UPDATE: You Guessed It

TO WANT A BRAWL

This is terribly sad. This cherubic young girl, Ashley, a McCain volunteer from Texas, evidently attacked outside an ATM in Pittsburgh. She said that the attacker threatened her with a knife, took $60, and had stepped away from her when he saw the McCain bumper stickers on her car, became enraged, knocked her to the ground and carved this B on her face. Backwards.

It's sad on many counts: that this young woman is suffering these injuries, that many young women suffer injuries like this, and that it's probably a fake.

(2:16 PM- she's confessed: http://kdka.com/local/attack.McCain.Bloomfield.2.847628)

All the features of this story are fuzzily familiar: the attacker is of course 6'4", of course black, and of course Ashley doesn't want to go to the hospital. Why would a 20 year-old be interested in a plastic surgeon repairing her scarred face?

The backwards “B”, besides being the dead giveaway, illustrates an old, sad, joke: Q:What’s the difference between genius and stupidity? A:Genius has limits. The crime itself is so very illogical and melodramatic it mirrors the cheap-novel gothic mind of a disturbed freshman: After getting sixty dollars,a pretty good haul, the mugger’s that outraged by a McPalin sticker? He hasn’t gotten used to seeing McPalin signs in Pittsburgh?

Instead of getting the hell out of there, he gently incises the more difficult of Barack Obama’s initials into her face, without leaving any ragged edges or even breaking the skin. Why not an easier O?

Self-mutilation through scratching is a not uncommon practice among teenage girls. Nor is texting, and she texted her search for an ATM to a group site she participated in with unusual devotion, carefully noting her transit to the Wrong End of Town. (the "wrong end of town" turns out to be a heavily white Italian neighborhood, the scene of the crime a busy intersection) Does downtown Pittsburgh have no ATMs? Downtown Manhattan is nothing but bank branches. Of course, many of them are failed banks. But the ATMs still work. Mostly.

So we have her placed in the Bad Section, a little Texas girl's prefab nightmare, and up pops the six-foot black man, who in classic bogeyman fashion, can't leave well enough alone by absconding with his loot, but has to turn back to attack the heroine. And I’m no expert in how blacked eyes heal, but this happened when, a couple days ago? The white of the blackened eye is clear.

For the first and probably last time in my life I have to write that I agree with Michelle Malkin on this. Which makes me breathless and sort of uneasy, but there you are. Hoax.

It certainly was:

• Her FaceBook page, which was screencaptured before it was taken down, has a statement about how much fun it is to lie.
• She called the McCain campaign office BEFORE she called the police.
• Security cameras showed she wasn't even an ATM customer.
• Here is a photo from her flickr page, showing her holding a sign she lettered. That "R" sure looks familiar! http://www.flickr.com/photos/lifeinthefield/2962501339/

This poor addled race-baiting nincompoop is looking at some charges, I think, like filing a false police report, for one. (But what about the race-baiting nincompoops like Sean Hannity and members of the McCain campaign, who eagerly bit on this rotten story that even Michelle Malkin could see through? And can we now please recognize the go-to black bogeyman story employed by sad-sacks like Ashley for what it is the next time it's dragged out of storage among the other racist toys in their attic?)