This is really trivial, but I have to respond to at least some of the whining on Michelle Malkin's blog in the aftermath of her cable TV appearance last night. Malkin writes:

As I am seated at the table with Matthews, who I am meeting for the first time, he cracks a joke--and not in a well-meaning way--about how I look.... "Are you sure you are old enough to be on the show? What are you? 28?" I grit my teeth. He badgers me again with the same question. I politely answer his question and supply my age.

(I wonder how Matthews' wife, the respected TV journalist Kathleen Matthews, who hosts a show about working women, would react if informed about her husband's treatment of a fellow female journalist. I've been in the business a dozen years and would be happy to talk to Mrs. Matthews about my firsthand experience with Neanderthal chauvinism in the workplace.)

Oh, please. Look, this may be insensitive, but if it's sexist to say that Malkin looks quite young (in fact, she does), then my wife and I are sexists for asking aloud whether bartenders still card Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution whenever we see him on TV, and we were sexist back in the '90s when we used to say the same thing about the State Department's Jamie Rubin. And a male acquaintance was being a sexist when, upon seeing the author photo on the jacket of Kenneth Pollack's bestseller The Threatening Storm, asked, "Is that his bar mitzvah picture?"

(More substantive critiques of Malkin's TV defense of the Swift boat liars can be found here and here.)