The Post has launched a reality-show-style contest seeking out a columnist for the paper to anoint as "America's Next Great Pundit," because "pundit" no longer means "person who expounds from knowledge and experience" but instead means "category of celebrity, like glorified hooker or bug-eater."

Here's your chance to put your opinions to the test — and win the opportunity to write a weekly column and a launching pad for your opinionating career!

Start making your case.
Use the entry form to send us a short opinion essay (400 words or less) pegged to a topic in the news and an additional paragraph (100 words or less) on yourself and why you should win. Entries will be judged on the basis of style, intelligence and freshness of argument, but not on whether Post editors agree or disagree with your point of view. Entry deadline: Oct. 21, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Then get ready for the great debate.
Beginning on or about Oct. 30, ten prospective pundits will get to compete for the title of America's Next Great Pundit, facing off in challenges that test the skills a modern pundit must possess. They'll have to write on deadline, hold their own on video and field questions from Post readers. (Contestants won't have to quit their day jobs, but they should be prepared to put in about eight hours a week for three weeks.) After each round, a panel of Post personalities will offer kudos and catcalls, and reader votes will help to determine who gets another chance at a byline and who has to shut down their laptop.

Eyes on the prize.
The ultimate winner will get the opportunity to write a weekly column that may appear in the print and/or online editions of The Washington Post, paid at a rate of $200 per column, for a total of 13 weeks and $2,600. Our Opinions lineup includes a dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, regulars on the national political talk shows and some of the most influential players inside the Beltway. We'll set our promising pundit on a path to become the next byline in demand, the talking head every show wants to book, the voice that helps the country figure out what's really going on.

THE VOICE THAT HELPS THE COUNTRY FIGURE OUT WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON. Somewhere, in America, a sad blog commenter knows WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON. The Post certainly doesn't. But they're going to find that person by way of the internet, test their knowledge of WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON by putting them through challenges to find out if they have the "skills a modern pundit must possess," such as how to make videos of themselves, and then pay them $200 per column to tell us what's REALLY GOING ON. Give these people a bailout. Their continued operation is crucial to the survival of our democracy.

From the Everett Daily Herald:

Five baristas are accused of engaging in prostitution at an Everett bikini espresso stand following a two-month undercover police investigation into complaints that the women were selling more than coffee.

Detectives say the women were charging up to $80 to strip down and flash customers while fixing lattes and mochas.

Investigators saw the women expose their crotches, lick whipped cream off their co-workers' private parts and pose naked for pictures inside the Grab-n-Go Espresso stand at 8015 Broadway, according to police reports obtained by The Herald on Wednesday.

Yes, it is called Grab-n-Go Espresso. The arrests were the result of a two-month undercover investigation into complaints about prostitution at "various bikini coffee stands around the Everett area." Two things of note: 1) There are bikini coffee stands, and 2) More than one of them have generated complaints that they are actually espresso stands/whorehouses. The detectives singled out the Grab-n-Go because it had generated the most complaints, and probably because the name was just too much.

More from the Herald:

An Everett detective took a city prosecutor to the stand to witness firsthand the activities of the baristas. During that visit, two women allegedly engaged in a "whipped cream show" in which they sprayed whipped cream on each other and licked it off.

[snip]

Detectives say the women also charged customers to play "basketball" - a game in which customers were allowed to throw waded up money at the women, who caught the money in their underpants.

No word on whether the baristas' defense attorneys got their degrees from the Wal-Mart School of Law. We're gonna go grab a coffee now.

UPDATE: Apparently this is a thing. A commenter points us to a site that compiles all the "bikini baristas" coffee shops for your convenience. The latest addition: Sweet Cheeks Espresso in Des Moines, Wash.

