Defending the Indefensible

Washington Post syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker has seemingly become so overwhelmed with her new found role as enemy of hoi poloi that she will excuse any kind of boorishness or aberrant behavior if criticism of it arises from the supposed enemy of good sense, the blogosphere.

Thus, Ms. Parker defends Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, who famously was caught on camera recently groping the breast area of a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton while an acquaintance pretended to grab Ms. Clinton by the hair and pour beer down her throat.

Ms. Parker rues the loss of "low tech America" and laments that "no one's having fun anymore."

All of which causes one to wonder how drunk an adult has to be to consider groping a cardboard cutout to be either fun or funny? Drunk enough to imagine that Ms. Parker writes well?

Cheap shots aside, in all of my days of walking down malls and seeing life sized cutouts of celebrities, it never occurred to me to entertain either myself or my fellow mall walkers by grabbing said cardboard in certain places. Has it ever occurred to any normal person above, say, age 12? Either extreme amounts of alcohol or some sort of mental illness would have to be involved.

Whatever the case, there is no doubt that the internet is sometimes abused to put people on the defensive needlessly. This is not one of those cases. Technology in this instance has not unreasonably imposed standards of decency; it has exposed a lack of them.