SO MANY RETARDS, SO LITTLE TIME. God, the web's infested with brain-lice today.

I expected the usual idiots to exploit the recent dead-miner unpleasantness as a victory of blog-borne news over old, worn-out, no-longer-cool MSM (though I notice Pajamas Media, the Perfesser's hobbyhorse, reported the story on January 4 this way: "In an extraordinary twist of fate, 12 miners caught in an explosion in a coal mine were found alive late Tuesday, more than 41 hours after the blast").

But I must credit the New York Post's Ian Bishop with going beyond the call of idiocy, under a headline that sounds like a collaborative effort by Evelyn Waugh and Nathanael West: "SIMPLE FOLK VENT THEIR OUTRAGE AT THE BIGSHOTS" --

Residents were rightfully serving up blame by the bucketful. Mine executive Ben Hatfield was an easy target — and so was Gov. Jim Manchin.

The local talk-radio stations — both of them — were lit up with calls whacking the gov.

Where was their Rudy Giuliani? irate listeners wondered...

The locals feel that they're saddled with the brother of Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, whose hand-wringing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina last year made her a national joke.

At least Bishop refrained from using quote marks. Even credulous Post readers might find it hard to imagine heartbroken backcountry folk in their moment of anguish crying out for Rudolf Giuliani or cursing the name of Kathleen Blanco.

Meanwhile, I suppose you all heard about that poor woman whose ventilator was turned off because she couldn't pay for it, and who subsequently died. This is the sort of thing that outrages normal people, but gets the glibertarians enthusastically re-tucking their shirts and clicking their pens. Andrew Sullivan's third string :

While here the critics are mostly on the left, the argument parallels closely what you'll hear from opponents of assisted suicide on the right: revulsion at the prospect that terminal patients might make decisions about when to end their lives on the basis of "economic considerations." I'm with Landsburg: It seems mad not to allow economic considerations to play a role—that's not heartlessness so much as the ethical equivalent of refusing to let your genitals do the thinking for you.

There's an argument: if you support the right to die, you support the right to be killed! As for the "genitals" bit, there are some depths to which my analysis will not sink.

God, that was depressing. I could use some real laughs... but Lileks is too generically hippie-hatin' today, only recovering the higher notes of his madness with the climactic "Wal-Mart, for example, probably won’t stock the Swedish jeans. I think that says it all"; Crazy Jesus Lady is just gently scolding the dolls around her tea-table, and what's the fun in that?

Thank heaven for Altmouse!