New conservative talking-point: Hateful rhetoric? Hey! The Left does it just as much!

Nope.

Here’s a forceful riposte to that defensive blather: Hard to add much to a comprehensive beat-down like that. But:

Commenter “truewest” makes an obvious point over at Jay Currie’s place, where unadulterated hatred is beginning to ooze from a thousand cracks, and neo-Nazis are the new Jews, seconded by Kathy Shaidle.

Let’s take a closer look at Michelle “Stalkin’” Malkin’s “See! They do it too!” list, to which both Jay and truewest refer.*

Here’s her catalogue:

I. PALIN HATE II. BUSH HATE III. MISC. TEA PARTY/GOP/ANTI-TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE HATE IV. ANTI-CONSERVATIVE FEMALE HATE V. LEFT-WING MOB HATE — campus, anti-war radicals, ACORN, eco-extremists, & unions VI. OPEN-BORDERS HATE VII. ANTI-MILITARY HATE VIII. HATE: CRIMES — the ever-growing Unhinged Mugshot Collection

What do we see? In the first instance, mostly voices in crowds and entertainers. There’s name-calling, mockery and invective aplenty, but scant reference to guns.

Bush? T-shirts and picket signs. Exponentially fewer than the hateful sentiments about Obama at a single Tea Party rally. No mention of “watering the tree of liberty” to be found. No guns in evidence.

In the “miscellaneous” category, more voices in the crowd. Scatology. Grass-roots idiots spouting off and acting out here and there. An anti-Proposition 8 GBLT blogger calling for churches to be burned (but no mention of Jim Adkisson, having imbibed too much Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, who actually shot up a church, killing two and wounding seven.)

Ditto for her other categories. Mostly anonymous individuals behaving badly. (Do you really want to get a contest going here, Michelle?) In any case, truewest’s point stands. Where are all the politicians, the candidates, the opinion-makers with tens of millions of viewers, in Malkin’s hall of shame?

Poof! There go Michelle’s lame rationalizations, which only serve to highlight her immoral refusal, like that of her fellow haters, to take any responsibility at all for the wave of eliminationist rhetoric from the Right—and its inevitable consequences. Check out a more serious and methodical catalogue, and its appendix. Then weep for America.

*Ignore her illiteracy: she’s the one playing “tu quo que [sic],” not the Left. “The thought of what America would be like/ If the Classics had a wide circulation/ Troubles my sleep.” —Ezra Pound