(Ugh, TimesSelect, come back! Untear down this paywall!)

I'd been toying with a similar comment for awhile, but Choire at Gawker beat me to it. TimesSelect has been unwalled for some time now, yet I haven't felt the need to praise or throw tomatoes at, or even pay much attention to any of their stable of OpEd writers.

Did the wall lead to their increased irrelevance? Or did it merely reveal how uninteresting most of their observations have been? When you couldn't link to them, you didn't really miss linking to them, and now that you can link to them again, it hardly seems worth bothering to link to the latest entirely predictable screed from Friedman, or Dowd, or Hebert.

The article by Thomas Friedman that hacked off the blogger at Gawker enough to unload both barrels of snark at Friedman was an article about the current college age generation. He's determined that letters continue to be the best way to define generations, so he assigns "Q" to the current kiddies, for the 'Quiet American' generation. He praises them for all their commitment to service, and derides them for not noisily protesting crap the way the 60s generation did.

So dumb, but where to begin with how and why it's dumb? Seems the 60s is remembered differently than it actually was, for one thing, the majority of folks, even the majority of college aged folks, weren't full time marchers, protesters, and hippies. Nixon won the 'youth vote' in both 68 and 72, so this perception that kiddies then were all this progressive vanguard doesn't match the facts. The hippies and freaks dominate the discussion and the nostalgia industry about those years, but they were never the majority, just a vocal, dirty, hairy, drugged-out minority (I forgot smelly). The squares were the 'silent majority' then, and continue to be the silent majority now. Friedman is just seeing that fact with different eyes when he looks at people his daughters' age.

So the kiddies today would rather meet and greet via facebook and myspace instead of at a sit-in, march or rally in the quad. The end result is the same, though. The dirty secret of the protest movements back in the 60s, is that for a great many of the participants the primary motivation was avoiding military service (for the guys) and getting laid (for both the guys and gals). The internet makes it so the kiddies can hook up much easier now, no need to pretend to care about more than getting sweaty together, and the lack of a draft makes protesting the current conflict about politics only. Today's kids aren't political in that sense, they're joiners, and doers, and even activists, but they've also grown up with a touch of a libertarian streak and appreciate being left alone to do their own thing, and seem to understand that implicit with that expectation is to get out of the way and let others do their own thing, too.

This in part might explain the core of the young Ron Paul supporters, they've been so used to being told that everything must be designed to cater to them, and that limits must be put on all their activities and options, that when somebody comes along saying the only limit that should be put on a citizen is what the constitution says, and beyond that, you should be left to your own devices, that message strikes a chord. Unfortunately, Paul is a nutbag who adds in all sorts of extreme isolationism and entirely unrealistic economic policy ideas to destroy the good of his core libertarian message, but it's forgivable for young college kids not to get how dangerous Ron Paul would be if he actually got the job of President. Nothing explains their insistence on wasting their time and subverting every poll that his name pops up in, though, that's just being asinine and demonstrates nothing more than too much time on their hands.

A Reader Suggests . . .

Scouring my endless torrent of email, I came across a suggestion from a reader

Notice how whenever Andrew Sullivan does one of his "a reader writes" or "a reader suggests" that this unnamed reader basically says exactly what Mr. Sullivan was thinking. I'm beginning to think that there are no readers, and that he's faking these emails! I know, shocking to say the least, but it does seem like just a tired, hackneyed and pussified way to distance himself from statements that he wanted to make anyway but which he's hoping to paint with a shimmering veneer of credibility that if he just comes out and says that this is what he thinks may lack. And when I say that this is pussified behavior, I of course mean no disrespect towards his orientation. There are plenty of pussified heterosexual men, and there are plenty of non-pussified homosexual men, but when it comes to matters of intellectual honesty there are more than a few occaisons of late where Mr. Sullivan is one big massive vagina.

Anyway, that's what "a reader suggests", I certainly wouldn't have put my criticisms of Mr. Sullivan in those terms, I would have just pointed you to his rather incomprehensible man crush on Rep. Ron Paul as all the evidence you need that Sully has lost his freaking mind.

Don't believe me? Look at his reaction to the debate yesterday, in a series of posts that boggle my mind he takes on the media for their unfair(!) portrayal of Dr. Ron Paul as a crackpot.

He seems to think that internet polls are beyond gaming and sees Paul's victory in a Worldnet Daily poll as proof that Paul has appeal to rabid conservatives. If The Advocate had a poll on gay marriage and a bunch of "Christianist" (his term, certainly not mine) jumped in and skewed the results, I doubt he'd take that poll seriously. I suspect a serious case of the Mobys whenever these polls go up and some lefty jokers are organizing to screw up every online and text message poll where Ron Paul is an option. If Republicans and conservatives didn't have lives, they could do the same to the Dems and Gravel would win every time, but things like google bombing and astroturf letter campaigns and poll fixing are mostly the provenance of lefty losers and tech savvy idiots with too much time on their hands.

Whenever I visit Sully's site I tell myself this is the last time as he has ceased being capable of sustaining a thought that's worth listening to, yet I still venture over there. What's wrong with me?