A sustaining din of indignation has a steady source in the blogging collective surrounding Michelle & Jesse Malkin.

It appears to be getting more shrill as the group grows. This week saw a raising of stakes of sorts: paranoia of media manipulation in the coverage of the continuing slaughter in Lebanon, Joe Lieberman’s primary loss to a political fish, and the arrests of alleged violent jihadists in Britain.

• On 7 August Michelle appeared on The O’Reilly Factor. She was given a platform to discuss liberal charges of bigotry against conservative politicians and pundits. [MMFA has the video; Link.] In a roundabout response with the apparent goal of plugging her lackluster book Unhinged, she came out in agreement with me and others who use terms like racist, xenophobe, bigot, Islamophobe conservatively and reservedly: “I call people what they are”.
• The “Hezbollywood” posts have also been pouring fuel on the bonfires of outrage demanded by Malkinites and Hot Airians this week. [The excruciatingly poor writing of Bryan Preston can be found here.] As with all “blogpiles,” individuals fail to step back and broadly analyze the situation:

  The obvious: Long gone are the days of Alfred Lord Tennyson. The digital age has brought us a culture of instancy. Fact and rumor don’t just spread quickly; we demand it to be on our screens two seconds ago. And, as it’s always been with wars, the propaganda must precede the facts, so as mentioned, there is no time to wait for a nationalist to write a poem to stir men’s hearts.

  Hezbollah, adapting to this age of instancy as everyone else has, is packaging the propaganda in with the facts. The U.S. military made it very clear on the run up to the invasion of Iraq that it would exploit embedded journalists for the twin purposes of information control: getting the right message to citizens and limiting the scope of that message.Therefore, “Green Helmet’s” cynical use of corpses as props is expected.

  What puzzles me is what the Hot Airians are proposing here. Surely they understand that Hezbollah’s propaganda campaign is aimed solely at those who would be sympathetic to their cause and that the only way to stop the media manipulation is to stop giving them the props. What exactly would they do to achieve their goal?

  If it’s a full-scale ground war with even more massive civilian casualties, it looks like they just got it.

• As always, one should check TBogg before coming to MW. He catches Michelle being her bigoted self by not informing her readers that about two dozen of the alleged violent jihadists arrested yesterday are British citizens.

  She repeatedly refers to them as men of Pakistani descent in a lame attempt to incite racial hatred.

  Blogging — although very nerdy and ultimately a grand waste of time — brings with it a sense of accomplishment and responsibility. It is this bloggers opinion that to consider the blog a broadcasting medium is to overestimate its utility. What is odd about the blogosphere phenomenon is that a handful of sites have large audiences.

  In the cases of Little Green Footballs and Michelle Malkin’s main blog, the responsibility to editorialize is blatantly abdicated. The content, usually in the form of news stories, can lead a moderately informed reader to infer a blogger’s political standing, but what Charles Johnson and Michelle/Jesse Malkin avoid is the explicit expression of policy positions.

  Michelle has long been an advocate of racial profiling. Her infamous In Defense of Internment extolled the virtues of locking up those deemed disloyal to the United State. Although she has never expressed her desire to intern American Muslims, I wonder strongly whether she would be against such a proposal. Where exactly does she draw the line? What would she do if she were manning the controls?