THE DEATH OF OUTRAGE. The Miley Cyrus story is not much, and so not much that even Howard Stern has denounced her Vanity Fair photo spread. (The odd bit is that her father Billy Ray is a former Pax TV actor and Jesus testimonialist. Well, to be fair, Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication.)

Maybe I don't have much of a story either, as my favorite God-botherers are taking this rather lightly. Rod Dreher, having perhaps exhausted his compassion on Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse, cuts the little tart no slack. "The dear thing is shocked," he says. "She was, she claims, hoodwinked by the evil Annie Leibovitz into appearing semi-nude after her parents left the set (never mind that her publicist, her granny and her manager were still there)..." Then, for laughs, a Brother Theodore routine on nymphets. I guess Dreher has finally decided that the Benedict Option is in full effect, and is preparing for a new Zion where the Cyruses will be unwelcome and the nubiles will dress less provocatively when not screwing fogeys.

James Poulos does offer a wistfully Benedictine closer ("It's going to take a long time to untangle the psychosexual web this culture's woven. Maybe forever") but defends the principle of "marvelous fresh fecundity and youthful radiance" in representational art, which is inevitably reduced in our corrupting times to "the erotic appeal of a giant confection. In an earlier era, this picture would in fact be a painting of a nameless young girl, and it would be a work of art. In this era, it's a brick in a long, high wall." So maybe the real problem is mass production -- in a nobler time, we had to wait for geniuses to laboriously hand-paint our softcore porn, and it was shown in galleries where jacking off was frowned upon. Supply and demand being what it is, the Masters wouldn't have bothered with Miley, who is "not particularly gorgeous," and the Cyruses would have been content with a simple, rustic existence, with Dad appearing in Passion Plays and singing with his daughter in the church choir. I wonder that Poulos chooses to contribute to the degrading march of technology by writing online; doesn't he realize that every new reader he brings to this fetid trough will be degraded beyond redemption? The more the merrier, I say, but he should consider switching to illuminated manuscripts.

Ross Douthat figures the Cyruses have it macked: because "the Cyruses are stage-managing this whole 'controversy,'" they probably have "enough worldliness and self-awareness to navigate Miley's adolescence without letting the celebrity machine grind her down into Britney Redux." He saves his tears for "the weak and the damaged and the dumb" who suffer in the maw of the machine. Well, that's capitalism, comrade -- most of us writers are likewise too weak and damaged and dumb to score a prestigious gig (like an Atlantic blog), and will wear away our souls scribbling unprofitably, maddened by the prospect of fame, pathetic victims of the opinionating machine. Weep for us!

We could easily go downmarket for some real ravings, but when the major thinkers of culture war can't pop a stiffy over a half-dressed teenager, America may be on the verge of losing her moral compass, and alicublog of losing some valuable material. I hope at the next Restoration Weekend Bill Bennett gives them a good talking-to.

THE NEVER-ENDING STORY. Obama put a little more daylight between himself and the Reverend Wright -- divisive, destructive, outrageous, appalling, etc. I guess I should put my own disappointment aside, and focus on the political capital this has won Obama among those citizens sincerely troubled by his connections:

"Too Little, Too Late..."

"No 'Sister Souljah' Moment for Barack Obama..."

"Of course, in reality, Obama's nature and (especially) nurture left him worried that he won't be perceived as 'black enough,' so he has devoted much of his career to working to extract money from whites and spend it on blacks... (Bonus quote: "I'm always being denounced as 'obsessed' about race...")

You may find more measured stories in the old-fashioned news outlets, but all of them end something like this:

Whatever happens to the Reverend Wright story now, one thing is clear: the long relationship between the pastor and the politician is forever changed. And Obama has had to spend yet another day trying to regain the narrative of his campaign.

Update at 11! And so it goes. You can't win the game when they keep changing the rules. Somewhere John Hagee is laughing his ass off.

A METS GAME IS NOT A DINNER PARTY. I went to Shea on Saturday, and heard the heavy boos for the slumping Carlos Delgado. So I can understand his reticence to take a bow after his second homer on Sunday. The New York Post's Joel Sherman affects concern for the relationship of the Mets and their fans:

The Met loyalists turn verbally pessimistic at the first sign of trouble in a nine-inning game. The booing feels like the in thing; hey everyone is doing it, so why not me?... There is no let-bygones-be-bygones here. There is a lack of trust toward the team, a lack of faith that the manager or management knows what they are truly doing, a lack of conviviality toward the roster.

