Wonkette Strikes Back

I knew it was only a matter of time until Ana Marie Cox would come up with a riposte to Michelle Malkin. Lucky for Ana, Malkin wrote a book defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II at the same time that this little cat fight started. This deserves to be quoted in full. Take it away, Wonkette:

The great thing about political rant books is that you can hate them first, not read them later. And so it is with Michelle Malkin's ambitious new tome, "In Defense of Internment." Actually, the full title is "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling,'" but that seems like overkill -- perhaps she should have taken a less inflammatory position, like, say, "In Defense of Internment: It's Not Like We Gassed Them." Oh, wait, that is her position.

According to the publisher, "'In Defense of Internment' proves that everything you've ever learned about the World War II 'internment camps' for Japanese in America is wrong," a sentence which does with a single set of scare quotes what took David Duke his entire career. Among the things you learned that are "wrong": The camps "weren't the product of racism or war hysteria, they weren't only for Japanese, and they were nothing at all like the Nazi death camps to which they are often compared by craven and opportunistic alarmists on the Left." Well, OK then! Of course, the internment camps ("internment camps") also weren't designed to kill people, but that's setting the bar awfully low.

The publisher does try to up the expectations a little bit, though -- teasing us with the promise that we will learn "[w]hat the West Coast relocation centers were really like," and asserting that while "tens of thousands of ethnic Japanese were allowed to leave; hundreds voluntarily chose to move in." Hey, maybe we should take "camp" out of the scare quotes after all!

Oh, and just for the record? "Malkin is not advocating rounding up all Arabs or Muslims and tossing them into camps." [Emphasis theirs.] But we didn't think so. . . we hear it's more of a "shoving them gently into jail cells" plan. Still working out whether or not glowsticks will be involved.