wabbit season!

Oh, the stupid.  It burns.

Sometimes you wonder how right-wing bloggers like Michelle Malkin keep from getting lost in the bathtub.  Do their more intelligent spouses and family members draw them maps on the bath tiles with a Sharpie?  When people are so ideologically blinkered and hard-headed to the point that they will deny evidence that's right before their eyes, you have to wonder just how they keep from hurting themselves on a daily basis.  With things like electrical outlets, butter-knives, and puddles of water right there in their general environment, are they ever truly safe from themselves?

See, Michelle Malkin and some dorky accomplice of hers decided that they were going to go to Iraq and show once and for all how the Associated Press has been distorting the facts on the ground, making up phony witnesses, and lying and distorting the situation over there, which has in turn demoralized the American people and, by dint of several thousand US citizens simultaneously ceasing to clap their hands and believe in fairies, completely lost us the war.  It's all the liberal media's fault, you see, that things aren't going well over there.  And Michelle and her Li'l Buddy were going over there to prove it.

Undaunted and unbowed in the face of their first big "exposé" getting its legs shot out from under it by the truth, this intrepid pair of "citizen journalists" soldiered on to debunk the Next Big Mainstream Media Lie.  They settled on the following report from the AP in November:

Earlier that day, rampaging militiamen burned and blew up four mosques and torched several homes in the capital's mostly Shia neighborhood of Hurriyah, police said. Iraqi soldiers at a nearby army post failed to intervene in the assault by suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia or subsequent attacks that killed a total of 25 Sunnis, including women and children, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

So, Malkin and entourage go to the mosque, shoot some footage, and then hastily cobble together a big "Gotcha!" video to post at Malkin's multi-media vanity project, "Hot Air".  It's called "Hurriyah Mosques: Still Standing" and in it, Malkin fatuously declares that she's about to offer you, the viewer, concrete indisputable proof that the AP is lying about everything in Iraq.  They said that four mosques were "destroyed", she maintains (they didn't), and look!  Look at the mosque!  It looks great!

And the camera pans over to show us this:

 hurryiah mosque

(Fig 1-b: Courtesy of those rapscallions at Sadly, No!)

Uh, okay, Michelle.  You're absolutely right.  Clearly that mosque is the picture of health.  Never been better.  That's just their new skylight, which they put in when they decided the place needed more natural light.  Not "destroyed", you see.  Just..."forcibly remodelled", let's say.  Decorating with rocket-launchers is the latest thing in Iraq.  It's not a Civil War, no, it's just one giant sectarian episode of "Trading Spaces".

And that's their big scoop.  The mosque is not a pile of radioactive glass fragments, so therefore, everything you know about the War in Iraq is a lie!

Now, clap your hands and shout, "I do believe in Islamofascists!  I do, I do, I do!"

Do it!  Or the War in Iraq will die, kids!

TBogg has more:

The Malkin Mobius Moron Strip

So anyway, Sadly No! was all like "Malkin you are so busted" but then that guy who hangs around with Michelle at her locker and stuff, (but he's not like her "boyfriend", eww, ick) he's all:

I see that our friends at Sadly, No! can’t distinguish between a mosque having a hole in an onion-shaped thing on top and that mosque being destroyed, as the AP reported on Nov 24. That failure to distinguish between such widely varying descriptions should guide you if you read anything else published there. (snip)

But then Michelle shows up and she's all:

Tellingly, the pathetic, attempted debunker fails to link to either my post at mm.com or my full report at the NYPost, which give the full details and nuance (plus more photos) of what we found versus what the AP reported (and didn’t report). There is now an all-too-predictable attempt to distort our reports. Read. Them. In. Their. Entirety. For. Yourselves.

Where she says:

WELL, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior says disputed Associated Press source Jamil Hussein does exist. But at least one story he told the AP just doesn't check out: The Sunni mosques that as Hussein claimed and AP reported as "destroyed," "torched" and "burned and [blown] up" are all still standing. So the credibility of every AP story relying on Jamil Hussein remains dubious.

I get so sick of this routine from them.  "Well, maybe I was wrong about that, but, you know, there's A Lot of Unanswered Questions still surrounding the issue!"

Godammit, Michelle, the only freakin' unanswered question I have at this point is why anyone takes you seriously.  You're wrong about everything.  You're a wrong sandwich with extra wrong and a side order of super-wrong wrongness smothered in wrong sauce.  And yet, you persist!

Fortunately, so do the young men at Sadly, No!

Expect this one to go into extra innings, gang.