Why the obligatory link? Rule 2, baby, Rule 2. When I link to him, he links to me. And since he's coming up on three million visitors in his second year of blogging and carries a Google Page Rank of 6, that's a damn good deal. But, as time goes on, I find myself more inclined to pick nits than to either weigh in with "me tooz" or try to start detailed ideological arguments (Stacy's got bigger game to hunt than me; he occasionally offers a substantive reply, which is nice, but I'd rather not wear out that tendency on his part).
What's my beef with Malkin? Well, it irks me that someone with so much potential -- in the 90s, I'd have picked her in a heartbeat as "young libertarian columnist most likely to become a big-name libertarian columnist" -- blew it so badly. The jury's still out on whether she went completely batshit insane after 9/11 or whether she just decided that it was easier to cash in on paranoia and hitch her wagon to the War Party than eke out an honest living in the real world, but that's a distinction of little importance. The only redeeming characteristic of her post-9/11 output is that she mercifully serves up her rotten, wormy political stew as "conservatism" instead of damaging the "libertarian" brand with it.
Anyway, from the obligatory weekly OTM link:
Go read what terrible things were said about Michelle Malkin when she published In Defense of Internment. Malkin took on a very difficult topic, exploring the reality of the U.S. security situation circa 1941-42, explaining circumstances so as to cast a new light on that troubling episode in American history. For her skill in performing a difficult task -- a task she surely knew out that the outset would expose her to angry attacks -- Malkin was denounced as if she were actually endorsing the internship [sic] of Japanese during WWII, or advocating some similar policy today.
There's no "as if" about it. Malkin clearly did endorse the internment of the Issei and Nisei populations. From the introduction of In Defense of Internment:
The central thesis of this book is that the national security measures taken during World War II were justifiable, given what was known and not known at the time.
Is Malkin's endorsement of internment justified? Is her defense of internment successful? My answer to both questions is "no," but those are separate issues and ones which I urge you to reach your own conclusions on, preferably after reading the book, or at least the excerpts available on Google Books (see link above -- I won't stoop to selling this one for an Amazon commission). The relevant question is whether or not she did, in fact, endorse internment. There's no doubt whatsoever that she did.
Nit picked.
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