I am no fan of Al Franken, who likes to play tough guy as long as he’s dealing with people who are too civilized or surprised to fight back. I’m very much hoping he will run for the Senate seat in Minnesota, just so I can engage in the schadenfranken of watching a car crash of a campaign that would make John Kerry’s ongoing debacle look competent.
But since I first expressed my opposition to Michelle Malkin’s “In Defense of Internment,” I have been deeply disappointed to discover that Alice was not entirely wrong to cast stones at the right-wing commentariat in “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.” The sad fact is that there truly appear to be people on the right who have the same distant relation with the truth as the media whores of the left.
Just to give one of many possible examples, in defense of her assertion that potential espionage by Japanese-American citizens required their internment, Michelle Malkin wrote on her blog:
Spies on the West Coast, where the movements of our aircraft carriers could be easily monitored and where the risk of hit-and-run attacks like the one at Pearl Harbor was substantial, posed a greater threat than spies on the East Coast, where there were no aircraft carriers and no risk of a major attack.
This is wildly untrue. In early 1942, the period with which she is concerned, the aircraft carriers Wasp, Hornet, Ranger, Charger and Long Island were all on the East Coast, operating out of Norfolk, Va. On the West Coast, there was only Saratoga, being repaired while Enterprise, Yorktown and Lexington were out raiding and protecting convoys in Samoa.
John Leo, who ominously salutes Malkin for breaking a taboo and opening a debate on “internments past and present,” also delves into historical fantasy by writing: “With most of the U.S. fleet destroyed at Pearl Harbor, the Pacific became a Japanese pond.” Which is true only if you consider five of 17 battleships, zero of 9 aircraft carriers, zero of 18 heavy cruisers, zero of 20 light cruisers and two of 250 destroyers to somehow equal “most.”
Most disappointingly, the eminent Dr. Thomas Sowell, who has long been an intellectual hero of mine, defends internment by writing: “No one knew where Japan would strike next.” However, the Blue Flag Messages at the Naval Historical Center record that “Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, insisted on a more aggressive plan of attack during the early months of 1942 … He knew that the Japanese had weakened their defenses in the central Pacific by transfers of land-based aircraft from the Mandates to the southwest Pacific, and he knew in detail the whereabouts and often the destinations of each element of the Japanese Combined Fleet.”
Now mistakes – even howlers – are made by every columnist from time to time. But when egregious mistakes are compounded by evasive half-truths, it raises real questions about whether they were honest mistakes at all. On WBAL radio last Tuesday, Ron Smith asked Michelle Malkin how she would be responding to my challenge to debate the question of military necessity. She backed down, saying:
“I won’t be doing that. I have already addressed those questions on my blog.”
However, the only posts at michellemalkin.com related to the question of military necessity were made on Aug. 6 and Sept. 6. I did not join the growing number of Mrs. Malkin’s critics until Aug. 18, and I did not even send her my list of 10 specific questions until Sept. 8. The truth is that she has never successfully addressed a single point that I have made with regard to her many factual inaccuracies and erroneous assertions, on her blog or anywhere else.
Conservatives, libertarians and Republicans often pride themselves as being more committed to the objective truth than the biased left-wing media. But when confronted with the mistakes and misrepresentations of those who are on “our side,” we have two choices. We can reject them, or we can imitate the other side, circle the wagons, and pretend we are all in agreement that black is indeed white.
There is no more to write on this matter. The facts are well-established. I hope, however, that we will prove ourselves to be better and more principled than the Al Frankens of the world say we are.
