Awesome: After The WaPo's Kurtz Rips LGF's Commenters As "Vile," LGF Documents WaPo Commenters Delighting In Tony Snow's Cancer

Pot, meet kettle.

Will Kurtz now write a screed about the vile commenters at the Washington Post?

Sloppy of Me: Christopher Fotos did what I hadn't -- read Kurtz' original piece. Which is also excerpted at LGF.

Kurtz does acknowlege such comments appear at the WaPo:

No corner of the Net is safe from this bile. The Washington Post’s Web site has been grappling with a surge in offensive and incendiary comments.

The really gruesome stuff represents a tiny minority of those online. But is there a way of policing the worst stuff without shutting down robust debate?

The comments about Cheney at the Huffington Post included: “You can’t kill pure evil.” “If at first you don’t succeed . . . ” “Dr. Evil escapes again . . . damn.” Founder Arianna Huffington wrote that “no one at HuffPost is defending these comments — they are unacceptable and were treated as such by being removed.”

The comments about Mohammed and Carter at Little Green Footballs included: “Can we furlough him — just so he can realize the Carter plot? Please?” and “Even this schmuck had some good ideas.”

The site’s founder, Charles Johnson, wrote on Little Green Footballs that such comments “reflect only the opinions of the individuals who posted them” and doubted that they “rise to the level of hatred that showed up in Arianna’s readers’ Cheney-related comments.”

Some conservatives and liberals seized on the incidents to denounce the other side, but no conclusions should be drawn from wackjobs on the fringe.

So bad on me. With all due respect, however, Kurtz has clearly been mau-maued by the Greenwald Leftist Apologism Machine. The piece is practically lifted from Thomas Ellensberg's rantings about this.

Kurtz attempts to mitigate the assassination and cancer death-wishes spewing out from the left by quoting a few similar, but nowhere near as toxic, comments about Jimmy Carter on LGF. The comments concerned a "planned" assassination on Jimmy Carter by Al Qaeda which apparently never really made it very far into the even the planning phase. So this was entirely hypothetical, and pretty far in the past to boot.

To that revelation, some LGF commenters said stuff along the lines of "Well let's trade Jimmy Carter's life for the lives of those lost on 9/11." Pretty weak tea.

Compare that to the hundreds of pro-assassination comments on the HuffPo and the various other blogs of the Toxic Left.

Speaking of Bad Behavior: It's not just commenters, it's particularly sick internet crapmerchants and left-wing bloggers celebrating the cancer of Tony Snow and cancer-caused death of Cathy Seipp.

And it's also not merely political bloggers and commenters engaging in bad behavior. Kathy Sierra, who I think must have started the Sierra Games company, is now getting death threats over her blogging comments about the... game industry.

Apparently she was too "optimistic" about it -- seriously -- and hence the death threats.

I'd hoped that we wouldn't need a law, but I have a feeling a law will be passed. Or applicable laws will start being enforced. Make a death threat, spend six or nine months in jail. Why people think they can do this on-line when doing it over the phone or in person would get them locked up or shot is beyond me, but there you go. The rise of the Internet SuperMouse, a take-no-prisoners tough guy and threatener of women so long as he believes (mistakenly) he's annonymous behind his screen-name/Superhero Handle.

Nope! Kathy Sierra has nothing to do with Sierra games, commenters tell me. I remembered it was a husband-wife team, but apparently they're named Roberts or something. The game was named after the mountains.

I guess I should have picked up on the fact that no one was reporting she was the creator of a huge computer game business as reason to disabuse me of my kneejerk assumption.

posted by Ace at 02:36 PM

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