And as one player asked, "Do they think that is helping us?" In other words, it is hard to win, harder yet when you are playing either in anticipation of the boos or to try and ward them off. Both media and fans have become harsher over the years, but there is a quick, energy-sapping maliciousness at Shea that is hard to match anywhere.

This is a little rich. Booing makes it hard to win? Major league ballplayers have earplugs made of 24 karat gold. They haven't heard anything besides "Your contract demands have been accepted" and "My name is Tiffany, can I ride in your limo" since Triple A. On those rare occasions when our displeasure reaches them, their response is Delgado's: a quiet Fuck You.

I have followed the Mets through seasons in which booing was about the only cheap pleasure to be had at Shea. The team has gotten better, but the years of overpayment and underperformance have left us a little jaded, maybe even slightly depraved. Last year's collapse was certainly no fun for anyone, but the fans who paid both keen attention and a good chunk of the players' salaries -- and who later learned that Paul Lo Duca's combativeness in the home stretch may not have revealed the heart of a gamer, but the long-term effects of steroid abuse -- had good cause to be bitter.

Soon the franchise will relocate to a new stadium, where everything will certainly cost more: tickets, beer, hot dogs. I think fans who notice, for example, a decreased willingness among Met infielders to dive for ground balls may be forgiven a little vociferation.

No quarter asked, no quarter given, and Delgado was well within his rights to go Ted Williams on the boo-birds on Sunday. I would be pleased if Delgado hit many more homers and circled the bases each time with two middle fingers held proudly aloft. In fact, maybe the key to 2008 is to keep hate alive. If the Jose Song fails to motivate Reyes to realize his considerable potential, maybe "You suck" will; I would happily trade that stupid song for some timely base hits. Athletes know that the best way to shut a big mouth is with a big win, and if they want to stick it to us ingrates by cruising to a World Championship, that would suit me fine.

SOME GET STONED, SOME GET STRANGE, SOONER OR LATER IT ALL GETS REAL, WALK ON. Jeremiah Wright says, "I said to Barack Obama, last year, 'If you get elected, November the 5th, I'm coming after you, because you'll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.'" Barack Obama says, "[Wright] does not speak for me... He does not speak for the campaign." So reporters and commentators have them twinned as never before.

Obama wore a flag pin the other day, so there is more news than ever about his refusal to wear a flag pin.

The conventional wisdom is that Obama has to do something drastic about all this -- maybe hit Wright with a blackjack, or go around dressed as Captain America. But under this kind of ridiculous hazing, there's really not much he can do. Though he may try and paint the corners now and again, Obama is clearly disinclined toward the grand renunciatory gestures the press has prescribed for him. I suspect he realizes that this course could fatally derail his Presidential run, but would rather fail going forward than in retreat.

We think of these crises as a test for Obama, but as things are currently playing out, they strike me as more of a test of our politics -- that is, of whether we are so fatally addicted to sideshows that we can't have a national election about even the most pressing national issues. Obama's political fortunes, or those of any candidate, are small potatoes compared to that.

RETRO FIT. You have to pity the leftover 80s Republicans. People no longer tolerate the cigars, zoot suits, and swing dancing with which they once attempted to insert themselves into American culture, and the attempted transition to South Park Conservatism never quite took. Many of them now brood in their condos, riffling dog-eared P.J. O'Rourke and Tom Wolfe books and dreaming of what might have been.

Give credit then to libertarians Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie: where we behold only a pathetic scene, they see a market opportunity, and following the Time-Life method of repackaging old crap for new profits seek to re-sell the old crapcom "Dallas" as the Le nozze di Figaro of the Reagan Revolution.

"Dallas" wasn't simply a television show. It was an atmosphere-altering cultural force. Lasting nearly as long as recovering alcoholic Larry Hagman's second liver, it helped define the 1980s as a glorious "decade of greed," ushering in an era in which capitalism became cool, even though weighted with manifold moral quandaries...

