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Appealing to the herd is irresistible to the alternative prom crowd on MSNBC. These are people who have been awkward throughout their entire lives. They laugh a little too hard at jokes that aren’t funny, and get too excited at minor flubs by their enemies. Usually, the socially maladroit don’t hurt anyone and, with luck, will eventually find someone who appreciates their license plate collections.

No one enjoys picking on dorks. But the nightly smirkathons on MSNBC canceled out the usual solicitude. Things change when the lonely nerds decide they will lash out at the world from their sets at MSNBC.

As the famous psychiatrist M. Scott Peck says, “We are impressed not only by the innocence but also by the cruelty of children. An adult who delights in picking the wings off flies is correctly deemed sadistic and suspected to be evil. A child of four who does this may be admonished but is considered merely curious; the same action from a child of twelve is cause for worry.”31

Sure that someday he would be quoted like Oscar Wilde, in 2009, Olbermann manfully ripped into twenty-year-old Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean, night after night, giggling mercilessly with the Village Voice’s Michael Musto in their gay coffee klatch about how stupid Prejean was.

Musto: This is the kind of girl who sits on the TV and watches the sofa. She thinks the innuendo is an Italian suppository.…

Olbermann: The moral in this is, what, never cross a beauty pageant official who knows you’ve had implants?

Musto: Yes, exactly, that’s it. This has escalated to a public shaving.… They also paid for Carrie to cut off her penis, and sand her Adam’s Apple, and a get head-to-toe waxing.… Now he’s a babe who needs a brain implant. Maybe they could inject some fat from her butt? Oh, they have?

Olbermann: I didn’t like her earrings.32

That’s not Oscar Wilde: That’s what gets your face smashed in and your lunch money taken away in high school. But Keith thought he had achieved such comedy gold that he replayed that segment on four other shows.33

I guarantee that Carrie Prejean is no dumber than Cindy Crawford, Stephanie Seymour, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, or Naomi Campbell, who are treated like a virtual Bloomsbury group by the elites. This is not a criticism, just a suggestion to cut the crap with conservative Christians like Prejean.

Liberals are people whose entire lives are consumed with following the crowd. Otherwise, how will they get a reputation for speaking truth to power?

Ever since David Letterman has become a tired old hack, watched by people about to collect Social Security, he has specialized in cheap applause. In June 2009, Letterman told this knee-slapper about Sarah Palin going to a Yankees game with her daughter: “There was one awkward moment during the seventh-inning stretch: her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”

Except Bristol, the Palin daughter who got pregnant out of wedlock, wasn’t at the game. Fourteen-year-old Willow was. And Rodriguez hasn’t gotten anyone pregnant out of wedlock. The only way the joke works is if you’re willing to accept that being a compulsive womanizer is close enough to getting girls pregnant and Willow Palin is close enough to Bristol Palin.

But Letterman was bullying the daughter of a hated Republican, so the audience knew it was supposed to laugh at the lame joke. The New York Times “ethicist” couldn’t even acknowledge it lacked the basic elements of a joke, explaining that even though Willow isn’t Bristol, and dating women isn’t impregnating them, “a joke is a form of fiction, the punch line a contrivance: the bartender was not actually talking to the duck. A premise, too, can be invented: a man with a duck did not really walk into a bar.”34

Yes, but if the talking duck runs into Alex Rodriguez and Willow Palin in the bar, Willow can’t suddenly become Bristol and Rodriguez can’t become John Edwards.

How about a joke about Obama getting smashed? Did I