Marq is right — it’s time to drop the Foley matter for a while, and discuss what is REALLY important: Bikinigate.
For just when you thought that it was safe to go back in the Photoshop, Townhall gave a guest columnist spot to college student Ashley Herzog, the coed whose online photos of innocent young Republican life were hijacked by some anonymous Flickr user.
And here’s Michelle Malkin to present her latest young protegee:
Ashley Herzog is the Ohio University student whose photos were filched by some unknown hate-monger–still unidentified, still out there–who created a fake Flickr site with Photoshopped images of me. Those images were falsely publicized last week by UNC School of Law professor Eric Muller as authentic, and then picked up and broadcast widely by the Gawker Media smear machine. [...] Today at Townhall.com, Ashley talks back to the smear machine.
So, let’s let Ashley tell us some of the sad lessons that she learned from this tragic affair, and listen while she talks back to the smear machine (which probably doesn’t read Townhall, but what the heck).
Future women leaders of America: Beware of Photoshop::By Ashley Herzog
Future women leaders of America beware: if you plan on a career in politics, don’t allow yourself to be photographed in a bikini.
Words we can all live by, especially leaders of America who plan to become women in the future.
Especially if you’re the type of woman who speaks out against the sexualization of young girls, the media will be eager to use it against you. That is what we learned from conservative author Michelle Malkin last week.
And what will happen to you are a future woman leader of America and you allow yourself to be photographed in a bikini? Well, from Michelle, we learned that Gawker/Wonkette will poke fun at you for a day, and, um, well, that’s about all that happens. So, future women leaders, either keep your swimsuit photos off the Internet, or get over yourself, girlfriend.
But wait, there are actually futher things to beware of, since the prankster who put Michelle’s head on another girl’s body also used Ashley’s photos to imply that Michelle had hot friends when she attended college.
Whoever made the photo page apparently wasn’t content to insult Malkin, an Asian woman, with racial slurs – a popular activity among her critics. Instead, they aimed to expose her as a hypocrite. Using pictures stolen from various Webshots.com accounts, including mine, the creator wrote captions to imply that I had had been a classmate of Malkin’s at Oberlin College in the early 90s – and that she was anything but a moralist back then.
The bastards!
So, I guess the real lesson for future women leaders is: avoid having your photo taken with Michelle Malkin, as that’s presumably what led the hoaxster to mess with Ashley’s photo gallery in the first place.
As for Michelle, I guess the lesson is: what goes around comes around.
Or the message for both of them is to stop taking theirselves so seriously.
Anyway, we’ll skip the anecdotes about Liberals Gone Wild in Comments Sections of Blogs, because Ashley just copied them from Michelle. And we’ll leave you on your own to read the stolen body’s anguish on seeing Michelle’s head attached to her torso (her tale reminds me of the MST classic The Brain that Wouldn’t Die), and get right to Ashley’s disillusionment with online media, blogs, and humankind in general.
This is the brave new world of Internet media. Like many Americans, I entered it with a naïve notion of bloggers as modern-day pamphleteers, throwing the cover off stories that the establishment media won’t touch. I believed that Internet blogs, being far more democratic mediums than mainstream television networks and newspapers, would show respect for the truth. But after visiting a few popular blogs, I realized I was sadly mistaken. At best, many zero in on political gossip and absurd non-issues, such as whether a conservative author ever posed in a swimsuit. At worst, many political blogs are cesspools of racism, misogyny, and obscenity, not to mention vicious lies.
Speak power to truth, sister! But I think she was a little hard on Powerline and Instapundit (but she certainly has LittleGreenFootball’s number).
The posts and links to my pictures are still up, and I’m no longer anticipating a response from Gawker. They are a multimillion-dollar behemoth; I’m a college kid with a claim to a few stolen photographs. They have nothing to lose by ignoring me. [...] Gawker and its ilk appear willing to perpetuate bald-faced lies in order to advance an agenda. And they don’t mind taking a few innocent college girls along for the ride.
A sad story indeed — it reminds me of a Dickens novel, or maybe a Lifetime Made for TV Movie (suggested title: Little Photoshop of Horror).
But if you’re like me, you want to know more this innocent college girl, and what she does when not having her photos used to smear Michelle Malkin. And it turns out that she writes a regular conservative column for the student paper. Here’s part of one that you might find interesting:
Women Should Cross Party Lines to Combat Porn
One day last spring I was walking down the street, minding my own business, when a schleppy-looking guy in a plaid shirt asked me to pose in his topless magazine.
“Have you ever considered modeling?” he asked, as I picked up my pace in an effort to ditch him. “Come on, don’t keep that body a secret!”
In case you’re curious, here’s a photo of Ashley — she’s the blonde.
Now, back to the story:
On one hand his proposition was comical, especially because I’m not particularly well endowed in any area of interest to a nude magazine. Still, I couldn’t help but fume. Why did this man assume that I – a total stranger – would jump at the chance to undress for him? And why hadn’t anyone else told him to get lost?
The answer turns out to be that feminists are against the exploitation of women, and no good conservative girl wants to be taken for a feminist, so they all take their tops off when Playboy comes to town.
After all, it was feminist heroine Gloria Steinem who went undercover as a Playboy bunny in the 1970s – and then attacked the magazine for its egregious sexism. Conservatives have been silent on the issue ever since. As my friend explained, “I think it’s wrong – I just don’t want to be called a feminist.”
So, I guess the lesson that future women leaders of America can take from this is: if a photo of you in a bikini later comes back to haunt you, just claim that you posed in order to show your opposition to all things feminist.