We learned yesterday, when they posted and quickly removed the leaked CNBC video of Barack Obama calling Kanye West a "jackass," that Politico endeavors to be "respectful" in its coverage of the D.C. media—that's the word managing editor Bill Nichols used to explain the spiking of the video. (He meant, we presume, that they want to keep their reporters getting booked on NBC News programs.) And today, we see a perfect example of that respectful coverage in the site's cheeky little version of the Emmys for pundits, wherein they strung together clips of some of the best practitioners of lowest-common-denominator punditry and asked readers to rank them by how "good" they are at it. The intro explains a lot:

Hollywood knows full well how to craft entertainment — and Sunday night's Emmy Awards will honor the best of the year. But here in Washington, the players know how to entertain and inform with that finest of all television genres: the political chat show. On Sundays, the hosts wake up painfully early to make news and analyze the passing scene. During the week, expert guests zip around town to studios where they pontificate at any given moment - and on any given topic.

The acknowledgment that entertainment is even on the agenda, let alone precedes "inform" in the Politico schematic, pretty much says it all. Of course it's accurate—cable news is entertainment, and Sunday hosts do want to be the ones "making news," rather than their guests. But that's very bad and wrong and they shouldn't be praised for it.

But in PoliticoWorld, our intrepid reporting class is judged not on its facility for rooting out falsehoods or illuminating issues of pressing public concern, but in categories like "Best Gets" and "Best Dynamics." Who's a best get nominee? Why, Barney Frank, of course, because he pulled out his earpiece and walked out during a CNBC interview. Now that is some fantastic TV talking. And why is New Gingrinch a "Best Get" nominee?

Although he hasn't held elective office in more than a decade, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) hasn't given up the power that goes with being a lawmaker.

That's right: People who say shit on TV that Politico writes about now have as much power as actual, sitting legislators who have been elected by their constituents. Because they are on TV.

And when it comes to good cable-news "dynamics," what do you think Politico looks for?

Conflict makes for good television drama. But not every commentator can bring the sizzle solo. Sometimes a producer needs to throw Feisty Pundit A into the mix so that Feisty Pundit B will let loose. A producer needs to look for some on-air chemistry - a little charm between two people who want to rip each other to shreds. And it's out there, all right.

That's actually not a bad summation of the indictment of everything that's wrong with cable-news culture. Now who do you think is best at it?

P.S. Politico media reporter Michael Calderone, who wrote up this "respectful" enterprise, is a good guy, but jesus.

Tucker Carlson was one thing. But Tom DeLay actually wielded power and made the lives of millions of Americans worse by ramming through the Republican Party's agenda and even standing up to George W. Bush's efforts to help poor people. He is a thug and a ghoul masquerading as a clown. This deliberate attempt to debase himself and shrug off what little dignity he ever had—presumably to raise money for his legal defense against charges of conspiracy to violate election laws in Texas—cruelly robs his enemies of the satisfaction of their hatred. Because what more is there to say when the man who was for decades the bloated, red face of the conservative agenda is literally dancing for fucking money on television? God help us.

At first, we couldn't believe Palin actually said, "north to the future," but then we looked it up and saw that it's Alaska's state motto. North to the future? So Australia is living in the past? What happens when you reach the North Pole? That state is a fucking disaster.

Here's the video, followed by the text that O'Brien recognized as Ginsbergian poetry:

soaring through nature's finest show.
Denali, the great one, soaring under the midnight sun.
And then the extremes. In the winter time it's the frozen road
that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty,
the cold though, doesn't it split
the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs?
And then in the summertime such extreme
summertime
about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter
than just some months ago, than
just some months from now,
with fireweed blooming
along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing
and carving
and reminding us that here,
Mother Nature wins.
It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild
good life teeming along the road that is
north to the future.

Web entrepreneur Jeff Atwood, who first highlighted the ads, writes that they "take advertising on the internet to the absolute rock bottom," and toward the moronic, hypersexualized future foretold in Mike Judge's movie Idiocracy.

Yes, sure, inevitable cultural and intellectual decline of America, whatever. Vulgarians that we are, we're far more burned up by the game's false advertising: After all that flesh, there's not actually a "queen" to "save" in the game! The boobage was strictly for "marketing purposes," according to Evony. Now that's something you can (probably!) sue over.

The first ad emphasized Evony's pedigree as a clone of the strategy game Civilization, in which the player must "build an empire to stand the test of time."

The next picture used a stolen catalog photo to emphasize the game's ample... opportunities for adventure!

But that ad really didn't convey the teamwork aspect of the game. To get across the "cooperation" theme, what could be better than hot twins?? The word "lover," perhaps. There's your ad!

