A Hard Right Punch

Between bites, though, you can catch a glimpse of amazement that "a small-town girl from South Jersey," as she puts it, can have such an outsize impact. Even if she makes plenty of enemies in the process.

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Malkin has been relentlessly critical of the media's coverage of Iraq. Last month, she went to see for herself.

"I really wanted to go to Ramadi, but my husband wouldn't let me," Malkin says. Instead, she spent a week embedded with an Army unit in Baghdad and returned more hopeful about a war effort she had increasingly begun to doubt.

Part of Malkin's self-assigned mission was to check out a much-debated Associated Press dispatch. It quoted an Iraqi police captain, Jamil Hussein, as saying that Shiites had burned or blown up four mosques -- and at one of them, doused six Sunnis with kerosene and burned them alive while nearby Iraqi soldiers did not intervene. After the widely published November report, Malkin and other conservative bloggers mounted a campaign questioning whether Hussein existed.

When the Iraqi government belatedly confirmed that Hussein was a police official -- and said that he faced arrest for speaking to the press -- Malkin reported the news and expressed regret. But she now questions Hussein's very account, saying she found little damage at the mosques.

"We quoted people saying [the victims] had been bombed and burned," says John Daniszewski, international editor at the AP, which acknowledged last week that the mosques are still standing despite some damage. "It was a moving news story. We said these were allegations and not confirmed by police."

In the wake of her Iraq trip, Sullivan has softened his criticism of Malkin. "You've got to give her credit that she has actually gone there," he says. "And she has criticized the administration on this and other things. She may be shrill, but she's not a shill."

Malkin bristles at the notion that she is "some Republican Kool-Aid drinker." She has lambasted President Bush -- whom she views as insufficiently conservative -- on such issues as immigration reform, the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court and the failed Dubai ports deal. Malkin was frustrated when the president agreed to seek court warrants for domestic eavesdropping, after she had doggedly defended his earlier position that judicial approval was unnecessary.

"There is a feeling that every time we go to bat for the Bush administration, they pull the rug out from under us," she says.

Malkin's campaigns have had mixed results. She helped lead the charge against two liberal bloggers who resigned under pressure from John Edwards's presidential campaign after being castigated for anti-Christian writing. But she apologized last month for linking to a photo of John Kerry sitting alone during a visit to Iraq, and adopting accounts by a blogger and a radio host that he had been spurned by the troops there. It turned out that the Massachusetts senator was waiting for an interview with reporters.

Malkin also serves as an early-warning system, such as when she wrote about protests (by what she called "Islamist p.c. bullies") against a Danish newspaper for publishing cartoons making fun of the prophet Muhammad. When violent demonstrations later broke out, Malkin posted all the cartoons as a free-speech gesture.