The XX Factor

The Last Gasp of the Culture Wars

Lisa de Moraes took another , deeper look yesterday at Bristol Palin’s ability to avoid the ax on Dancing With the Stars , concluding that Palin’s good fortune is due to conservative activists organizing on her behalf. As I noted in earlier blogging on this, it’s basically a “stick-it-to-the-liberals” move, probably the most misguided attempt to stick it to the liberals undertaken without the would-be stickers actually causing harm to themselves. The money quote from de Moraes’ piece:

Meanwhile, a conservative blogger who’s taking credit for the e-mail voting shenanigans, says he orchestrated the whole thing to pay back Democrats for years of voter fraud at the polls.

To be clear, this means that conservatives are organizing to punk a TV show to stick it to liberals who don’t care that much about mindless entertainment like DWTS , and they’re doing it to get revenge on liberals for “voter fraud” that actually never happened. I suppose if you’re going to do something meaningless, it might as well be in service of a paranoid fantasy instead of for reality. Perhaps this is just a warm-up to the scheduled Fox News outrage over the War on Christmas, another conservative freak out over irrelevancies fueled by a belief that imaginary liberals are out to get them. If the right-wing outrage machine keeps at this, within a couple of years the totality of their activism will be putting together snipe hunts after a rumor breaks out that the Obama administration wants to put snipes on the endangered species protection list.

Photograph of Bristol Palin by Michael Caulfield/Getty Images for Extra.