Michelle Malkin gets Dowdified

Ah, the delicious taste of manufactured outrage. From Atrios:

Michelle Malkin believes she understands what Casey Sheehan would want more than his own mother does.

I can’t imagine that Casey Sheehan would approve of such behavior.

And from the crooks and liars at Crooks and Liars:

Bill: I think Mrs. Sheehan bears some responsibility for this [publicity] and also for the responsibility for the other American families who lost sons and daughters in Iraq who feel this kind of behavior borders on treasonous.

Michelle: I can’t imagine that Casey Sheehan would approve of such behavior.

There is only one small problem with this quote. In the first place, Michelle's sentence was incomplete. Secondly, it completely leaves out the behavior that Michelle was referring to, giving the deliberately misleading impression that Michelle said that Casey would disapprove of his mother's own behavior. This ain't so. Brainster has the full paragraph in question:

"She has aligned herself now with Michael Moore, who considers those very Iraqi terrorists Minutemen. That's what he calls them! He's likening them to the American revolutionaries and considers them heroes. I can't imagine that Casey Sheehan would approve of such behavior, conduct and rhetoric."

So, what we see here is that Malkin was actually saying that Casey Sheehan probably wasn't crazy about the guy who called the very people responsible for his death "Minutemen". For liberals, the Minutemen were the good guys in the Revolutionary War. That's a fairly significant thing to leave out.

Also significant are Michelle's comments before that (from the video):

MICHELLE MALKIN, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, I do want to emphasize what you said, Bill, which is that losing a child in any situation, whether it's in a war, from an accident or disease, is one of the most painful of human experiences. And Mrs. Sheehan deserves compassion and sympathy.

And apparently, according to the accounts from last year when President Bush met with her, that's exactly what she got. I don't think that anybody should demonize her, but I do think that she has turned her private personal pain into a public circus.

And just look what it's like down there in Crawford, Texas. You've got people surrounding her, people who are all too happy to help push her over the edge, yelling and screaming that the president was the one that killed her son.

No, it wasn't. And it's a shame that she doesn't have anybody to help bring her back down to reality to remind her that it was Iraqi terrorists who ambushed her son on a roadside and killed him and many, many other of his colleagues in the military.

Michelle: I can’t imagine that Casey Sheehan would approve of such behavior, conduct, and rhetoric.

Now, I want you to observe this thread at Tacitus that I've gotten involved in. Towards the bottom, the libs are full of outrage that Malkin would use her son to "slime his mother". Once I pointed out that this did not, in fact, happen, the argument became, "She shouldn't presume to speak for a dead person at all."

Oh, really? Does that mean that we've heard the end of Ronnie and Nancy Reagan when it comes to embryo destruction? I made the following point in that comment thread:

If Kate Michelman dies tomorrow, and her daughter (I have no idea if she really has one) joins the campaign of Sam Brownback in 2008, may we not reasonably conclude that Kate wouldn't have joined in?

I'd say it's at least as reasonable to speculate that a dead soldier wouldn't appreciate someone calling the people who killed him "heroes", and calling him (by implication) the unjust oppressor.

I wonder where the next backpedal will lead them?