After a long hip parade of unironic countercultural icons such as Luke of "Cool Hand Luke" and Randle Patrick McMurphy of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Dallas" created a new archetype of the anti-hero we loved to hate and hated to love: an establishment tycoon who's always controlling politicians, cheating on his boozy wife and scheming against his own stubbornly loyal family. But no matter how evil various translators tried to make J.R. and his milieu... viewers in the nearly 100 countries that gobbled up the show, including in the Warsaw Pact nations, came to believe that they, too, deserved cars as big as boats and a swimming pool the size of a small mansion.

I have no trouble believing that the gangster brand of capitalism practiced in much of the old Soviet bloc is inspired by shitty old TV shows. It takes nerve to brag about it, though.

For obvious reasons I prefer to think of these things as diversions rather than as a cultural signposts. Maybe in years to come we'll look back at "The Sopranos" as part of a magical time when we all decided, the hell with it, America's really just a large criminal enterprise so let's get ours while the getting's good. And at "American Idol" as when American popular music began to really, really suck. Maybe that explains our culture in general these days: the cynicism of the audience has caught up with that of the advertisers.

SHORTER DAN RIEHL: Liberals make a big deal about so-called "human rights," yet they refuse to defend a celebrity tax evader.

THE OVERCLASS STRIKES BACK. George F.ucking Will today:

After 1962, when New York City signed the nation's first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money.

August 1, 2007: "Firefighters, Scientists And Teachers Top List As 'Most Prestigious Occupations,' According To Latest Harris Poll."

Will, forever the callow young lord whose noblesse oblige turns to viciousness when the servants ask for a raise, probably never knew what normal people still (thank God) remember: disrespect for the nobler enterprises of society is one of the real signs of social collapse.

ASK AN EXPERT. People are stockpiling rice -- perhaps on the advice of the Wall Street Journal -- in sufficient quantities that Costco and Sam's Club are limiting purchases. I sure hope this panic over staple foods among heartland citizens is unjustified. But I lack the economics training to read the situation. So let's see what the top libertarian thinkers say about it. That always makes me feel better. ChicagoBoyz:

Back about 15 years ago I attended a seminar put on by Honeywell. The presenter arrived with several loaves of bread and brought the receipt from the store for them. This initiated a discussion of the whys and hows of choice, and marketing. Some people want more expensive bread because of the ingredients, some want a healthier fortified bread for the nutrition, and some people just want the cheapest thing they can find, any quality perceptions or realities be damned. I don’t remember what the point of the seminar was, but I always remembered the bread demo. I recently ran into this gentleman at a convention and he was happy that I recalled him as “the bread guy."

That's nice. The price of wheat has increased a gazillion percent in the past year, so I can see why the author is feeling nostalgic for 1993. (He also tells us about a really cheap can of shaving cream folks can buy. I don't see why -- you don't need shaving cream to slash your wrists.)

Commenters -- and the author, in a follow up ("The media is full of stories of doom and gloom about how food is skyrocketing in price, so let’s take the opposite tack...") -- talk about all the cheap foodstuffs (mac & cheese, ramen noodles, etc) with which complainers over food prices may shut their pie holes instead of pie, which would be too expensive.

I hope the Boyz get a gig with the McCain campaign, and disseminate this message of hope all over our great land. America: Home of the Mayonnaise Sandwich!

(Maybe I'm reaching, but they asked for it.)

BURN THE HONKY TONK DOWN. I predicted they'd go after Obama for Richard Pryor. They're getting closer. After a detour -- Malcolm X? Blogger, please! -- Human Events' Evan Gahr goes after "Obama's Other Jeremiah Wrights," namely Ludacris and Jay-Z. After tittilating Human Events readers with some expurgated lyrics, Gahr says:

Obama thus far has equivocated on rappers. He has criticized their language, but adamantly refused to denounce the whole sordid genre as the unique cultural problem that it is.

Suppose we apply this root-and-branch approach to country music. From the old murder ballads through the works of modern-era superstars, we can see a normative attitude toward drink, drugs, and violence against women. Many country songs promote alcoholism, loyalty to anti-social homies, and brawling. Even the female stars are getting in on the act, a sure sign of social breakdown.

