I’m not sure why Howard Kurtz is equating the deluge of nasty comments about Dick Cheney that appeared at the Huffington Post with the very few comments about Jimmy Carter that appeared in our Khalid Sheikh Mohammed thread—but that’s what he’s doing here: Online, Churls Gone Vile. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

No corner of the Net is safe from this bile. The Washington Post’s Web site has been grappling with a surge in offensive and incendiary comments.

The really gruesome stuff represents a tiny minority of those online. But is there a way of policing the worst stuff without shutting down robust debate?

The comments about Cheney at the Huffington Post included: “You can’t kill pure evil.” “If at first you don’t succeed … ” “Dr. Evil escapes again … damn.” Founder Arianna Huffington wrote that “no one at HuffPost is defending these comments — they are unacceptable and were treated as such by being removed.”

The comments about Mohammed and Carter at Little Green Footballs included: “Can we furlough him — just so he can realize the Carter plot? Please?” and “Even this schmuck had some good ideas.”

The site’s founder, Charles Johnson, wrote on Little Green Footballs that such comments “reflect only the opinions of the individuals who posted them” and doubted that they “rise to the level of hatred that showed up in Arianna’s readers’ Cheney-related comments.”

Some conservatives and liberals seized on the incidents to denounce the other side, but no conclusions should be drawn from wackjobs on the fringe.

Kurtz fails to mention the very visible disclaimer about comments that has been posted at the top of every comments page almost since LGF opened.

The simple fact is that Arianna Huffington deleted hundreds of those comments about Dick Cheney, and when another topic about Cheney was posted there, the exact same thing happened again. At LGF, there were very few such comments about Carter—and Kurtz doesn’t mention that other LGF readers also denounced them. And I reiterate: the two comments quoted by Kurtz above are simply not as vile as what appeared at Arianna’s hate site, where commenters wished for Cheney not only to die, but to suffer great agony and humiliation—with invented torture scenarios and murder fantasies. It was sickening.

There’s no comparison between the levels of profanity and hateful venom you’ll find at left-wing sites such as Huffington Post and the comments posted at Little Green Footballs. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at Howard Kurtz’s lame attempt at moral equivalence though; it’s what mainstream media does, whether the topic is blogs or “terrorism” or the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Note that he mentions that the Washington Post message boards also have a problem, although he basically brushes it off before attacking LGF. What he doesn’t say about WaPo’s boards is that the venom there is posted almost exclusively by left-wingers—and it’s not a sudden surge. It’s been out of control for quite a while.