Excessive Courtesy or Willful Blindness?

Howard Kurtz casts a bit of light today on the media's delayed response to the Haditha massacre, but fails to appreciate the depth of the insanity of the extreme right's response. For those of you just tuning in, here's an extremely abbreviated timeline:

1) In November of 2005, Marines in Haditha shot 24 unarmed men, women, and children, some of them in their beds.

2) In June of 2006, in defiance of known facts regarding the Haditha massacre and her own rapidly dwindling store of humanity, Michelle Malkin inaugurates the "Insurgents Use Children" campaign, complete with irrelevant slide shows of Palestinian children holding plastic rifles; Bill O'Reilly defends wartime murder by slandering dead U.S. soldiers in World War II; Chris Matthews defends both the Haditha murders and the coverup; and John Gibson puts on his historian hat: "If Iraqis know their own history, they know massacres have been committed in Iraq by warring parties for millennia piled on millennia. This is the part of the world that was in on the massacre game early..."

Though Howard Kurtz quietly alludes to some of this in today's column, I fear he doesn't see the danger of giving defenders of murderers the benefit of the doubt. Malkin, Gibson, and the rest of them are not sitting at the same rhetorical table as the rest of us; when it comes to shooting unarmed, noncombatant women and children, there is no room for "reasonable people to disagree." The bloodthirsty posturing of paid fanatics does not constitute respectable political discourse, and we weaken the entire structure of collaborative democracy when we pretend otherwise.