Yet John McCain has failed to denounce country music. Maybe Gahr can persuade him to appear in an appropriate venue -- Gilley's, perhaps -- for a Sister Souljah moment. I would advise him to bring plenty of chicken wire.

FOR DUMMIES. Julie Nixon Eisenhower made large contributions to the Obama campaign, and National Review Online's Lisa Shiffren draws what I'm sure she thinks are the inevitable conclusions:

Perhaps we humans are psychologically limited in our options, to following in the footsteps of, or rejecting and rebelling against our various patrimonies. Or, given the linked picture, perhaps the fact that she looks like a carbon copy of her mother — a bit mad, but with a little more iron about the jaw — suggests that she is not her father's daughter after all. The picture is more shocking than the deed. Trisha Nixon Cox, (the blond, putatively less ambitious, "pretty one") still looks like the girl America knew, and, recognizably, has given her campaign donations to John McCain...

Many NRO scribes betray a stunted view of life and human nature, but Schiffren's actually seems heavily informed by fairy tales about princesses and wicked stepsisters. (She also characterizes Hillary Clinton's marriage as a "deal with the devil.") I know there are other adults who think this way, but Schiffren's the first I've seen who could write complete sentences.

SNAKE OIL. Let's suppose you're an educated man, a Perfesser even, who sometimes likes to wax anti-intellectual -- whether out of self-disgust, philosophical confusion, or just for funsies, we'll leave for another hypothetical. These bagatelles attract hordes of winger yahoos, delighted that a college man is saying, or quoting, the sort of things they normal hear only on Fox News and from that guy who lives under the bridge.

This makes you a few dollars and a big name. And the elusiveness of your style -- usually just a link and a simple interjection -- prevents you from looking like too much of a yahoo yourself to casual observers or Perfessorial colleagues.

By and large, you've got it made. But like all sinecures, yours presents opportunities for comic dilemmas. Sometimes, despite the grand claims made for blogging, you have to go to long-form political blather in the MSM -- you are not yet as well-known or well-compensated as Katie Couric, or even Heather Nauert, so your pool of prospective suckers must be expanded if you and your family are to afford the robot bunker of your dreams.

So, good news, you have an assignment from New York Post, where the suckers are plentiful. Bad news: it's Earth Day Week, and the topic is global warming. As your rare substantive comments on the subject reveal, you are not totally insane about it. But your yahoo followers are; so, over and over and over you have portrayed global warming as a fraud and a joke. Now you have to appear outside your comfort zone, minus the protective cover of your usual fortune-cookie style, and try to avoid looking like a sell-out to your usual dopes and a lunatic to big-paper readers.

The result is comedy gold from the first paragraph, which sort of contains its quintessence:

I HAVEN'T been able to get very excited about the big global-warming debate - but I am excited about some solutions to global warming. These are just as worthwhile even if you don't believe that human-created climate change is a big problem, or even a reality.

The charitable explanation for this would be that the Perfesser so loves science that he would like to see it tackle non-existent problems just for grins, much as a young WWE enthusiast might like to know whether The Undertaker could beat up Batman. Alas, the Perfesser's quick reference to the "religious wars" between the "Church of Green" and the "Church of Carbon" -- suggesting that the scientific community is just being as silly as those lovable scamps in the PR firms of the oil and gas industries -- does little to win our charity.

The Perfesser comes out loud and proud against "hair-shirt" scientists with their demands of "impossible sacrifice," but picks an unfortunate example of the more realistic view:

Just ask people in China - now the world's No. 1 carbon emitter - how interested they are in returning to the economic conditions they suffered a few decades ago when their carbon emissions were lower.

Just ask people in China how they feel about Tibet, while you're at it. You'll probably get a similar answer -- that is to say, muffled screams. They're giving us a nice, protest-free Olympics, what more do you want?

Meanwhile, "many scientific champions of global-warming theory" are proclaimed to be on the Perfesser's side because they're against "impoverishing the world" to appease Gaia. Plus which "some environmentalists" are for nuclear power. It's a coalition of unnamed, innumerable exceptions! The problem, non-existent as it is, is half solved.

