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I am a long time commenter at Huffington Post. I was on the thread when those comments were being made, and when commenting was disabled for that article. There were a few (maybe 4 or 5) names I recognized as legitimate liberal posters. The rest I had never seen before, and I have been commenting there since the site's inception in '05. I will acknowledge that there are plenty of whackjobs on the left, but I am skeptical that all of those posters who suddenly came out of the woodwork to post on that thread were actual liberals. They're definitely not Arianna's bread and butter, that's for sure.
I read back through the pdf of all the comments last night, and they weren't even really that bad, anyway. There were a number of liberals (posters who have been posting there for a long time) who were condemning the posts, and plenty of other reasonable comments being put up. In fact, the right wingers who post there (clearly for the purpose of beating up on liberals) say the most vile, disgusting things on a daily basis (such as, "if I could work a deal with the terrorists where only stupid liberals would be killed, I'd take that in a heartbeat," from the guy who Townhall was holding up as a bastion of civility on the Cheney thread). They couldn't do this with the Huffington Post every day, because they'd have to admit to their own whackjobs. The whole thing has been completely blown out of proportion.
But, Kevin Drum is right - this is all the Malkins of the world can come up with. Comments that are the same (or better) than the things I regularly hear come out of Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin's mouth. (And a bunch of neocon trolls posting "gotcha" comments and expressing no worry whatsoever about Cheney's safety.)
That all being said, besides being distasteful, those comments were plain stupid. This is what's splashed all over the MSM, and Joe Schmo America never gets the flip side explained to him.
