When news broke of the attempt on Dick Cheney’s life this week, the Huffington Post had a few reads make comments that they were upset that the attack missed Cheney. Arianna has responded to the right wing smear which has since emerged:

On Tuesday morning, The Huffington Post linked to an AP news story on the suicide bombing at the gates of the main American base in Afghanistan during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney.

A miniscule portion of the people who read that story chose to take advantage of the anonymous, open forum nature of comments in our news section to express regret that the Vice President hadn’t been killed in the attack.

As soon as these offensive comments came to our attention, they were deleted from the site. But that didn’t stop the right-wing hit machine from seizing on the anonymous comments in an effort to prove that “Democrats and liberals” (as Rush, able to divine party affiliation and political philosophy from a username, quickly labeled the commenters) “have a hatred and a disgust for Cheney…that cannot be explained.”

Huffington Post did take the appropriate actions, but as Arianna points out, that doesn’t stop the regular cast of clowns from the right-wing smear machine to go into full attack mode:

Harsh — and frequently hateful — Internet rhetoric hidden behind the cloak of anonymity is not confined to politics, let alone one side of the political spectrum. Some 10-year old girl posts a video of herself on YouTube singing her favorite song. Inevitably, one of the first comments posted will be, “You suck. You can’t sing worth a shit — and you’re ugly. Go ahead and kill yourself. NOW.” Are we to assume that all YouTube users hate kids? Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin and company know that this kind of reasoning is blatantly false and pathetic. Which is what makes their fake high-dudgeon all the more manipulative. And disgusting. And beyond hypocritical.

This got me thinking about the fake anthrax letters, in which a suspect was arrested last November. That suspect, Chad Castagna, admitted he was a staunch follower of Malkin and Coulter. Malkin quickly took to the defense that she was enticing violence and posted one of her classic “video responses“, in which she tries to compare herself to Jodi Foster in the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. Hey Michelle – don’t flatter yourself and don’t insult Jodi Foster like that!

Now compare the response Malkin made to the response the Huffington Post made. Seems like the Huffington Post took a much higher road.

But let’s not stop there. Remember – these letters were being sent to people in the media as well as Democrats in Congress. When the New York Times’ received one of these letters, how did Coulter respond?

So Memo Pad went and asked her, sending an e-mail to her AOL account. And guess what? She not only responded, but claimed to be the sender of the mysterious powder.

Oh yeah – Coulter thought it was something to joke about. Even though the anthrax was fake, the response and use of emergency resources was very real. That’s a great attitude to take in a post-9/11 world. Let’s take the first responders out of commission in the same city that experienced the brunt of the attacks.

It is nothing for the right wing talking heads to go openly support someone like Castagna, but when someone makes a comment like “fuck they missed” on the Huffington Post when talking about the attempt on Cheney’s life then we have a real problem. No – the real problem is the typical hypocrisy that exists on the right. People like Malkin, Coulter, Limbaugh and Hannity talk a big show, but when the tables are turned they stick their heads in the sand, or , in Malkin’s case, make a video showing what a lunatic they really are.