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Malkin and the Mystery of the Burning Six

Michelle Malkin has been one of the most vehement detractors of the so-called "liberal media" for what she perceives as their bias reporting of the war in Iraq. The most recent episode was over an Associated Press piece which alleged that six Sunni men were dowsed with kerosene and burned alive. Immediately the right wing blogs began to piecemeal the details of the incident, never believing such a ghastly event could take place in a land where hundreds of bound and mutilated bodies dumped in the street each day has become the norm. Though no doubt those reports are suspect in their eyes as well.

Now Michelle has accepted the challenge to travel to Iraq to set the record straight on what the wingers have dubbed Jamilgate (one source for the AP story was an Iraqi police captain named Jamil Hussein who the wingers contend does not exist), though the consensus seems to be that she will ultimately chicken now that she will be required to put her money where her mouth is. I agree that it is unlikely she will go. For imagine if she were to learn that the violence in Iraq is actually worse than is being reported (one nugget of the Iraq Study Group report). She would no longer be able to blame the media.

Which is ultimately what this whole escapade is about. It's not about the truth. The truth, or the lives of Iraqis, matter little to people like Malkin. What matters is finding someone else to blame for why their idea, that invading Iraq was the greatest idea evah, was in fact a colossal mistake bordering on, as one senator recently put it, criminal.

Update: Check out Eric Boehlert.