THE OLD DARK HOUSE. Hadn't been over to see the Ann Althouse site for a long, long while, but I retain a soft spot for her, so when tipped today by the Perfesser (with the irresistible tease, "Teenager? Is TMZ threatening to post child pornography?") I took a chance. Professor Althouse was talking about the Carrie Prejean sex tape:

But TMZ — I don't read it much, but, again, I'll guess — does not itself parade as Christian. Prejean does, and so she will be held to the high standards of Christianity, while TMZ can say and do whatever it wants. ("When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. ")

TMZ is following Rule 4 of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals":

Scripture and Saul Alinsky? This explains so much: Althouse is The Anchoress!

This argument that hypocrisy doesn't exist for the Elect is by now an old rightwing favorite, and the quality of Althouse's reasoning hasn't changed much from the old days. But the Jesus stuff was a shock. I went down into her comments; a quick scan suggests that the old let's-pretend liberals (what were their names, again? Rainbow? Sunshine?) seem to have fled or outed themselves, and the remnant are leaving stuff like this:

What's difficult as hell to do is to live up to the standards that would be set up for Christians by the butt-buggering sodomites. The rapists of 13-year-old children.

Christians could never live up to the sodomites' expectations.

Thankfully, though, Jesus doesn't require that. And we know they'll spend eternity burning in hell.

So at least there's that comfort.

Amazingly, Althouse is still removing comments, perhaps because they don't come up to the standards of this gem, or because they're actually messages from her employers trying to reach her because her phone has gone dead and her windows are boarded up.

Den Beste isn't still blogging, is he?

UPDATE. Althouse has a 1,200-word response, in which she claims I quote her out of context. The link to her post remains active, so you can judge that for yourself. She also thinks I misunderstand her, and deliberately, lest I be forced to declare I agree with her, which would get me fired. On the contrary -- if our disagreements are as important as she portrays them, such a revelation would be headline news, and boost my traffic. I might get promoted to janitor. Think of the prestige, and the raise in salary!

She's right about one thing, though -- there's no evidence that she removes comments. That was "a lazy mistake," if she'll forgive my quoting her again without attaching the rest of the post to make sure the context is clear.

An Althouse defender comes to comments to notify my readers:

If you can ever tear yourself away from the one website you visit every day you would understand how big of a joke Edroso is in the blogging community, and it's because he does stuff like this.

I had deceived myself that they were laughing with me. But that's okay. If I weren't content with negative attention, why would I write about these people in the first place? The rest of you I leave free to dump me for some more reputable site, lest you suffer in the Althouseans' eyes guilt by free-association.

I should add that I am grateful to learn that the hell-fire commenter had specific targets in mind for her hell-fire, "Polanski and the Hollywood-type liberals who've defended him," though I had no idea those people ran TMZ, nor that they constituted all of Prejean's detractors. Shows you how dangerous it is to go to Althouse's site without a concordance.