The words "my lord" in prior ads really didn't properly convey a player's dominion over buxom females as well as a kneeling woman with an exposed bra and a sword pointed at her chest. But we'd have gone with, "buy our game or we stab this hot lady" for the tagline, here, as it's really more direct than "Help! Save the Queen," but without distorting the original message.

Oh, forget about saving the queen. So much work! Click here to just have wench sex and rule the world, already.

The orgasmic wench-elf and the kneeling queen and the lusty court twins were all too subtle, it turns out. Click here to play the boob game!* (*Game does not actually involve boobs). (This is an actual ad.) [Coding Horror]

Donna Watts-Brighthaupt is a former lobbyist with terrible, tragic taste in men. Barry hired her last year as his driver and personal assistant, and took her with him to the Democratic National Committee in Denver. "For reasons that remain murky," the City Paper reports, she was booked to stay in the same hotel room as Barry. While Barack Obama was busy restoring the nation's hope and offering a path forward out of our racial morass, Barry was busy, in the words of his girlfriend, putting her out because she wouldn't suck his dick. That's from an audiotape a fight between Barry and Watts-Brighthaupt, supplied to the paper by her ex-husband.

According to the paper, after Watts-Brighthaupt refused do the honors, he threw her clothes out of the room and forced her to sleep in his rented Cadillac in the hotel's parking garage.

But Barry's tender opening gambit eventually paid off, and the two started dating, which for Barry means leaving a bizarre and deluded succession of voicemail messages for his best gal, copies of which the City Paper has posted online. A sampling:

• "I'm gone. I'm not gonna think about it anymore. I'm not gonna worry about it like I used to, not gonna pray about it, not gonna do nothing....You don't even exist. Goodbye, good luck, God bless you."
• "Donna, this thing's gotten outta hand. That's too bad. I don't want to continue talking to you about anything and I don't want to press no charges, I don't wanna do nothin'. I just want to be left alone and so you oughtta do the same thing. Don't call me."
• "Donna, you don't have to answer your home phone....Don't call me back. I will not take a call from you; I'm not gonna call you, so this is it."
• "Donna, call me....I'd like to apologize and settle this matter."

There's also this gem, from a recording of an argument between the lovebirds, spoken by Watts-Brighthaupt:

You made me fuck you up in the middle of a Las Vegas casino. I had my shoes off. We were like fucking Tina and Ike Turner.

Where do you go after you've introduced such pitch-perfect generational catchphrases as "The Goddamn bitch set me up" and "You put me out in Denver because I wouldn't suck your dick" to the world?

And how does a paper that does work this beautiful—look at that cover!—end up in bankruptcy? It's a sad, crazy world, kids.

On almost no notice, Palin convened a late-night press availability in a remote fishing village in western Alaska for NBC News, CNN, ABC News, and Fox News in order to further obfuscate her already thoroughly inscrutable rationale(s?) for quitting her shitty job as governor of some crap state that's not even connected to the real America.

The interviews were a postmodern clusterfuck of epic proportions—a governor and her family on a desolate beach in the Alaskan wilderness, wearing waders and a lapel mic, surrounded by camera crews and sleep-deprived network news personalities. ABC News' Kate Snow got in Mitchell's shot at one point. Even though the sun was shining, it was really 10 p.m. in Alaska, because time doesn't work there the way it does in the real world. The gambit guaranteed that between the travel and time spent editing and doing live shots for the morning shows, the reporters didn't get any sleep last night.

Palin is shaping up to be something like The Joker of the political-media complex: Turning up at unexpected times with bizarre stunts designed to make everyone extremely uncomfortable, and then cackling a lot and speaking in riddles. It seems clear that last night's interview was just a dry run to see if she could get folks to fall for a trap—next time it's a hostage crisis.

So what did we learn this time around?

