What an idiot!

Check out Keith Olberman's response to Michelle Malkin's outrage at Olberman's outrage over her self-inflicted-wound incident.

For a moment there I thought I owed Michelle Malkin an apology.

Very few people who find themselves criticized on television, or even critically characterized, go out and make the criticism sound worse than it was. Evidently, judging by the fact that the same e-mail appeared a few hundred times in our Countdown inbox today (not similar e-mails; the identical one, with different return addresses), Ms. Malkin is one of the very few.

“How dare you call this woman an idiot?”

That’s apparently what she said, while appearing on Rush Limbaugh’s Entertainment Radio Program today. She certainly wrote it on her blog. To be precise: “his (Chris Matthews’) scurrilous charges were repeated by his MSNBC colleague Keith Olbermann, who called me an ‘idiot.’”

Well, I felt terrible. In my little naïve old-fashioned way, I feel you preserve terms like that exclusively for men. I was preparing a formal apology. Political differences, fault or innocence, are all secondary. There are codes.

Funniest darn thing happened, though. Checked the tape of the show, re-read the blog. I never called Michelle Malkin an “idiot.”

Never used the word.

Second time I referenced her, I did say “this woman, Malkin, who made a fool of herself on this network, about an hour ago…”

So that’s what you’re dealing with here. She’s an author or a journalist or something, and she misquoted the insult to herself.

Olberman didn't say it, but I will: Michelle Malkin really is an idiot.