All that's needed for a big finish is the 21st Century version of the last refuge of a scoundrel: technology. If the solar power cited by the Perfesser sets his homeboys to grumbling, "nanotech" ought to shut them up, as it is new, highly speculative, and not yet associated with hippies. Plus it can be explained in consumerist terms -- "Imagine how much more efficient a family car could be if you cut the weight in half" -- offering further proof that the Perfesser offers hope and cool cars, while all the stupid scientists (or "some" of them, or "many" of them, depending) want to do is make us and our friends in Red China go to their Church, eat flavorless health food, and generally bum out.

It may be said that the Perfesser's dilemma is solved, too: neither his customary blog readers nor his new MSM ones will find much fault with his column, because they'll never be able to figure out what he's saying. He who heh's last heh's best!

UPDATE. Commenter Craig points out that the "not totally insane" global warming post mentioned above wasn't written by the Perfesser, but by his guest-blogger Megan McArdle, so the credit for marginal sanity goes in that instance to her. This is a better example of Reynolds' grudging global warning acceptance.

GO FOR IT, DERB! I usually rejoice in John Derbyshire's unfiltered Asperger's rants on race, and today's celebration of Enoch "Rivers of Blood" Powell started promisingly enough, with a declaration that "Powellite sentiments" -- segregation and expulsion of dark people, in case you didn't know -- "were brow-beaten out of the public square" via a "campaign of propaganda, brainwashing, and intimidation."

When he got to "[Powell's] first trip ever to the United States," I looked forward to ravings about the British statesman's clear-eyed appraisal of the intractability of Negro anger, and how right he was, as the United States has become a place where African-Americans cannot be avoided, even at most country clubs. Alas, Derbyshire changes the subject to Vietnam.

What a disappointment! It's not like he needed to blaze a trail; rehabilitation of Powell's racially "contrarian" views has been going on among legacy-hungry conservatives for some time. I suspect even Derbyshire is feeling the heel of political correctness on his neck. Let us hope he wrenches free of it and, his ardor engorged by the spirit of resistance, unleashes a stemwinder on what he really thinks.

Till then, it's pretty sweet to see even Derb's watered-down racial obsessiveness share a page with Andy McCarthy's lament that Obama consorts with extremists. Spasms of self-awareness sometimes trammel (though unconsciously) individual National Review writers, but the magazine's institutional memory seems not to register with them at all.

SERVICE ADVISORY. Going soon for my annual trip to Medical Disneyland. (Explanation here.) Will try to keep in touch. If I don't make it back, a final thought: don't mourn, organizize. (Also: Thimk.)

BARELY LEGAL. I've been rough on Rod Dreher for siding with Islamic fundamentalists against the pornography that made this nation great, but maybe I merely misunderstand him. Maybe he's really just a cultural adventurer, curious about and tolerant of strangeways around the globe. For instance:

In our culture, it is abnormal for 14 year olds to marry. The fundamentalist LDSers have a communal structure built to accomodate married 14 year olds (well, "married"). I happen to think it's terrible to force a 14 year old to "marry" a 50 year old man who has five other "wives." I would put a stop to it. But shouldn't we at least ask ourselves on what ground we stand to criminalize the practice, when many of us are perfectly willing to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples.

If you're surprised Dreher, who doesn't even want high-school girls to engage in inter-gender wrestling, is relatively cool with Church of Lolita-Day Sex, you shouldn't be. The cultists have a skygod and the sort of "Benedict Option" separatism that gets Dreher mistily reminiscing about David Koresh. With God all things are normative!

I think this presents an opportunity to advocates of gay marriage: simply declare homosexuality a faith and gay marriage one of its sacraments. Not only might they finally get Dreher's respect (and that of a wider, momentarily-confused redneck populace), they would be eligible for government grants.

They would obtain other rights, too, it appears:

On January 10, 2004, the church suffered major upheaval when Dan Barlow, the mayor of Colorado City, and about 20 men were excommunicated from the church and stripped of their wives and children (who would be reassigned to other men), and the right to live in the town.

If I'd known when I was younger that there were churches that followed the ways of Gor I might have rethought this whole atheism thing. Well, too late for me now: I'm too strong in my lack of faith and values to endorse such religious practices, except on a fantasy role-playing level.

