Boing! Boing! offers a nice example of the sort of mindless Liberalism that pervades on left wing sites these days (and while Boing! Boing! is largely a techie/culture site, its increasingly frequent political posts are mindlessly Liberal).
Boing! Boing! has posted numerous rants against the Patriot Act, some of which I agreed with and others which I didn’t. But they’ve been consistently opposed to the Patriot Act specifically and the idea of giving up civil liberties in exchange for security in general.
Unless, in doing so they can make a point against President Bush. So, for example, today we see the following post (emphasis added),
Farnaz Fassihi, a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Iraq, confirmed that a widely-redistributed letter she emailed to friends about the nightmarish situation in Iraq was indeed written by her. Too bad the WSJ doesn’t allow this reporter to write these kinds of stories for the paper.
Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity,” Fassihi wrote (among much else) in the letter. “Guess what? They say they’d take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler.” And: “Despite President Bush’s rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a ‘potential’ threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to ‘imminent and active threat,’ a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.
Now if John Ashcroft penned a letter saying, “Guess what, Americans would prefer to live under a dictatorship rather than risk another 9/11″ he’d be excoriated by Cory Doctorow and Mark Frauenfelder. But as long as the author simply advocates such an arrangement for Iraq, well, of course, that makes absolute sense.
And just for bonus points, the controversy over the fake documents that CBS used to disparage George W. Bush’s National Guard service is clearly the penultimate example of the power of blogs and distributed fact checking and information sharing to have a major impact on the mainstream media and wider culture.
When the controversy first occurred, Mark Fraunfelder was very excited apparently because he misunderstood the story, framing it as Did the White House release forged documents about Bush’s service record?. As soon as it was clear the forged documents were from CBS, not the White House, Fraunfelder completely lost interest in it.
Apparently bloggers and other Internet technologies taking on the big boys is only interesting when it targets right wingers. Bloggers catching a major news program passing along forged documents is apparently too last year to bother mentioning.
