When the right wing gets out of touch

There are right-wing and left-wing bloggers who show sense — who write their blogs from a perspective of a principle. They can hate Bush, but also say, “He’s putting NASA in the right direction,” and they can love him but say, “Ordering the NSA wiretaps was wrong.”

They defend principles, not people. Principles are good, they show grounding and maturity. But people can be good and bad, right and wrong. Treating them as one-dimensional cardboard cutouts is the mark of a bad journalist.

And that’s what we have in loudmouths like Michelle Malkin — the Morton Downey Jrs. of our time. Rather than argue sense, they opt for sensationalism and they claw for their 15 minutes of fame. Rather than defend any principles — they apparently have none — they defend the President in lockstep.

Left-wing blogs and commentators who do the opposite — attack the President no matter what he does — are just as bad. But right now the right-wingers are yammering the loudest and least logically.

In this case, when Bush is under attack for ordering what are likely illegal surveillance operations, and then gets caught breaking the law, do loudmouths like Malkin say, “Yikes! I support the President but he’s wrong?”

Nope. After all, it’s noise that propels them, not principle. They don’t have the latter. Instead they blame the messenger, calling The New York Times unpatriotic for — gasp! — daring to point out the President’s misbehavior.

The fact is, the Times and other journalists are the patriotic ones, and Malkin et al are far from it. Unlike less-democratic countries, we’re allowed to question our leaders, and certainly allowed to shout from the rooftops when they break the law.

These yahoos are upset because, they claim, newspapers (evildoers all) have exposed a secret government operation — this time around it’s the surveillance of Muslim homes, businesses, and mosques. The journalists have damaged our security, they crow.

They completely ignore the fact that these programs are likely illegal and certainly wrong, and that the President may have broken the law by implementing them. Malkin and her kind are upset not about Abu Gharib, but that newspapers revealed it. Not about the CIA’s secret interrogation facilities, but that the story was on the evening news. Not about the NSA’s illegal wiretaps, but that the public discovered them. Not about the FBI’s spying on Planned Parenthood and Greenpeace, but that someone dared to use the Freedom of Information Act to learn about it. And on and on.

They are as unprincipled as you can get. They stand for nothing other than defending the administration’s actions no matter what they are. A principled person can like an administration but hate some of its policies. But when all you can do is, like Malkin, echo the party line — well, why are they worth listening to? They’re not.