RAISING THE FLAG. TBogg's right; the whole Green Iwo Jima uproar is worse than ridiculous. Or, as he puts it:

You really have to wonder what is wrong with these people that their rage richters are constantly cranked up to 11. These are the kind of people you read about whose crushed lifeless bodies are found underneath capsized vending machines all because they went DefCon 1 when their Zagnut refused to fall.

I see him his Canned Heat album cover and raise him this failed start-up. Jock was meant to be a thinking man's sports mag; its debut issue had articles by Woody Allen and William F. Buckley Jr., it was edited by Mickey Herskowitz, and its graphics consultant was Helmut Krone. As nobility of failures goes, that ain't bad.

Contrary to what you might think if you only know the hypercrazy media environment in which we now live, Jock was not taken down by "outraged" veterans; like Gablinger's Diet Beer it suffered from storming a niche that hadn't been chiseled yet.

That the people who dig so deep to find offense are the same ones who constantly bitch that "political correctness" limits free speech would qualify as a irony if irony still existed.

A QUICK ONE WHILE SHE'S AWRY. Two days after accusing me of "snide sexism and heteronormative stereotypes," Megan McArdle (of, we never tire of adding, The Atlantic Monthly) writes

I don't know that I agree with Mark Kleiman that Barack Obama's masculinity won't be an issue in the coming election. On the one hand he's tall, but he's kind of, well, scrawny looking. But also, the political space I think he's trying to occupy--building understanding and reconciliation between hostile voter grops--is generally seen as a woman's role...

I don't have a joke here. I'm only bringing it up to provoke her into another 2,000 word defense of double standards. I love when she does those. They're like brain teasers with no solutions.

IN THIS VERSION, SALLY BOWLES CAUSES THE HOLOCAUST. Talk show host Dori Monson denounces a Nicaraguan art installation in which a dog was starved. His conclusion:

You want an example of the slippery slope of an art world where anything goes? This is just an extension of the moral depravity of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe with his bullwhip in the anus... of Andrew Serrano with "Piss Christ"... when you have acceptance of works like those, it is not a tremendous moral leap to starving a dog.

Well said, comrade! When nothing is true, everything is permitted! I feel empowered to graduate from my occasionally obscene writings to a killing spree. Who's with me? (If you feel unqualified because you only swear recreationally, in the manner of the Wizard of Oz I'll give you some hokey-looking certificate, and then we can go hit the homeless encampments.)

As I've noticed before, these people really don't understand the idea of consent.

UPDATE. When Matthew Yglesias made the Obama-Jay-Z connection, I thought: oh no, soon they'll be demanding Obama identify and explain the 99 problems of which a bitch is not one! Sure enough, here comes the thin end of the wedge: Stop The ACLU brings up the Jay-Z thing, then suggest that Obama gave Hillary the finger, something he clearly learned from his gangsta rap homies. And since, as we have seen, engagement in obscenity leads to a reckless disregard for life itself, it's only a matter of time before Clinton makes a citizen's arrest, claiming there's a guy in Allentown who swears the man who shot him looked just like Obama.

UPDATE II. Well, that got around. RedState commenter: "It might not have been intentional, but if it was, it makes me like him more. Although I'd still use it to trash him in the general election." Laugh about it, shout about it, when you've got to choose/Either way you look at it you lose.

UPDATE III. As some commenters point out, this dovetails nicely with the Yale miscarriage artist whose possibly hypothetical stunt incurred the wrath of seriously underqualified art critics all along the reactionary fringe. My favorite, from a commenter at a well-known libertarian site: "And we come to the crux of what I hate about art." Well, yeah: as we have discussed before, the instinctual reaction of propagandists to anything more complex than a Morning Memo will always be High Boorishness.

RAISING THE BAR. At The Hill Byron York has made a whole column's worth of conservative talking-point out of Obama's bit about his friendships with former Weatherman Bill Ayers and Republican Senator Tom Coburn. After paragraphs of meaningless comparison of Ayers with Coburn (with such horror-movie intertitles as "And then, the Coburn Card"), York finally gets to the relevant point of Obama's argument:

Sen. Coburn and I disagree on some things, and yet we’re still friendly. Bill Ayers and I disagree on some things, and yet we’re still friendly. So what’s the problem?

