Is it too much to ask?

Is it too much to ask liberals not to indulge in racist, sexist nastiness while accusing the other side of bigotry? I've usually enjoyed Mithra's comments when I've come across them, so I sincerely hope that writing the below represents a temporary lapse in judgement.

2. Michelle Malkin - Far-right affirmative action hire who is so bigoted she'd arrest herself for trying to cross a border. Famously published a book praising internment of Japanese-Americans that was (a) incoherent and (b) probably not written by her. If she didn't have tits, she'd be stuck writing at Townhall.com.

I suppose Mithra's "point" is that Michelle Malkin's popularity on the right could only be as some sort of window dressing because being conservative automatically makes you so bigoted in Mithra's view that you would never take anything a minority woman says seriously otherwise. Yeah. Tokenism. That's why her site is getting about 80,000 hits a day on average. Can you name a female liberal blogger that gets that kind of traffic? Or a female pundit on par (in terms of popularity) with Malkin, Coulter or Ingraham? I don't think so. I guess our side respects women so much there's no need to actually listen to 'em out of tokenism, so we don't listen to them at all. For once, I actually agree with the Volokh Conspiracy. Ugggg!

Note to all liberals: We can be proud of our fight for sexual equality and civil rights. But this does not mean that minority women or blacks owe us political allegiance. We should be dancing in the streets at the sight of a black conservative judge or a Philipina blogger/pundit or a black woman secretary of state on the other side instead of trying to undermine them with cries of "Uncle Tom."

Update: Sivacracy, Talk Left and Alas a Blog all deserves to be read on this issue. And Scott Lemieux is right on the money:

I certainly agree[...]that as an empirical point Malkin being an attractive person of color helped her career; [...] That said, there is a line here--I don't think people are nearly as likely to question the credentials of a Novak or Hannity as a Malkin or Ingraham. [...] Thomas [....] is a good example. It is true that he would not have been appointed to the Supreme Court at the time he was if he wasn't an African American. It is also true, however, that although his jurisprudence is more principled and distinctive than Scalia's, he gets a far rougher ride from liberal academics, and is often derided (quite incorrectly) as being Scalia's sock puppet. Progressives sometimes seem to internalize this "affirmative action hire" argument, and I think it's something to be wary of. It's important to be clear about the distinction between Malkin's attractiveness helping her career (which is true) and her being somehow less qualified than most other conservative pundits (which is clearly wrong.)