The wingnuts, such as Michelle Malkin and Powerline’s John Hinderaker, Red State and David Horowitz and others, are claiming that the NYT Travel Section wants to assassinate Cheney and Rumsfeld. Because the NYT ran a story about the small Chesapeake Bay town of St. Michael’s and featured Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s weekend houses.
The homes are public knowledge and have been written about extensively by, among others, Newsmax, International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Salon [subscription required], General Aviation News, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and Luxury Explorer. Just do a google search and you’ll find out that Rumsfeld’s house is called, Mount Misery, and that Frederick Douglass was beaten there while a slave. [Mr. Torture Rumsfeld would buy a house with that name and history.] Or you can find out that Cheney’s house, which he bought about a week after Katrina hit, cost $2.9 million and is called Ballintober.
The wingnuts are posting the addresses, phone numbers and emails of NYT staff on their blogs and encouraging people to harass them, implicitly encouraging violence. Some of the blogs aren’t so implicit! The Secret Service protects Cheney and Rumsfeld, but who protects the NYT staff and their families.
Glenn Greenwald, a NYC litigator on the First Amendment, has a post that goes into this extensively, and links to the wingnuts’ blogs.
Isn’t this a form of cyber-stalking and terrorism? Isn’t there a law against this? If there isn’t, there ought to be. Because I believe this is just the beginning of a right-wing witch-hunt targeting the press and Democrats.
