on the apartment building's mailboxes. He calls your office operator who doesn't have the name at hand. See? Elroy tells others, Connie can't be cheating because he can't find Jamie. His other friends try to help him with this mythical "Jamie," all to no avail. And then Jamie comes back from vacation. And Elroy calls you up to say fine, you weren't lying about Jamie. But he still doesn't believe that Connie is fucking around.

Now, of course, Jamie's presence doesn't make the story true. And, really, Elroy's kind of stuck. Because if he was actually secure about his relationship with Connie, he wouldn't have given a shit about Jamie, and you and he would have had a good laugh at the idea. But all he did was chase after the source, not the real story.

Michelle Malkin and most of Right Blogsylvania went nutzoid at the idea that Captain Jamil Hussein, a source for an AP story about Iraqi Shia pouring gasoline on mosque-departing Sunnis and setting them on fire, was fake. To prove Hussein was not real was to prove that the story was fake. To do that was to discredit all of the AP and its reporting that the war in Iraq is a fucking nightmare. Malkin went further than the rest of the let's-kill-more-Americans-for-our-deranged-visions bloggers, in her most recent "column" (if by "column," you mean, "horrible Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like pointing and screeching"). She compares several right wing manufactured media "scandals," referring to "the Associated Press' Jamil Hussein-gate" as one "that will go down in mainstream history as yet another case of textbook media malpractice." Problem is, of course, that Jamil Hussein exists.

Now Malkin has issued a tiny correction beneath a correction for another much-hyped bullshit story, over whether or not John Kerry was dining alone in Iraq (he wasn't): "As I noted on the 4th, the AP reported that the Ministry of Interior in Iraq has now said a Captain Jamil Hussein does work in the al Khadra police station. I regret the error. But no blogger should apologize for raising legitimate questions about AP's transparency, its reliance on local foreign stringers of dubious origins, and information that sources such as Hussein have provided the AP. I will continue to pursue some of the unresolved issues related to this." Let's just get this straight: the United States went to war based in many ways on its reliance on people of "dubious" motives (anyone need a "Curveball"?). But that's okay. AP puts two sentences in a bigger story about civil war/ethnic cleansing and all of a sudden it's Inquisition time - get out the anal reamer.

The Rude Pundit's not saying whether or not the Sunni burnings occurred. He has no reason to believe they didn't. But the right's obsession with pursuing whether or not a source is real has come back to bite them on the ass. The mainstream media bought into the idea that because Dan Rather's story on Bush's Vietnam-era non-exploits had some forged documents involved that there was no story. Right Blogsylvania got the story, the real story, killed by attacking a source. It's classic lawyer bullshit. If the victim's a hooker, did a rape occur? If the witness is a junkie, did he see a murder?

And now, for Michelle Malkin and the Malkinettes, they have discredited themselves by not pursuing what may be a real story in their war-tainted brains. Although whether or not six Sunnis were set on fire seems to be a minor point in all the shit that's confirmed by multiple and official sources (tortured, tossed bodies; endless kidnappings). Like the entire right-wing attack on the "liberal" media ignores whether or not the "liberal" stories are true.

What this is really about, as Eric Boehlert and others have pointed out, is the gut-twisting denial these jerkholes have contorted themselves into. Even as other conservatives fall in with the vast majority of the nation in saying, "Enough," for Malkin and Right Blogsylvania, the war in Iraq is their raison d'etre. It's their cocktail, their lubricant, their red meat. If they admit its failure, even if they know it's true, then they will have to admit that they wasted their lives (and the lives of untold thousands) on a cause lost from the beginning.

In other words, there's a fuckin' correction that can never be made.