Kevin Drum – formerly of Calpundit, now of Washington Monthly – usually writes on politics, but in an article today he tackled – in an oblique manner – the browser wars.

What was interesting – to me – is that the article basically zeroed-in the whole issue of bundling products: Microsoft’s contention has always been that it’s not up to judges to decide what goes into a product, it’s the call of the company and the marketplace.

There’s a great deal of validity to this. (Yes, have to consider the monopoly issues; agreed.)

But the comments on this issue (yes, a couple are mine) pretty much focused on how MS sucks, how IE is not compliant, how Opera or Mozilla is the better browser, how OpenOffice is a good replacement for MS Office and so on…

Uh, OK, some valid points, but that’s … uh … not the focus of the article. It’s about bundling.

And people turned it into a Holy/Religious War.

I hate this shit. That’s what’s happening in the Middle East folks; it’s why Richard Clarke is being praised/slammed in Washington D.C. right now.

In a disturbingly overwhelming way, all three issues (MS, Middle East and Clarke) are focused on most anything but the actual issues going on. Just keep twisting the facts…or use one part of one fact to launch on an attack on some unrelated issue…

Maybe I’m just getting too old and cranky; maybe I’m irregular; maybe I’m upset to discover that John Stewart’s The Daily Show isn’t real journalism! Gasp!