Nerve Endings Firing Away

When the conservative bloggers run out of news to cry about, they resort to non-issues. The latest in this charade is the campaign against Google for being un-patriotic because — they didn’t display a Memorial Day special logo on their homepage. You cannot make this stuff up. Although he doesn’t call himself a pure conservative, Instapundit added fuel to the fire (of course, his blog his choice and all that) when he linked to Jonah Goldberg’s rant on Google:

It’s kind of sad. They change their homepage logo for all sorts of holidays and occasions. Just last week they paid tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday. But Memorial Day doesn’t seem to rate anything at all.

Instapundit further continued to update his post with other seemingly un-related news on how Google sucked compared to Ask.com or Dogpile. This also led to a mad scramble in the conservative blogosphere as they swore to switch to other search engines due to Google’s “blatant lack of patriotism.” Before I get into why that makes no sense at all, I bet you want to know why Google didn’t have a special logo when only a few days ago they had a Sherlock Holmes logo. Kevin Drum enquired at Google and received the following reply from their press office:

Google celebrates a wide variety of holidays with Google Doodles. Doodles are generally reserved for international holidays and famous birthdays.

They also do not repeat their logos and as Kevin found out, Google’s claims happened to be accurate. Now, any private company is free to make any change to its homepage or logo and should not be expected to toe the politically correct line or satisfy every wingnut. Google shouldn’t be expected to prove their patriotism especially when they have emerged as the paragon of American innovation in recent times by attracting the best of talent and sparking a huge upsurge in the American stock market. They have probably contributed much more to the American economy than all of their conservative detractors combined, many times over.

Secondly, if enough people thought that Google sucked, they wouldn’t be making so much money in the first place. The search business is as open as it can be and competition involving biggies like Yahoo and Microsoft is as cut-throat as it gets. If conservative bloggers are satisfied with Dogpile or Ask results, they are free to switch but for their own sake, let them make this decision based on common sense. All this façade of having to prove your patriotism over and over again by making largely hollow statement of supporting your troops pisses me off no end. This is almost akin to the brain drain proponents who often like to chastise non-resident Indians for not being Indian enough. I guess every nation has its share of weirdos.