Wingnutosphere exploits veterans' fund drive

There's no level low enough for the wingnutosphere not to stoop to - not even on Veterans Day.

Project Valour-IT - the nonpartisan Soldiers' Angels fund drive for laptops for wounded troops - is coming to an end today. If conservatives today were as respectable as they once were, they wouldn't be violating the spirit of Project Valour-IT by making political hay out of it. But we're not so lucky, and it's our duty to call the right-wing intelligentsia out on it.

I'm supporting Project Valour-IT until it concludes by featuring a link that lets you donate to it. I'm against the Iraq War as much as I'm against union-busting and racism. But America's injured soldiers need support from all of us, and that's why Project Valour-IT has enjoyed a prominent place on this blog.

Much noise has been generated by those who accuse me of posting the Project Valour-IT link only because right-wing blogs grumbled about progressive blogs not posting it. This is bullshit, because if I didn't support Valour-IT, I never would've posted the link. (My job is not to pacify conservative blogs.) Why am I bringing this up now? Because the wingnutosphere has spent most of November in attack mode over this issue.

The biggest culprit is Michelle Malkin's right-wing blog. Malkin boasted about how she stumbled upon Project Valour-IT's website and how she didn't know of any liberal blogs supporting it. The first mistake she made was underestimating Project Valour-IT's reach by thinking hardly anyone else would discover it. (Malkin thinks she's 'Net savvy enough to find stuff like this before everyone else.) This belief led her to pledge to donate to Project Valour-IT - if any liberal blogs signed up to support it. Apparently, Malkin is also delusional enough to think we don't monitor her blog and that this attempt to exploit a patriotic fund drive so she could advance her warped political views would go unnoticed. She also expected Project Valour-IT itself to attract so little attention that hardly any other blogs would even know about it.

Malkin continued to sneer that she didn't know of any liberal blogs supporting the fund drive. Oh yeah? Well, there's The Online Lunchpail, for one. I saw several others that prominently displayed Project Valour-IT's donation link. I can't name a single conservative blog that displayed this link, even though I monitor conservative blogs just as much as I read progressive blogs. I checked all over Malkin's site for the link and couldn't find it. The only place on her blog where I could find any link to any part of Project Valour-IT was buried deep within one of the articles attacking liberal blogs for allegedly failing to support it. I checked at least one other right-wing blog that was listed as having signed up for Project Valour-IT, but I couldn't find any mention of Project Valour-IT whatsoever on that blog. (Just because a blog signed up doesn't mean they actually donated.)

It just goes to show that when the modern brand of conservatives that dominates the blogosphere talks about supporting the troops, they've got a knife hidden somewhere to stab them in the back. It's just like how the Bush regime tried to make injured soldiers pay for their flights back home out of their own salaries.

When someone from Project Valour-IT commented on Michelle Malkin's blog that some progressive blogs had indeed signed up for the drive and prominently posted the donation link, Malkin suddenly shut up about the matter for days. Malkin was clearly reeling from the fact that her "challenge" wasn't going down the way she expected, thus robbing her of an excuse to attack progressives.

Someday there may be a time and place for me to "be a better person" by walking away from bullies like this - but this isn't one of them. I will not stand for someone attacking my patriotism and trying to do so in the name of a respectable charity. The right-wing bloggers of today are the progeny of the talk radio kooks of the '90s, so they've got a lot of nerve assailing our patriotism. A dozen years ago they were talking about overthrowing the government all because Bill Clinton got elected and because "there's too much freedom" and because America wouldn't adopt Singapore's judicial system (when Singapore sentenced an American citizen to be caned). Every day I had to hear conservatives complain about how horrible America was because "the libs" believed in due process and because some poor family was "stealing" from the rich by being in a lower tax bracket.

Maybe at one time conservatives were respectable even if wrong. You can't say the same of the new breed of conservatives, who run down America but have the gall to accuse everyone else of not supporting the troops. All this while they won't even post the link to a patriotic charity that they falsely accuse opponents of not supporting.