Michelle Malkin: Making War With Words

Michelle Malkin was ready to pounce when a new report appeared last week detailing the Democratic House speaker’s use of military aircraft.

“Nancy Pelosi is the Jennifer Lopez of congressional travel,” Malkin wrote. Her March 11 column outlined the nature of Pelosi’s trips and quoted from her staffers’ impatient demands — and from the befuddled responses of military officials, worried at the misuse of resources. “No word on whether Pelosi required vanilla-scented candles, Evian water and fresh white lilies aboard the flight,” she concluded.

This is Malkin at her best. Fans enjoy her syndicated column for its documentation of liberal outrages, but also for her provocative, humorous presentation of the facts. Critics bridle at the provocations, missing the humor entirely. The formula makes Malkin distinctively controversial, and loved or hated by everyone who reads her.

In 2004, when the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk dropped her column, its editors denounced her as “too stridently anti-liberal” and claimed that she “habitually mistakes shrill for thought-provoking and substitutes screaming for discussion.” Malkin, whose column is routinely picked up and dropped by newspapers without comment, mused on her blog that the paper probably should never have picked her up in the first place. “I was just as ‘anti-liberal’ five years ago as I am now,” she wrote.

Malkin is generous with harsh words, and she spares no one in the public eye. Not a fellow conservative, such as the “open-borders, national security-undermining Grover Norquist.” Not the Republican Party leadership, which is “incompetent, sloppy, arrogant.” Not the GOP senators who vote for Obama’s nominees — the “Bend-Over Republicans.” Not Larry Craig, the disgraced former Idaho senator, who is “not just a lying crapweasel” but “a supremely arrogant, lying crapweasel.”

Her sharpest barbs are for Democrats, though — “surrendercrats,” “defeatocrats.” Timothy Geithner, Obama’s treasury secretary, is “a serial tax evader and bailout failout architect.” With their conspiracy theories about Sept. 11, liberals form a “Party of Paranoia.” With their anti-yellow ribbon campaigns, liberals demonstrate that “They Don’t Support Our Troops.” In declaring the Iraq war a failure, Democratic lawmakers are not just “losers” but losers worthy of a cheer — “Give me an L!” — which Malkin delivered on YouTube in 2007 as a pigtailed cheerleader.

“I have a lot of fun,” she says when asked about that appearance, which predictably drew criticism. “People get to know me as a human being — with feelings and a sense of humor and playfulness. Who cares if the left-wing blogs post it every single time I post something? Readers appreciate that we are not the cardboard, scary characters that people make us out to be.”

Has there been a time when she went too far with her rhetoric?

“Off the top of my head, I can’t think of one,” she says.

If she dishes it out, Malkin takes at least as much in return. There’s a daily barrage of hate e-mails from liberals, often racist and sexually explicit in nature. And there are vituperative comments from public figures. Geraldo Rivera called her “the most vile, hateful commentator I’ve ever met in my life. … I’d spit on her if I saw her.” (Malkin tells me that Rivera’s subsequent apology was “classic Clintonian” — at the time she called it “a whiny, effeminate, blame-the-victim bleat.”)

Malkin, 38, established her combative writing style in her pre-blog career at the Los Angeles Daily News and the Seattle Times. Her old columns from the 1990s attack multiculturalists, moral relativists, teachers unions, Bring Your Daughter to Work Day and apologists for the Rodney King rioters. In 1994, she urged MTV’s Tabitha Soren to “grow up. Not all of us quake like Jell-O when President Clinton bites his lip, reveals his underwear preferences and drawls lustily about expanding government.”

Among Malkin’s fondest memories from those early days is her May 1993 column on a job training center in South Central Los Angeles, named after Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. As a candidate for president, Bill Clinton had once campaigned at the center, promising a new “urban agenda” with more funding for such job centers. But the government-funded center, Malkin wrote, “stinks — literally. … The toilets are all clogged up, so no one goes to the bathroom.” She quoted students and a teacher there complaining of “leaky roofs, flooded classrooms and a campus overrun by gangbangers ... mostly Crips.”

Waters demanded a retraction. Malkin instead wrote a follow-up.

No one can dispute Malkin’s status as a pioneer of the blogosphere. In 1999, she left her newspaper career to start a family and write her syndicated column from home. The move would free her up to become an Internet star long before the term “blog” was coined. The success of such early bloggers as Mickey Kaus and Glenn Reynolds “really caught my attention,” she says. “It was a way of circumventing mainstream publications that were sitting on my pieces.”

She has circumvented. In an age when news organs are folding, Malkin is succeeding online. Her eponymous blog attracted more than 10 million page views last month. Hot Air, a multimedia blog she founded in 2006, has nearly tripled its traffic in the past year under the care of two prominent bloggers she hired — the conservative Catholic Ed Morrissey and the anonymous atheistic “Allahpundit.” Hot Air drew 18 million page views in February and boasts 18,000 registered commenters. Malkin tells me the site brings two-thirds of the traffic of Daily Kos, the liberal lodestar. (Alexa.com, which tracks Web traffic, ranks the two sites closer than that.)

“We’ve hit on a great formula,” she says. “We’ve got these incredible hardworking bloggers who are very independent-thinking, very different from each other, and who have developed this amazing and underappreciated community on the right side of the blogosphere.”

Malkin is most vilified for her strong views on immigration and multiculturalism, two ideas she considers inseparable. “The Democrats have completely undermined the idea of assimilation,” she says. “They’ve undermined it in the public schools and even in the very immigration process.”

Of her Filipino immigrant parents, Malkin says, “Their experience informed my views profoundly.” That might seem counterintuitive coming from someone so ideologically opposed to immigration. But one of her first columns — a July 4, 1993, essay on patriotism and multiculturalism — explains the logic. “With so many foreigners literally dying to be Americans,” she wrote, “it’s amazing how many young, hyphenated Americans (Asian-Americans, Latino-Americans, African-Americans) seem so intent on devaluing their citizenship.”

When Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, R, recently delivered a televised address, many Americans tuned in to hear him respond to President Barack Obama. Malkin, on the other hand, was most interested by his remarks about being a second-generation American of Indian descent. “I so identified with his own biography of having immigrant parents who came to this country legally, and who from a very young age taught their children to be grateful for what they have,” she said. “It ought to be a very fundamental tenet of the Republican Party ... to protect that very precious system that allowed my parents and Bobby Jindal’s parents to come here and achieve the American Dream.”

America has never lost its promise for Malkin’s parents, as she related in a column published 16 years ago. “[M]y mother likes to remind me that she has a great advantage over her children,” Malkin wrote. “She was born poor in a foreign country that offered no opportunity for advancement. Unlike jaded American cynics who’ve grown to despise our country’s greatest legacy, she’ll never take for granted the gift of the American Dream. I hope I never do either.”