The Problem Is We're Not Morons

Today there was a headline that John McCain wears $520 Ferragamo loafers. If the liberal blogosphere were set up like the conservative blogosphere, everybody would be frantically posting about it and linking to one another's attempts at humor, making really crude Photoshops with McCain in a full-length gown and shoes made of gold, create horrible YouTubes about "Richie John" or some other kind of nonsense pun, and basically cause such a ruckus that the AP and Washington Post would devote 1,600-word stories to the shoes and where they came from and maybe an interview with the shoe salesman.

But sadly, we're not juvenile delinquents. We didn't see the Edwards haircut as a big deal and we don't see McCain's shoes as a big deal, and the most we can muster is a slightly ironic raise of the eyebrow and saying "If McCain were a Democrat he'd be pummeled for this..." Rich people can wear what they can afford and I don't really have much to say about it. But there is a kind of asymmetrical warfare at work here. The pundit media, the chattering class, has virtually no grasp of policy and exists to be fed the kind of pointless stories like what kind of shoes a candidate wears. Republicans are all too willing to do the feeding; but Democrats pretty much aren't, and that's a character flaw. Or rather, it's not a flaw, but it causes the critique of Democrats as weak and effeminate to go unchallenged, often. Meanwhile Republicans are tough and rugged and they live on ranches (even though McCain's is not a ranch, it's called one).

I don't know what to do about this. I'm not going to pounce on every little cool kid snickering statement to prove that McCain is some dandy or whatever. It's just not worth it. He has no understanding of the economy, no principles that he keeps for more than five minutes, and constructs his foreign policy around more wars and using the military to problem-solve. That's enough for me. But at some level, these bullshit ticky-tack things do have to be combated in the media.