The Ashford Zone Blog

I understand that I am not a conservative, so my brain is wired a little differently.  But I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person with the ability to understand different points of view, even if I don’t necessarily agree with them.

Still, I have to admit that many of Michelle Malkin’s outrages simply stump me.  Take this, for instance:

This is one of those stories you shouldn’t read if you have high blood pressure:

Three invited pro-military speakers were shocked last Friday when they arrived for a West Seattle High student assembly to confront a theater stage strewn with figures costumed as Iraqi men, women and children splashed with blood….

For Nadine Gulit of Operation Support Our Troops, the spectacle was sickening.

She had been asked by student organizers to provide three speakers and she delivered.

"I was told there would be three on each side. No debates. No rebuttal," she said in the e-mail she fired off to members of the Seattle School Board. "At no time was I referred to a teacher nor did a teacher contact me. As I walked into the theater there was a young girl wearing a mask and crawling on the floor. And, over the loud speaker (someone) was denouncing our military, saying ‘Americans are killing my family!’ "

Not a good thing for "impressionable students who may have family serving Iraq," Gulit told student organizers. "Two of our speakers had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan."

With her speakers in tow, Gulit saw the bloodied figures on the floor. Stage right were students in orange Abu Ghraib-style prison jumpsuits, hoods over heads, pounding on plates with spoons. Next, a student dressed as a grieving Iraqi woman knelt near a bloody body while, over a microphone, a narrator wailed the story of civilians shot, kicked and beaten by American soldiers.

Truly outrageous.

Okay.  So what is the "outrage" here?  That returning soldiers might have to endure some bad political theater?  Does Michelle really think that these hard core soldiers are going to be traumatized because they might witness a high school student wearing a mask?

I respectfully suggest that if our soldiers are so psychologically fragile that they cannot harbor anything that remotely looks like dissent for a political policy, the last thing they should be doing is engaging in public speaking events where they might be exposed to people who disagree with that policy.  Rather, such soldiers should be hermetically sealed in a pro-Bush-only bubble, preferably in some remote region of the country, until they are well enough to participate in a pluralistic and diverse society.

However, I think Michelle’s "outrage" is more mock than anything else.  I am quite certain that the speakers who ran into student theatrics were quite annoyed — but that of course was the whole point of the student theatrics.  And that goes to the core of the lunacy of wingnuts like Michelle: they are all for freedom and democracy, except when those who exercise it disagree with right-wing conservative views.  Then, they’re all like "Waah!  Waaah!  Those moonbats on the left were mean to us by saying things we disagree with!  Waaah!  Waaah!"

UPDATE:  Captain’s Quarters joins the mock outrage and bangs its head on the poop deck.  First, he starts with a post stating that the guest speakers to the Seattle high school should have admonished the kids and set them straight.  Then, he follows immediately with a contradictory post saying that guest speakers at high schools ought to be sensitive to the student body.  Whatever.