Argument by anecdote

There are those here who need to take note of this point.

UPDATE II: This whole issue raises a broader point: the reliance by idiots and deceivers on the fallacy of argument by anecdote, one of the lowest (and most commonly invoked) forms of fallacious reasoning.

It is hard to overstate how pervasive this lowly and manipulative weapon is wielded by right-wing demagogues to shape our political debates. LGF's simplistic trick, for instance, is to post individual stories every day of Muslims who engage in violent acts ("hey, look - I proved that Muslims are inferior and dangerous!"). Michelle Malkin repeatedly posts individual stories of supposed leftists engaging in illegal or violent acts ("hey, look -- I proved that liberals are unhinged"). Or the right finds a single obscure college professor nobody ever heard of who referred to 9/11 victims as "Little Eichmanns" ("hey, look - we proved that 'the Left' hates America and believes that the 9/11 victims deserved it!").

Those who rely on that cheap, tawdry tactic are really indistinguishable -- just in terms of the methods -- from, say, websites run by white supremacists who, every day, troll the news wires and post individual stories of crimes committed by African-Americans and then think that they've made a broader point. In that context, most people can see how transparently fallacious the tactic is, but in other contexts, they are blind to it.

In fact, because such sloppy, illogical shorthand -- when used against "liberals" -- is easy to both convey and ingest, journalists love it. They use it themselves and are easily manipulated into passing such arguments along (just fathom how quickly this story is going to make the usual rounds -- "'liberals' hate Bush and Cheney so much that they actually expressed sorrow that Cheney wasn't killed in the explosion today").