More Hits Plz Or: Ooo, Please Give RUFNKM Some Of That Blogswarmy Goodness!!!!

So I quit the blogosphere for like a month or two. The reason? Well, in an echo-chamber it's sometimes hard to hear yourself think. So I hooked up a D-Cell battery to some copper wire and taped the exposed ends to the "b" and "l" keys on my keyboard so that every time I'd try to type either "blogspot" or "blogines" into my browser I'd get an electric shock. But last week the juice ran out of the battery, and I've started reading (and posting) again (I've also been hoping there really was a controversy surrounding "V For Vendetta", but that's proved more or less fruitless). This week was my chance to get back in the saddle, to figure out what the biggest of the big deals were, and what do I find?

Ben Domenech. Before yesterday if you'd said the name I'd have replied with "Ben Who? Oh, wait, I think you've mispronounced his surname." But now there's lotsa folks talkin' about him (and that's just the tip of the iceberg) and what his new blog-thing at the Post says about our discourse and wondering how a former Bush staffer gets such a high profile gig. (The obvious answer - "Most mainstream media gets most of its sub-par editorial commentary from former Hill staffers who have not much to offer c.f Will George F., Safire William, Matthews Christopher, Kristol William and Cadell Pat" - seems to have escaped everyone. Speaking of which, it truly is a scandal that part of the government service racket includes not only ease of movement between government service and lobbying but between government service, lobbying, and punditing. I mean, the "government to media to lobbying" circle is like welfare for the well-off yet eternally mediocre, no?)

So, in yet another ham-fisted attempt to gain hits by hitching our waggon to bigger'n'better'n'us, I'm going to use this subject as the "dipping the toe in the shallow-end" exercise. What I couldn't help notice was that this Domenech dude claims he's a Red-Stater, which I think implies he's a conservative, which I think implies he's one of them that thinks government should be smaller because it just rips off the taxpayer or something. So I shouldn't be suprised at all that, when not sucking at the tit of money-losing foundation-funded journals, his professional experience consists of sucking at the tit of the nanny-state (can I get a refund on the part of my tax-money that went to paying his salary?). Nor should I be suprised that he comes from a family of nanny-state tit-suckers since his daddy was a Hill staffer too. None of this is suprising at all, because, as everyone knows, you don't get fame-n-fortune by walking the walk. You get it from the taxpayers. Just ask George H. W.