i'm frustrated

Sometimes I like to read websites I disagree with to see the other side of the political spectrum. It's partially an exercise in futility, because most of the right-wingers right now are pretty much unreasonable. But what really got me fed up was that a few of these sites were talking about how Michelle Malkin had been a great addition to the blogosphere. So I checked out Michelle Malkin's website. And I checked out her books. One of which was titled In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in the World War II and the War on Terror. And I thought, fine, anybody can be racist, incoherent, stupid and fascist. But the real frustration was that people actually gave this book good reviews. The United States formally apologized for internment in the 1980s! Reagan signed the internment reparations bill into law! Yeah, Reagan was just a politically correct lefty.

The positive reviews of this book are really an insight into some dark netherworld of America. I have no idea what the hell happens there. And I was grotesquely curious. Who are these people? Where do they get their facts and ideas? So I poked around in the books that customers who bought Malkin's book had also bought. We've got the flattering biography of Kerry Unfit for Command. The book about Hilary Clinton that is essentially a big personal smear, including a baseless claim that Bill Clinton had "raped" her. And Men In Black, the contradiction laden anti-judicial polemic/farce that claims somehow that Plessy and Dredd Scott were activist decisions. It also claims that the decisions that required a warrant for wiretapping were unconstitutional, because the "constitution does not include anything about wiretapping. Yes, the moment you use anything that was invented after the Constitution was signed, your Constitutional rights immediately vanish, since it wasn't mentioned in the Constitution. By this standard, the government should be allowed to limit everything printed on laser printers, because the First Amendment doesn't mention laser printers, now does it?

Now these books have a few things in common, besides being massively flawed. They are all perceived as such a joke by most reviewers that not a single one garnered a legit editorial review on Amazon. All the books also got a lot of customer reviews, most positive. This is, as I said, a scary netherworld where one simply seeks out what he agrees with, and rubberstamps it. There is no regard for the facts. It's all about conservative and liberal. There's nothing about true and false.

And speaking of that bullshit dichotomy, conservative and liberal are not coherent ideologies anymore. Time was, conservatives actually stood for smaller government. Now they want a bigger government too, so long as it can turn Public Broadcasting to their ends, channel money to religious organizations and schools and defend some sort of unrigorous and subjective standard called the "sanctity of life." Intervening in Terry Schiavo case = small government? Torturing possibly innocent detainees = small government? Allowing federal agents to conduct searches without a warrant or look at the library books we check out = small government? Invading anothe country to insert a liberal democracy = conservative small government? That's some sick and twisted world. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

Don't fuck with me today. At least until after work.