War and blogs, what are they good for?

There’s a warblogging book coming out.** No, that isn’t a link to a story at The Onion…it’s really happening. In all fairness, a collection of online writings about the events of September 11th with the proceeds going to charity sounds like a decent idea. It’s interesting, possibly important, and it’s doing some good. What I find curious is the agenda attached to it: “Let us crush the apologist/root-cause-spewing/Western-civilization-hating/lefty-fascist essayists with blogger logic and righteous indignation. This is a mission.”

So, what are the choices here? Either a) everyone with a weblog is a hawkish right-wing Westerner; b) only those webloggers who are hawkish right-wing Westerners can submit something for consideration; or c) I’m not getting a joke here. What seems like an opportunity to take a balanced, accurate snapshot of what people all across the Web were writing online at the time of the events of 9/11 has somehow turned into us vs them. Isn’t there enough us vs them going around these days? How about letting everyone play…or at least make folks who may not be right-wing or pro-West feel welcome to contribute?

Related topic: what the hell are the warbloggers going to talk about when the “war” is over? There will still be political issues and current events to yammer on about, but they seem to have a lot invested in that name. Maybe they could all turn their sites into a big online book club that only discusses H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

** I sincerely apologize for the weblog-related posts of the last two days…there are probably about 3 people out there who could give a shit. I promise that tomorrow I will return to posting about more important things like what I ate for breakfast, how freelancing sucks, my continuing battle with the shower, and how deeply I have been injured by the repeated disparagement of my personality (or lack thereof). Wait, that’s no good either…