Michelle Malkin takes a page straight out of the 2000 Republican political playbook and uses Al Sharpton to try to paint the Democratic party as extremists-by-association in her latest Vent, “The party of hate”.

Hmm… Extremism-by-association. Okay, I’ll play.

Let’s have a look at a few of Michelle Malkin’s associations, shall we?

First, we’ll take Malkin’s ties to the White Nationalist web site VDARE, which date back several years. Michelle Malkin considers VDARE founder Peter Brimelow her friend, and once quipped that “people apparently think linking to VDARE is tantamount to a hate crime.”

In fact, VDARE has been deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Here’s what SPLC has to say about Peter Brimelow:

[VDare’s founder Peter Brimelow] described the role of race as “elemental, absolute, fundamental.” He said that white Americans should demand that U.S. immigration quotas be changed to allow in mostly whites. He argued that spending tax dollars on anything related to multiculturalism was “subversive.” He called foreign immigrants “weird aliens with dubious habits.”

He worried repeatedly that his son, with his “blue eyes” and “blond hair,” would grow up in an America in which whites had lost the majority.

At one point, he wrote that if one enters an Immigration and Naturalization Service waiting room, just like entering the New York subways, “you find yourself in an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored.”

Even earlier, in 1993, Brimelow, who is himself an immigrant from England, lauded a book by Jared Taylor, who now oversees the racist American Renaissance magazine.

Next up, the Schiavo protesters. In the spring of 2005, as the Terri Schiavo saga unfolded in Florida, the protesters outside of Schiavo’s hospice scored an impressive amount of real estate on Michelle Malkin’s blog. Later that year, in her book Unhinged, Michelle Malkin lashed out at the media for what she claimed was negative bias against “the ordinary, peaceful protestors who traveled to Florida in support of Terri Schiavo”. What Malkin conveniently ignored, however, was the rightwing extremism that found its way into the ranks of those “ordinary” protesters.:

If you continued watching the broadcast of Reliable Sources that Malkin cites, you’d have heard them discuss further the nature not just of the “ordinary” protesters who were showing up at Schiavo’s hospice, but of their allegedly mainstream-conservative supporters in the media:

JOHN FUND, WALL STREET JOURNAL: Michael Schiavo, the closer you look at him, the more unsettling the whole case gets, because, frankly, he has not been a good husband.

PAT BOONE, SINGER: Terri’s husband is determined to let her die, not let her die, put her away.

PAT ROBERTSON, THE 700 CLUB: I blame her husband, who obviously wanted to kill her.

Let’s not forget, of course, that this rhetoric in fact inspired at least one person to action — the charming fellow who plotted to have Michael Schiavo and the judge in the case murdered.

Moreover, the stage in Florida was every bit as filled with right-wing extremism. The ranks of those “ordinary, peaceful protesters” were being filled by the likes of militia leader Bo Gritz — who attempted a citizens’ arrest of Michael Schiavo and the judge in the case — and Randall Terry, who has a long history of associations with the murderous wing of the anti-abortion movement, as well as the Patriot/militia movement. Neo-Nazi Hal Turner went so far as advocate an armed rescue, as well as shooting anyone who interfered.

Michelle Malkin is also a big fan of the Minuteman Project- a self-proclaimed border “watchdog” group which formed in 2005 and has allegedly been infiltrated by white supremacists. Dave Neiwert explains:

Then there are the Minutemen, hailed by Malkin as “the mother of all neighborhood watch programs“, and defended with regularity on her blog. As I’ve observed numerous times, the Minutemen are a magnet for the most extreme racists and xenophobes in America, and their claims to be “weeding out” such extremists are so much hooey.

After all, not only is the Minuteman Project directly descended from the militia movement, the Minuteman leader have a history of extremism. And they haven’t changed their stripes, their media makeover notwithstanding. Jim Gilchrist, one of the Minuteman Project cofounders, is currently running for Congress under the banner of the far-right Constitution Party — which itself is closely bound up with promoting the militia movement. And then there are the charming folks who show up for Minuteman parties.

There’s also Ward Connerly, a black conservative activist whom Michelle has referred to as her “hero”. This is a man who cozied up to the Ku Klux Klan as he led an initiative to end Affirmative Action in Michigan last year. The Ku Klux Klan, for Pete’s sake.

Of course it’s not like Malkin needs to be tied to the Peter Brimelows of the world to prove how frighteningly outside of the mainstream she really is. No, she pretty much takes care of that all by herself: