Eric Muller of Is That Legal? has been jacking Michelle Malkin for In Defense of Internment since her first stupid words on the topic dropped. God only knows why she hasn't just folded...but it looks like game, set and match from up here in the cheap seats...
Michelle Malkin's Ever-Shrinking Defense of Racial Internment
Doing research on World War II in the papers of Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson, historian Greg Robinson discovered a document from July of 1942 in which Assistant Secretary or War John J. McCloy asserted that Japanese Americans were removed from the coast largely because the government could not control the white population of California. Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times wrote about the document in a column, arguing that the document further corroborates the case that the internment was an outgrowth of group feeling, hysteria, and fear.
This document (further) devastates the revisionist claims of Michelle Malkin in her book "In Defense of Internment." (You can read the rest of the devastation here.) Malkin argues that McCloy was the chief architect of the Japanese American internment, and that he settled on the policy of evacuation and internment because of top-secret decrypted evidence of Japanese American spying (the so-called "MAGIC" diplomatic cables) to which he, and a very few others, were privy.
That Robinson's document helps kill Malkin's thesis is obvious: Five months after the launch of the policy of evacuation and internment, McCloy tells a superior at the War Department that the main reason for the policy was an out-of-control white population in California.
She puts up a weak defense:
On the first point—the authenticity of the handwritten note—we expect a Dan-Ratheresque disquisition about kerning and typeface, but Malkin gives up the game before really even starting it. When all is said and done, she says this:
"I would venture a guess that McCloy probably wrote the note. But unless someone locates the original, we cannot be certain. In failing to acknowledge this uncertainty, Ramsey and Robinson are either being sloppy or dishonest."
Ramsey and Robinson are being sloppy or dishonest?
Let's do a reality check: Malkin builds her defense of the racial detention 110,000 people on three key propositions:
...and Professor Muller deals with it appropriately. I love it.
"...Assistant Secretary or War John J. McCloy asserted that Japanese Americans were removed from the coast largely because the government could not control the white population of California."
My mother was born in the little San Joaquin Valley farming town of Pixely. She grew up in the larger nearby farming town of Tulare and graduated from Tulare Union High School. She always told me that the internment of the Japanese was just a scam to allow folks she called "Okies", although she meant whites in general, to get possession of the farms and businesses that were owned by Japanese-Americans. She said that the Japanese folks in her community had beautiful farms and homes and all of it was taken away from them by the government and given to whites.