I wonder if the accumulation of scalps in the blogosphere’s trophy room hasn’t finally driven a few bloggers a little ’round the bend, to he point where they’re hallucinating scandals everywhere in hopes of collecting their own. Even while I thought the Eason Jordan scandal was overblown, at least there what he was supposed to have said—that U.S. troops had deliberately killed journalists—was offense-worthy if false. Now Michelle Malkin’s apparently desparate to have a scandal of her very own in the form of some thoroughly unremarkable comments from a People’s Daily interview with WaPo managing editor Philip Bennett. Bennett says the paper misconstrued some of his remarks, but assume that’s not even the case. That she’s actually found other bloggers capable of summoning the energy to give a shit about anything Bennett said is, as they have it, informative about media’s disconnect from reality, but the relevantly disconnected medium ain’t WaPo. Malkin boldfaces, as though they were shocking heresies, remarks about how Bennett’s correspondents are giving him a more complex picture than the unmixedly optimistic one Bush presents, and Bennett’s notion that it’s a bad idea for the U.S.—or any country—to be seen as “the leader of the world.” Stuff like that isn’t just “uncontroversial” in the sense of “not being worthy of a scandal.” They should be “uncontroversial” in the sense that any person with two brain cells to rub together ought to recognize them as fairly obviously right. I’d expect a smart hardcore Republican to endorse both without much fuss. Are we really this pathetically starved for stories to break?