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Bye Bye, Malkin

It's hard to imagine a three-way pundit battle in which Geraldo Rivera is the most sympathetic participant, but that happened last week, when Michelle Malkin vowed to never again appear on "The O'Reilly Factor." Here's New York magazine's version of events; this happened last week but somehow I missed it completely:

We guess Michelle Malkin won't be coming to town to guest-host for Bill O'Reilly anymore. She just quit forever, after a three-way conservative-pundit street fight that has left our minds reeling a little bit. For those weren't paying attention (we weren't, until now), what happened was this: Crazy attention whore Geraldo Rivera told the Boston Globe that crazy attention whore Malkin was "the most vile, hateful commentator I've ever met … It’s good she’s in D.C. and I’m in N.Y. I’d spit on her if I saw her.” Later, when O'Reilly asked him if he wanted to say something about it on the show because, he said, Malkin's "feelings were hurt." (Saying this he came across, weirdly, as almost grandfatherly and sane.) Rivera did apologized for his "ungentlemanly" and "ungallant" words — "I never spit!" he said — but couldn't help qualifying that he disagreed with everything Malkin said and basically indicating that he thought she was an asshole.

Then Ann Coulter chimed in and said Geraldo was an asshole, and furthermore that his overgrown mustache was full of tortilla chips and Michael Jackson's love juice. (No, she didn't, but if she had chimed in that's what we imagine she might have said.) Then Malkin referred to his mea culpa on her Website as "a whiny, effeminate, blame-the-victim bleat," and soon after decided that she wasn't going to be a victim of mean-spirited insults, and if anyone really loved her they could go over to her blog where she would be hurling them at others.

No more O'Reilly and Malkin together? It's like finding out my least-favorite band just broke up.

Posted by Stephen Silver at October 23, 2007 04:20 PM