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When host Howard Kurtz pointed out that Milbank was, in fact, wrong about how many Democrats had appeared on Fox News election night, Milbank said, “That’s a fair argument. Maybe I should have written it differently, but let’s not talk about cutting off heads.”6 Yes, he should have “written it differently” by not lying.

Now, here’s some of that lighthearted “mockery aimed at Republicans” Krugman sees from Keith Olbermann. After Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade chastised the media for refusing to identify Muslim terrorists as Muslims, Keith commented: “There is ‘stupid’ and there is ‘bigoted’ and there is ‘paranoid’ and there is ‘Islamophobic’—though it takes a big man to combine all four of them.… Not every un-American bastard is Brian Kilmeade, but all Brian Kilmeades are un-American bastards and tonight’s ‘Worst Person in the World.’ ”7

The mind reels at such dazzling, frothy wordplay. If you close your eyes, it’s almost like you’re listening to Oscar Wilde!

A few years earlier, Keith accused Bush of inspiring the anthrax attacks (in his wry, Noel Coward–like way).

Rachel Maddow’s caustic repartee includes her making up stories about right-wingers killing a census-taker and a Republican congressman being warned in advance about the Oklahoma City bombing—both stories requiring subsequent corrections.8

Maddow has also tied Republican Senate candidates to the killing of late-term abortionist George Tiller by describing her documentary on the shooting as important because “there are five Senate candidates running right now who have a position on abortion that has never really been seen in mainstream politics before.”9 Apart from “for” or “against,” one wonders what the other positions on abortion might be. (Pro, but feel really bad about it? Against, except in cases where Charlie Sheen might be the father?)

Claims of “toxic rhetoric” invariably mean a conservative is talking. We just passed this wonderful health care bill and it really debases the tone to hear all this criticism. Liberals are blind with rage that conservatives get to talk now, too. They would prefer to return to a kinder world when there were just three TV networks and no Internet, back when Walter Cronkite told everyone what to believe and liberals didn’t have to win arguments.

Krugman is not exactly a sardonic bon mot–dropping wit himself. He’s more of an angry, red-faced ranter. His 2008 election-night party included effigy burnings of conservative politicians, according to an admiring profile in the New Yorker magazine.10 Evidently, it’s mocking, rakish wit when liberals burn political figures in effigy, but an incitement to murder when conservatives do it.

Democratic ex-congressman Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania wrote a column for the New York Times calling for “an atmosphere of civility and respect in which political discourse can flow freely, without fear of violent confrontation.” Just months earlier Kanjorski had called for a Republican candidate to be shot: “That [Rick] Scott down there that’s running for governor of Florida. Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him.”11 I’m not from around here, but that sounds like toxic rhetoric to me.

As much as the media stacked the deck with lies, they still couldn’t win a hand.

In our next Portrait of Scumbag,* two days after the shooting, former congressman Alan Grayson was all over the networks blaming conservatives for inciting violence.

Grayson was most famous for the “Taliban Dan” video about his congressional opponent, Daniel Webster, in which Grayson edited Webster’s remarks to precisely reverse their meaning. Webster had told a men’s church group to pick a verse from the Bible that required something of them, such as “Love your wife even as Christ loved the church,” adding “Don’t pick the ones that say, ‘She should submit to me.’ ” Grayson’s campaign ad showed Webster saying only, “She should submit to me,” playing “submit