Correcting Michelle Malkin

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24 Nov 2009 06:21 pm

She's been on a roll today artfully declaring that this blog drew the conclusion that Bill Sparkman was murdered by neo-confederate thugs. Here's her formulation:

Andrew Sullivan pointed his finger at “Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts” in a post titled “No Suicide,” which decried the “Kentucky lynching.”

And again:

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan immediately fingered “Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts.”

What I actually wrote - and you can click the link for the full quote - was:

It's possible, I suppose, that anger at the feds in general could make a drug dealer murder a census worker. But the most worrying possibility - that this is Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts - remains real. We'll see.

Notice Malkin's formulation: "pointed his finger" or "immediately fingered." I said the "possibility" remained real and that "we'll see." How can you finger someone when you simultaneously say we do not yet know what happened for sure?

Two days later, I wrote that, "We still don't know very much about the death of Bill Sparkman in a brutal scene in Kentucky." In my first post, I wrote:

From this profile of the cancer survivor and volunteer, it appears suicide is unlikely. We'll find out.

I subsequently linked to a story that proved that the case was getting murkier. In other words, although I clearly suspected foul play and believed it wasn't suicide, I drew no firm conclusions about the actual perpetrators of this act. In every post, I made sure readers knew that the investigation was ongoing and we did not yet know the full facts. And at every opportunity, this blog linked to stories pushing back against the idea that this was a murder.

Malkin is a journalist in the sense that I am "far-left."

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