In what he doubtless considers a fair and unbiased examination of all pertinent facts pertaining to the Iraqi police captain whose existence was disputed for six weeks, Glenn Greenwald claims to have exposed the right wing blogosphere for what they truly are:

And now the right-wing blogosphere stands revealed as what they are -- a pack of gossip-mongering hysterics who routinely attack any press reports that reflect poorly on their Leader or his policies, with rank innuendo, Internet gossip, base speculation, and wholesale error as their most frequent tools of the trade. They operate in packs, constantly repeating each other's innuendo and expanding on it incrementally, and they then cite to each other endlessly in one self-feeding, self-affirming orgy of links, as though that constitutes proof.

And they are wrong over and over and over -- and not just in error, but embarrassingly so, because so frequently their claims are transparently, laughably absurd, and they spew the most righteous accusations without any sort of evidence at all. The New Republic has its Stephen Glass and The New York Times has its Jayson Blair. But those are one-off incidents. The right-wing blogosphere is driven by Jayson Blairs. They are exposed as frauds and gossip-mongerers on an almost weekly basis. The only thing that can compete with the consistency of their errors is the viciousness of their accusations and their pompous self-regard as "citizen journalists."

So here's more:

Nobody is less interested in media accuracy than they are. Correcting media mistakes is so plainly not their agenda. They are nothing more than hyper-partisan hysterics who jump on any innuendo or rumor or whispered suspicion as long as it promotes their rigid ideological views and political loyalties and hatreds. ...

But isn't repugnance a form of taste? And isn't there that old saying De gustibus non est disputandum?

MORE: I realize that this post was about taste in writing (and not truth), but I think it's fair to mention that according to one of the leading right wing hyper-partisan hysterics, Jamil Hussein seems to have used two names, and the story is far from settled, as is the issue of his reliability, which should not be conflated into the issue of whether he exists.

(If "George Harleigh" were shown to have existed, would that make him right?)

This is my third post dealing with Jamil Hussein -- whose existence has been alleged, questioned, denied, and reaffirmed repeatedly. As none of this can be known by me firsthand, I had no way to know whether to believe the AP the first time, the Ministry of Information the first time, or the MoI and the AP this time. And that doesn't even get into the man's reliability.

Whether to believe or disbelieve things said by others -- and under what circumstances -- seems to be a judgment call.

As a philosophical question, yes, the truth is somewhere.

Why does it so often get confused with taste?