Perhaps risking showing myself to be a completely uninformed world citizen, I will admit that until he was assassinated a week and a half ago, I’d never heard of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. Now having read more than I ever wanted to know about him, I don’t think I was missing much.
Am I the only one embarassed and not a bit put-off by the endless defenses of web bloggers (those worth reading and those that aren’t) and how Weblogs supposedly “covered the story of Pim Fortuyn’s death better than the major media” (as one blogger put it)? I’m the last one to defend the mainstream media, whom I naturally suspect doesn’t get (or print) the whole story 99.9% of the time. But enough already. Fortuyn’s popularity was based on stoking fear among the Dutch, and as he himself said when a reporter suggested that the people who would vote for him were racist, “So what? Why they vote for me is irrelevant, but if they do they’re in safe hands.”