MALKIN'S RIGHT-WING PROJECTION

You just knew the second that news broke that John Ashcroft required immediate surgery for gallstone pancreatitis, the right wing do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do morality patrol would be out there, combing the internet and the airwaves for any possible expression of joy or glee that a conservative so reviled by the left was in medical peril.

You know, this coming from the party of Jesse Helms who jokingly warned Clinton not to come to North Carolina because he might get shot, and so on.

First Projectionist of the Hypocritical Morality Squadron Michelle Malkin is on the case, and she finds, uh, a lot:

Those oh-so-compassionate liberals could hardly contain their glee upon hearing the news that Attorney General John Ashcroft is suffering from a severe case of gallstone pancreatitis.

And what liberals does she find?

"He has it coming. He is utterly sub-human and evil. Suffer, bastard," gloated an Internet user on the DemocraticUnderground.com Web site.

Someone from DU? Good work there, Michelle! But surely you found more than that, right?

"(T)he world would be better off without him," responded another writer on the forum.

Someone else from DU! And we don't even know if that was a sentence fragment being taken out of context. Nice work! And?

"I hope he is in the most severe pain a human being can suffer, and after that, I hope he remains in constant pain with no hope of relief," chimed in yet another bleeding-heart Democrat.

This one is completely unsourced! Who else?

Out in Hollywood, comedian Bill Maher echoed these unsparing sentiments during his HBO talk show monologue, speculating that Ashcroft contracted his unimaginably painful and potentially deadly illness from "wiping his (expletive) with the Bill of Rights." The audience roared with laughter.

Uh, Michelle? Bill Maher refers to himself as a libertarian, did you know that?

Though I'm impressed that "ass", presumably, required censoring in the hallowed cyberspace of Townhall.

From there, Malkin's column descends into the usual rightist paean to Ashcroft's work. I'm a big fan of all that great counterterrorism work he was doing in the months leading up to 9/11, ya know.

Anyway, what's the point of using DU for just about all your sources of liberal sadism if we can just point here and here?