• "One term was enough." Too much, Sarah. One term was too much.
• "[Fishing] teaches the kids not to be divas." That one was offered without prompting. She's like an 8-year-old who thinks she can trick her parents into buying her a pony or something.
• People who don't understand why she quit "might not be fully aware of all the conditions" of her job. Like how hard it is.
• "You know why they're confused? I guess they can't take something nowadays at face value." Sarah Palin's "career" thus far represents the triumph of convincing people to take things at face value. It's the only value she has.
• "Most public officials, they get to look into a camera and they say, you know, 'You better leave your hands off my kids!' And I haven't been able to say that." Because David Letterman is still statutory-raping your daughter, Sarah, as we speak.
• "The fish slime and the dirt under the fingernails—the stuff that is me." Well put!

In an email sent out tonight by one of the organizers, Palin pal John Ziegler, the group claimed victory and implied that the fight has only just begun:

This is John Ziegler, the Los Angeles radio talk show host and documentary film producer who went to New York to speak at Tuesday's rally outside the taping of David Letterman's show.

I wanted give you some major news about this cause. Despite the media doing their very best to try and diminish our efforts and pretend that the issue is dead, several the members of this list have received e-mails from "Olive Garden" announcing to them in very strong language that the restaurant chain is pulling their advertising from David Letterman's show for at least the remainder of the year.

We hope/expect that this major development will create some news coverage on Thursday and hopefully other advertisers will follow suit if you keep the pressure on.

Regardless, congratulations!! You have already made an impact and we still have a chance for some sense of accountability and justice here.

Ziegler then went on to offer his followers a treat for all of their hard work, a discount on some stupid DVD he's been going around peddling:

As a big thank you for those of you who have supported this cause, I would like to offer you a special discount on my highly acclaimed (endorsed, on air, by both Governor Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh) documentary on the media coverage of the 2008 election which got me involved into this issue to begin with.

How many of the sheep receiving Ziegler's email do you think are actually stupid enough to buy his garbage? Just curious.

Regardless, Zeigler's email points a major flaw in Olive Garden's claims that the termination of their Late Show ad buying just so happened to coincide with the protests—The fact that an executive at the company sent out emails filled with "very strong language" announcing their allegiance to a handful of extra-chromosome wingnuts and disgruntled Hillary supporters. A flack for Olive Garden told the Times' Bill Carter that the person who sent the emails to the group, company guest relations manager Sherri Bruen, isn't "an authorized spokesperson for the company." Yeah, okay. Can we just go ahead and call "shenanigans" now on this?

This is all so unfortunate—On the handful of occasions in life where I've eaten at Olive Garden I've really enjoyed those breadsticks and that gluttonous never-ending pasta bowl thing. Too bad I'll never eat there again.

Olive Garden Backtracks on David Letterman Ads [Politico]
Olive Garden Says It Did Not Cancel Ads on the Letterman Show [New York Times]

The massive, traffic-stopping march that drew a couple dozen to Manhattan's Ed Sullivan theater on Tuesday in protest of Letterman's rape-speech was organized by failed sportscaster and radio host John Zeigler. But he and his followers aren't the only ones who've heeded Sarah Palin's call to "rise up." Deprived recently of a target to shrilly—that's right we said shrilly—harangue, disaffected Hillary Clinton voters have taken to the streets, and to Photoshop, to threaten Letterman's advertisers with a boycott unless they stop subsidizing his sexual assaults bad jokes.

UPDATE: An Olive Garden spokesman tells the New York Times that they didn't actually pull their ads; rather, they merely let a previously scheduled run of ads expire earlier this month. Sounds like a standard advertiser dodge when they're trying to cave to outrage without appearing to do so.

Hillbuzz, one of the premier reactionary Clintonist sites, has taken time off from its ongoing search for Michelle Obama's "whitey tape" to draw up clever versions of some Letterman advertisers' brands that reflect the truth about the man they sponsor. Here's some of their handiwork:

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

[Via Balloon Juice.]

Prejean says she was fired because she's an opposite-marriager, and that her beauty pageant handler Keith Lewis undermined her by...liking gay marriage? We can't figure it out. She doesn't blame Donald Trump, can't explain why he would fire her now because she doesn't like gay people when he publicly supported her immediately after she said she didn't like gay people, and says that before all this started Lewis never asked her to make any appearances and she used to call people and say, "Hi, I'm Miss California—would you like me to attend your event?" No. No we would not.

