Picking the nits

I commented a few days ago at Gateway Pundit that its proprietor, ‘Midwest Jim’, was engaging in a favorite winger pastime: pick out the most outrageous acts of a tiny minority of war protesters, and use those acts to smear the majority of Americans who want the US out of Iraq. And of course, Heidi Thiess at Euphoric Reality cannot resist using the same dishonest tactic:

Portland Peace March : Euphoric Reality

They burned the American flag, they burned an American soldier in effigy, and then, most shocking of all, one of them dropped trou and defecated on the smoldering American flag.

Yes, Heidi. A few people will do that sort of thing. And yes, it is reprehensible. But it’s not the way the vast majority of those who oppose the war choose to express their views:

“This was a splinter group. It was not the group we negotiated with for weeks before the march. Those people had a peaceful march and went home,” said [police spokeswoman Officer Cathe] Kent.

Glenn Greenwald exposes this tactic for exactly what it is — dishonest and manipulative:

One of the reasons why I wrote about that HuffPost story when it was still nothing more than infected bile bubbling up in the right-wing blog sewers was because it was glaringly clear that it was going to worm its way through the standard channels and become a major media story. And the reason that was clear is because the tactic embodied by that “story”—namely, finding isolated, obscure, stray, unrepresentative individuals or comments and obsessively focusing on them in order to imply that they are representative of “liberals” or “the Left” generally—is a deceitful tactic that is one of the most commonly used by the right-wing noise machine, and the national media has been trained to ingest that tactic and disseminate it.

The Ward Churchill whirlwind is one of the classic examples of this rotted genre. “Stories” of that type—which are, as I’ve noted before, perfect examples of the logical fallacy of “argument by anecdote”—are naturally attractive to lazy journalists because they enable broad political points to be made simply by focusing on single anecdotes in isolation. Very little analytical or journalistic work needs to be done in order to covert those anecdotes and cliches into a sensationalistic, attention-generating story.

This is why Michelle Malkin blog’s (and LGF), for instance, constantly hypes photographs of the single most “offensive” sign at every protest march, or why Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh single out some obscure comment by some unknown or inconsequential “leftist” and lead their shows with it regularly. It is a manipulative and slothful—though highly effective—means of assigning attributes to a large political movement based on nothing other than cherry-picked and highly unrepresentative examples. And that is why Malkin’s screaming about the HuffPost comments she found was so clearly going straight to the national press. That tactic almost never fails.

Wherever intellectual dishonesty and an aversion to a substantive discussion of the issues rear their ugly heads, you can bet that ‘Midwest Jim’ and Heidi Thiess will be eagerly trotting alongside the larger winger blogs, yipping ‘me, too! me too!’.