That was a relief -- for about a nanosecond:

That’s not quite good enough. [cue sinister music]

Obama needs to tell us more about his relationship with Ayers. It’s important because voters might well wonder whether that relationship, coupled with Obama’s longtime relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is the beginning of a pattern...

...a pattern which, unlike most china, dressmaking, and test patterns, currently consists only of two elements, Ayers and Rev. Wright. But York did say the beginning of a pattern! And who knows what other undesirable friends and acquaintances Obama might have? Turn over your Blackberry and old matchbook covers, Senator!

The nonsense has spread all down the conservative lunchtable ("Does Obama Believe Coburn=Ayers?" asks The American Pundit; "Obama Equates Conservative Republican to Terrorist Bomber" says Gateway Pundit, etc).

One would think Obama had proposed Ayers for Secretary of State instead of just hanging out with him. In a few weeks, they'll find security camera footage of Obama shaking hands at a rally with a guy who later drove drunk and killed a rabbi, and then we'll hear about Obama's beginning of the genesis of a theme of a pattern of anti-Semitic violence.

Well, at least people have stopped referring to him as an affirmative action case -- because it's clear no candidate has ever been held to this kind of ridiculous standard.

THEIR LITTLE ROCK AND ROLL. A few people who (lucky them) didn't know much about this blog crap before they read my Voice article have questions. The most common is, "Why would anyone want to read about this?" The next most common concerns those bloggers who, though their history and attitude show that they're extremely unlikely to vote Republican in November, still complain that my "arrogance" and "demonizing" are driving them away from the Democrats. What, they ask, is the point of this charade? Whom does it convince?

When short of time or just too drunk to speak, I hand them the glossary. Pretense of sympathy is one of those rhetorical tropes that even the unsophisticated can work, as seen on playground where kids yell, "Too bad you're such a retard."

The bigger question is, what is concern trolling and its home-field equivalents meant to achieve? Because I have never seen it even begin to change anyone's mind on issues or candidates.

The simple answer is, it's not about the argument, it's about keeping the crowds coming in. Like other kinds of masquerade, it's an easy way to make your blogging sexier.

In all but a few cases, political blogging is meant to reenforce the prejudices of its readers. Simple chest-pounding and foam-finger-waving get tiresome after a while, so bloggers who want to keep their audiences try to mix things up. But most don't have much in the way of mixers in their cabinets, and certainly can't write well enough to cruise on style.

So, as some of our ancestors developed prehensile thumbs, the more advanced bloggers develop more complicated arguments which, while they may lead to the same conclusions as before, take the reader on byways of reason that make the journey more rewarding and might even (if he is really ambitious) enrich the blogger's point of view, too. This is the point where, it may be said, blogging starts to turn into writing.

But if you're not interested in writing, or any more complex achievement than the leading of online pep rallies, there is a shortcut: instead of feeding complexities into your work, you feed them into your online persona.

Instead of merely being the member of the tribe who holds the talking stick, you can become a fascinating person with unexpected depths. It's not that hard. Since you are constructing rather than revealing a personality (you don't have the artistic control for that), you can start throwing quirky, contrarian things about yourself into your posts. Add as many as you like; you don't have to worry too much about making the effect believable or coherent. It's sort of like writing a screenplay for Madonna. Just make sure that, in the end, you make your readers feel good about themselves.

I just found a great example of this in one Rachel Lucas. In a recent tirade, "The Core of What Liberals Just Don't Get," she states:

If most of us do not, in fact, feel good about our country (which is a whole other question again), the source of that lack of good feeling stems almost completely from the results of liberal/progressive thinking and behavior. In other words, it’s people like Obama who make us feel bad about our country.

Okay. I guess we know how she feels... or do we?

This might be another great time to point out that I’m not even a conservative, and I still feel this way.

Following that last link, we hear about the things that exempt her from conservatism. Anyone want to guess... oh, I see you got it right away: pro-choice, pro-legalization of weed, not too religious. (Funny how easy that was; I said "wants national health care" just to mix things up and I got burned.)

But don't worry, she's not going to hassle you about that. Instead, she'll tell you how nice conservatives are, and that "liberals tend to be assholes."

To be fair, she does argue with conservatives sometimes: here's a post in which she chides them for insufficient enthusiasm for John McCain: "You’d rather have Hillary Clinton, a bona fide socialist, liar, all-around bad person, as president. You’d rather have Obama, the senator with the most liberal voting record, as president." Eventually she explains again that she's not a conservative, this time in all capital letters.

