Michelle Malkin is Right....

....It isn't just Newsweek. Now NBC is getting in on the Holy Flush:

NBC's Today show aired unsubstantiated claims on Tuesday that U.S. troops had desecrated the Quran on at least two occasions, in a report that echoed a now-retracted Newsweek story that has inflamed the Muslim world and led to deadly riots.

The Today broadcast also covered an allegation that U.S. troops had gang-raped an Iraqi woman.

You'll understand why I will not help spread this enemy propaganda further by not quoting the rumors NBC helpfully regurgitated, other than to highlight out one telling point:

The NBC newsman then sourced an allegation by a female terrorist suspect who had been detained at Abu Ghraib, who aired her claim in an Iraqi newspaper.

Did our media make a habit of interviewing German, Italian, or Japanese prisoners during World War II and splattering their claims all over the front pages? Wasn't in any history text or topical reference book I've ever read.

Adds the Newsmax blurb:

Syndicated talk radio host Laura Ingraham, who aired portions of Engel's report on her broadcast Tuesday night, was outraged, telling her audience: "We have an NBC reporter repeating rumors that are clearly being spread by terrorists to inflame sectarian violence in Iraq and to start a civil war."

A TKS reader named Allan fairly sums up my take on the Holy Flush smear that NBC is perpetuating:

The difference is simple. CBS was simply anti-Bush. Love guy or hate the guy, he's just one man. Newsweek's article was anti-American in conception, presentation and effect.Their factually-deficient smear was targeted at not (just) George W. Bush, but the U.S. government and the American people.

And that is just how our enemies, and particularly the new jihadi recruits this "story" will garner, will be seeing it.

It fills one with a sense of foreboding. Not so much vis-a-vie our enemies, since their lust for our blood can be taken for granted and doesn't need external "stimulation," but for what might be called the "enemies within." The Extreme Media is, I'm coming to believe, not just "its own party," but sees itself as its own country, or at the very least a "shadow government," unelected but entitled to rule by the secular equivalent of "divine right." They effectively "seceded" after Vietnam and Watergate, and those are the templates they've psychologically hardwired into themselves ever since.

Now it's a generation later, and there's another hated Republican president they can't touch, leading the country in another war that they can't abide. Except this Republican president isn't a crook, and is everything in terms of political adeptness that Tricky Dick wasn't. And the war is not a pointless "police action" in which victory has been denied by deliberate policy, but a morally unambiguous fight for survival against murderous, bloodthirsty, theocratic crazoids who have proven their ability to strike us hard on our own soil - and a fight that we are winning.

Moreover, their every attempt at a "Tet" and every crack at scandalmongering not only keeps failing, but failing in increasingly catastrophic magnitude. The Holy Flush was the first in which people died because of it - all Afghans (so far), as it happens. But with NBC having taken the handoff from Newsweek, we can expect far more to join them, including our own.

The fact that NBC is keeping this pot boiling, like a smear relay, is the new factor in the equation. Nobody picked up the TANG fake memos story after the blogosphere exposed Dan Rather's fraud. No one in the press was in any hurry to echo Eason Jordan's sliming of American troops as mafia hitmen against journalists once that "mischief" became publicized. But even after Newsweek backed away from and finally retracted the HF, other EM outlets are eagerly, shamelessly copycatting it - fulfilling the "fake but accurate" template proclaimed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune today. [HT: Captain's Quarters]

One wonders how they can do this, until it is remembered that these are, after all, members of the loony left. And as we're seeing on the Social Security reform and judicial filibuster fronts, the loony left is more than living up to its nickname.

I think libs just find themselves in uncharted territory. With George Bush's re-election last November the last anchor they had in reality and sanity uprooted itself and floated away in the current. Now they don't know what to do except what they'd already been doing, only at an even louder volume and at still more plummetous depths that nobody knew were plumbable.

Bushophobia has metastasized into Ameriphobia. To damage Bush is to damage the country that elected and re-elected him, and vice versa. It's no longer about winning politically; it's about sheer lashing out. And the stratospheric solipsism of these people still manages to insulate them from realizing how seditious and borderline treasonous they've actually become. How else to explain how such "worldly sophisticates" could possibly have failed to consider the reaction a story accusing the U.S. military of desecrating the "holy" Koran would be certain to have in the Muslim world?

Left-wingers today are like the Jem'Haddar going through ketracell-white withdrawal. For the former the drug is power, and it's only now, after a decade in the political wilderness, begun to dawn on them that they're not likely to get it back any time soon. As a result, they're, quite bluntly, going berserk. And the Extreme Media manifestation of it is functioning as the Stateside affiliate of al-Jazeera.

I don't doubt our military's ability to squash Muslim fanatics like grapes (the will of higher-ups, such as vis-a-vie Iran, is another story); I do doubt our martial stamina on the homefront having to row upstream against a monolithically, relentlessly seditious press gone insane with partisan-inspired hatred. And heaven help us if the enemy manages to hit us here at home again.

An ill wind has begun to blow. We can only hope and pray that it's just a passing squall.