"...it's harder if you're stupid."

As some of you may have noticed, I have been absent from the blogger's desk for about ten days. And with the exception of a bout with stomach flu, my time away has been most pleasant. Lately, it is more than a bit exasperating to chronicle the excesses of liberalism on a continuous basis. I pine for the "good 'ole days" (i.e.: prior to January 20, 2009) when you needed only to be concerned with a creeping liberalism. Now, progressive acts and impulses are on a full tilt rampage; these days, the job of a conservative scribe - especially one with a full-time job and a life besides - is one that never ends.

Just in the length of my absence, the Obama Left has:

- Shown its disregard for propriety and journalistic ethics by way of a (heavily) "Photoshopped" picture of the Great Himself

- Yukked it up while their Supreme Leader turned Hugo Chavez into "Soul Brother Number One"

- Jeopardized the vital work of the American intelligence community be releasing so-called "torture memos" detailing enhanced interrogation methods used by the C.I.A., while opening the door for prosecution of Bush administration officials who consulted on the enhanced interrogation policy

- Obliterated any credibility that the Department of Homeland Security had by dint of Janet Napolitano's unfortunate memos and comments. (See video here of the "money shot" portion of her interview, and here for great commentary on the Canadian border flap.)

But perhaps the most egregious events of my ten day sabbatical involve the contretemps between a beauty queen, Miss California Carrie Prejean and a gossip queen, celebrity blogger Perez Hilton. As you are doubtless aware, while serving as a judge for the recent Miss USA pageant, Hilton asked Prejean her opinion of gay marriage.



The ensuing flap likely caused Prejean the Miss USA title (despite the fact that she was recapitulating exactly the opinion expressed by voters from her state last November.) Even after the pageant, the spit continued to hit the fan:





Whatever your position may be on same-sex marriage, you will have to acknowledge that the job of persuading those who might have been on the fence has been made harder by Hilton's behavior and demeanor. He took a highly nuanced issue and superimposed his own abundant baggage on it. The entire matter transmogrified from being about implied versus specified Constitutional rights to being a referendum on a flamboyant man-child who demands that Prejean negate her own opinions so that his can be validated. It appears that the whole gay marriage effort is similarly oriented towards validating homosexuals more so than any overwhelming desire on the part of gays to enter into monogamous, life-long committed relationships (as discussed elsewhere.)

However, if liberalism run amok is a threat to conservatism, the threat is nearly matched by that similarly posed to progressivism. Simply put, the Left's tendency when it is in power is to overreach, and the gay rights crowd has surely done just that. By demanding that Miss USA not be "politically incorrect" while displaying his own incorrectness by calling Prejean a "dumb bitch," Hilton - and by extension, gay marriage advocates more generally - seem to have shifted from a strategy of coaxing Americans to embrace gay marriage to attempting to bully them into doing so. Hilton's rants may be to social conservatives what Rick Santelli's Chicago Mercantile Exchange floor speech was to fiscal conservatives.

P.S.: The picture above was taken from an appearance Perez Hilton made on a Oxygen Network reality show, The Bad Girls Club. Greg, the young man in Hilton's lap is straight. Even as Hilton eschews what he calls political incorrectness, sexual harassment seems to be no problem.