You may be asking yourself what the effective difference would be between this non-conservative and a conservative. The answer is marketing. She offers her conservative readers the thrill of apostasy -- someone who doesn't go to church hates Hillary too! -- without ever challenging or discomfiting them. For a few minutes, they can believe that no one would disagree with them if they knew them like Rachel knows them.

And we get what in American political discourse is the optimal result: no one learns anything and everybody's happy.

UPDATE. In comments, Susan of Texas finds the McArdle connection ("We all have multiple potential selves within us, none of which is more 'real' than any other..."), and better Susan than me, because if I said it you know it would be heteronormative, somehow.

PAPAL BULL. During Benedict XVI's American tour, you may tire of watching the pontiff work his small range of expressions and resemblances (when he is enthused and engaged, Dracula; when he is not, Sam Jaffe in The Scarlet Empress). But conservative bloggers -- whether out of allegiance to Opus Dei or just out of collegial feelings for a fellow dogmatist -- are riveted. From The Corner at National Review comes this awestruck Michael Novak reportage from the Pope's D.C. lodgings:

...hanging on the wall, a life size portrait of [Benedict] by the great Russian émigré painter, Igor Babailov.

Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Apostolic Nuncio, said in advance that the portrait catches the pope’s shyness, strength, and almost physical presence, in stirring colors of light gold against the dark.

An "almost physical presence"? Maybe it's actually a hologram that blinks on and off. Also:

Best of all, the figure of the risen Christ towers above Pope Benedict...

If Benedict is, as Novak says, "life size" in the picture, and Christ towers above him, the whole thing must be the size of a small billboard. Imagine being comfortable with a near-mural starring oneself in one's apartment -- especially one that, "in its style and presentation," Novak reports, "reaches back to the traditions of the great artists of the Renaissance." I imagine this would be a little much for Siegfried and Roy, let alone a simple man of God.

But this ostentation is just funny; some forms of Pope worship are creepier. At the Weekly Standard, Mark Shea compares the relationship between Benedict and Americans to that of St. Paul and the Corinthians -- and no, I didn't mean "American Catholics," because neither does Shea: he means the lot of us, whom he blasts as a "Paris Hilton kind of people" with "a culture that is desperately in need of the clarity, humility, beauty, and love of Christ that [Benedict] preaches with such marvelous grace."

So if you ain't a congregent, you best congregate anyway! And if you aren't so inclined, too bad, because the TV stations are all tuned to the former Inquisitor performing his Stations of the Crass: zipping around in his motorized vitrine, listening to ecclesiastical yammering (where the dazed Sam Jaffe look comes into play), and explaining to Americans (alongside their despised leader) that they aren't entitled to freedom, because it isn't a right at all -- just something God grants. If you're lucky. And he's in a good mood.

No doubt some of us will get lulled by the incessant coverage, and begin to think, well, the man talks about religion and we all know religion is a good thing, and he certainly wears nice dresses. Let me explain something:

Back when I was in the first grade of a Catholic school, the nuns used to slap us and make us kneel on metal rulers as punishment. Then came Vatican II, and corporal punishment ceased. Eventually we could eat meat on Fridays, and even take a swig of the sacramental wine. It was like the Prague Spring. We still had to do catechism drills and go to Mass every First Friday, but the small kindnesses inspired by John XXIII's Council gave us the notion, however faint, that we were not just souls to be processed for redemption, but also human beings. That may be why I was eventually able to escape.

Now consider this: Benedict and his guys want to roll back Vatican II. He didn't come to America to be your best friend: he came to lay down the law on the faithful, and tell them that "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted." He doesn't want the souls trapped in his net to get one little breath of freedom, lest they develop a taste for it.

The simultaneous pomp and boredom of the TV coverage tends to minimize it, but the Pope's message, to put it in the mildest possible terms, is not necessarily consonant with the traditional American idea of liberty. Of course no one will ask any hard questions about it of the Americans who support and choose to stand with Benedict -- the Catholic Church has way more juice than the Trinity United Church of Christ. But it's worth keeping in mind during all the ring-kissing.