Was reading some of the reader's reviews of "Unfit for Command" and there are a slew of comments of people ASKING AMAZON TO CLOSE THEIR ACCOUNTS thanks to their policy of "relaxing" standards for commentary for the Kerry book...

to wit:

Thank you for contacting us at Amazon.com. I would like to assure you that Amazon.com is not affiliated with any political party, nor do we endorse any opinions expressed by individual authors, musical artists, or filmmakers. While we do handle Borders' online sales, we at Amazon.com have no connection to how Borders stocks it's individual stores. "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry" has been the top selling book on our website for some time now. We are a retailer and have no incentive to censor or discredit a book that is a very popular seller. We decided to relax our normal review policies due to the intense nature of Presidential year politics. This policy works both ways, as you may note that many of the reviews attack John Kerry and his supporters as well, including two recent reviews that refer to Mr. Kerry as a "coward" and "treasonous." I apologize if anything we did led you to believe that we favored a particular political party. It is Amazon.com's policy to remain neutral in these matter and we sell books that express a wide variety of political views.

The Kerry faithful have been bombing the reviews with brief 1-star rating diatribes, and Amazon is eagerly permitting them (instead of critical reviews)

Why? Sounds like Jef Bezos' company is a little BIASED for Hanoi John.

Read the reviews for yourself and decide (you may have to go back 10 or 20 to find the complaints, every day there are more one-star wonders trying to bury the truth.

If true, then FU Amazon!

I am outraged that nobody else is outraged over this!

They're a private company, so there are no assurances of free speech or fair play.

Just buy the book elsewhere.

I know for a fact that Amazon's policy is to remove 1-star reviews if they are part of a co-ordinated bombing campaign because another website (slashdot.org) co-ordinated one on another book once.  Amazon removed all the 1-star comments.

My ex-wife's brother went to school (Harvard) with Jeff Bezos.

He is as lefty a liberal as any.


Here on "opensecrets" you can see he's been donating to a very lefty Democrat, Patty Murray.

www.opensecrets.org/indivs/search.asp?txtName=bezos&NumOfThou=0&txt2004=Y&submit=Go%21

Update:   Here's more on Bezos and his wife's donations.

Now they have a One time ONE PRODUCT change of policy that has no other effect except for decreasing the "signal to noise" ratio on the website?  

http://www.opensecrets.org/indivs/search.asp?NumOfThou=0&txtName=bezos&txtState=WA&txtZip=&txtEmploy=&txtCand=&txt2004=Y&txt2002=Y&txt2000=Y&Order=N