That is what is on display in the latest blogosphere firestorm centering on Michelle Malkin and the UC Santa Cruz anti war group Students Against War. Go here, and here for background.

SAW is now claiming to have received death threats and appears to at the least received some very unflattering emails due to Malkin’s posting of their contact info. She obtained the information from SAW’s press release on the protest. It was also available on their web site but has subsequently been removed.

Michelle is also receiving hate mail that is at least as virulent as the email directed at SAW and several of the emails to her contain racial slurs (how very liberal of them).

Malkin says the SAW needs to be responsible for their own actions. I agree. Obviously many people are offended by their protest. However threats and hate mail is never acceptable be it from the left or the right.

To her credit Malkin stated in her post:

If you are contacting them, I do not condone death threats or foul language. As for SAW, my message is this: You are responsible for your individual actions. Other individuals are responsible for theirs. Grow up and take responsibility.

The most hypocritical response I have seen so far is by Ezra Klein who in one post condemning Malkin manages to include an amazing amount of invective and hyperbole:

And then there are the unlucky ones, the Michelle Malkins, who achieve acceptance through hatred and venom, and find themselves groping down the darkest path to political success.

Malkin has already done grievous harm to an idea.

Malkin lays claim to no such ignorance. A skilled and experienced rhetorical warrior, she saw the pale, white flesh of their throats and lunged. The vicious always seek out the weak.

If any of these students are hurt by a crazed Malkinite, the blood will drip from her hands, the guilt will burden her shoulders. But forgive her just the same, for there is nought else she can do.

Malkin has created an identity of outrage, she trades in hate because she proved unable to achieve recognition for anything more elevated.

I wonder if her younger, better self ever once entertained the notion that she’d soon be a peddler of anger, successful in nothing but demagoguery and appeals to the reptilian brain? I wonder if she saw it foreshadowed in her own darker moments, if she feared it? Malkin may have hurt some idealistic young college students at Santa Cruz, and I loathe her for it. But I pity her, too, because somewhere along the way, she murdered her own.

In the same post Klein characterizes the SAW members as:

young, idealistic kids determined to save the world, feeling their way through uncertain thickets of ideology and unfamiliar collections of ideas, and naive about the dangers of direct political action outside a university’s protected confines.

Excuse me these are adults and responsible for their own actions which by the way were disgraceful in their own right and possibly criminal. I am not referring to the protest but to the slashing of tires and vandalizing of several SUV’s in the area after the protest. The SAW members may or may not have been involved but the perpetrators definitely shared their ideology and goals.

Brainster has some background on the SAW leaders.