Mollie...did you know I do Wheel while drunk?

I also thought it said "Bucket List." I finally figured it out, Peter, and I thank you. If everyone else will excuse a personal aside, I know I owe you an email. Give me a day or two.

It wasn't all that long ago that the absolute worst thing you could say to someone was, "Hey, come on over to the house, and I'll show you my home movies." We now spend hour upon hour watching other people's lives. There is something very deep, very dark and very sad going on. I wish I had the insight to be able to explain it.

I appreciate the "welcome backs." Knowing the value of teases and shameless promotion as I do, let me mention that I'll discuss my sabbatical on the Ricochet podcast the week after next.

Thanks, I will. And I will soon explain my absence.

Dave,

All the really good plugs are shameless.

Okay, Mollie, you got me. I'm Wink Martindale.

I couldn't have said it better, Claire, even if I were Vice Chairman of the Hillsdale Board of Trustees. Oh, wait...never mind.

What makes the Palin case such a goldmine for the MSM is that accomplishes two goals: peer approval and increased reader or viewer interest. The former is due to the general tone of their coverage and the latter due to her wild popularity and unpopularity. She will remain big news for a long time.

There is a hard-to-believe truism that many media outlets will often follow a self-destructive course if that course is looked on with approval by peers. In other words, they will expend far more effort to be liked by their brethren than by their viewers or readers. A frivolous, but instructive, example is the incredible amount of coverage given to soccer's World Cup by major newspapers, even though the bulk of their readers have little or no interest in it. That decision is almost aggressively anti-commercial. Their peers will applaud their efforts to promote an international sport, and their xenophobic readers will get their medicine. It's nuts, but it's true.

Claire, it really is a chicken and egg argument. Besides which, if the media are merely responding to a market, why are they not generally right of center, as the country is? 

Claire, the incident reminds me of the time I was looking out over the Gulf of Finland during a visit to the Soviet Union in 1988. I turned back to look at the city and saw a sea of rooftop television antennas--all, by decree, pointing inward, away from the Gulf. It was a touching, sad sight, and results of such a society can now be seen in an empty park.

There are actually three lists, and you're on each of them.

Food fight!

This is Maryland. Don't bet on it.

There will always be a double standard regarding personal behavior, with those who talk most about morality apt to take the most heat if they transgress. That doesn't strike me as unfair, because irony makes for a good story. However, the idea that hypocrisy trumps morality is ludicrous, though that appears where we're headed.