Palin continued her insistence that Letterman had made a joke about the "statutory rape of my 14-year-old daughter, Willow."

When Matt Lauer mentioned Letterman's on-air analysis of the jokes he was making about Bristol Palin, who got knocked up at age 17 and had what Republicans call an "illegitimate child" with a "baby daddy" that she never married and quickly broke up with just like all those unruly black people do in the inner city because she was raised by horrible people, Palin unraveled the whole conspiracy for him:

You and anybody else are extremely naive to believe that very convenient excuse of David Letterman's the other day. It took him a couple of days to think of that excuse.

Also, she hopes people start "rising up" against him. And says that it's "not cool" to joke about statutory rape. Our question: Why is she stressing the "statutory" part? Why not just go the whole hog and accuse him of joking about Alex Rodriguez—a known Hispanic!—and Eliot Spitzer—a known liberal pervert who might have a venereal disease!—brutally and non-consensually raping her 14-year-old daughter, which is clearly what Letterman meant?

The announcement of the game caused a stir on the web yesterday, with the Weekly Standard launching a protest campaign encouraging readers to e-mail Microsoft and T-Enterprise, the out-of-its-depth company that had hired actual Gitmo detainee Moazzam Begg as a consultant on the game. Today, T-Enterprise released a statement explaining that the fact that they'd hired an alleged former Al Qaeda operative to consult for a game in which a terror detainee at Guantanamo Bay escapes and fights back against his captors was in no way intended to be a commentary on "the British and American troops that fight the war against terrorism to make the world a safer place." Sadly, though, they've pulled out of the project, which was obviously never a real project to begin with because there's no way in hell Microsoft would have gone along with it.

Official Statement Regarding Rendition: Guantanamo – 3 June, 2009

In recent days, much has been made of the involvement of T-Enterprise in relation to an X-Box 360 game entitled Rendition: Guantanamo. As a reputable and highly regarded firm amongst professionals and clients alike, we would like to take this opportunity to clarify a few issues that have emerged in the wake of press coverage in the United States.

Unfortunately, much of the speculation regarding the game itself made by various publications and websites has been inaccurate and ill informed. Based on a simple teaser trailer that actually revealed little of the game, many conclusions were reached that have absolutely no foundation whatsoever. It was never designed to be "propaganda" or "a recruiting tool for terrorism". Neither was it designed to glamorise terrorism as has been reported.

First and foremost, the main character was NOT Moazzam Begg. Instead, his name was Adam. He happened to be involved in a case of mistaken identity and so was never a terrorist. T-Enterprise is against all forms of terrorism and would never seek to advocate otherwise. Furthermore, Guantanamo was to be a mercenary run institution and so there would have been NO American military personnel killed within the game. Again, we support the British and American troops that fight the war against terrorism to make the world a safer place and would not make a game that said otherwise.

Having clarified our position on terrorism, I would now like to refute all suggestions that the game was in any way linked to Al Qaeda. T-Enterprise has never had and would never have a link to Al Qaeda in any way, shape or form. Furthermore, we would certainly not facilitate a means of funding for any group that undertook terrorist activities. The game was simply designed to be an action video game that adults could enjoy.

However, as a direct result of the extreme reaction that the game and its popular misconceptions have provoked, T-Enterprise has decided to pull out of the project and will not be completing Rendition: Guantanamo.

Should you have any questions regarding this statement then please contact our press office for clarification.

Zarrar Chishti

Director, T-Enterprise

You can see the trailer at left. It's called "Rendition: Guantanamo." From the Telegraph:

In the game, players control a detainee at the camp, which has been sold by the US Government to a shadowy agency called Freedom Corp.

Before he is subjected to torture and scientific experiments, the character must shoot his way out of the detention camp to bring down his captors.

Zarrar Chishti, the director of T-Enterprises, which is developing the game, told the paper that it's really no big deal, because the game's players will only be shooting the "mercenaries" of Freedom Corp.:

"We have had a lot of hate mail about this, mainly from America, saying things like 'don't dare put out a game that shows them killing our soldiers.' But no US or British soldiers get killed in it. The only ones being killed are mercenaries."

Begg, a British citizen who moved to Afghanistan shortly before 9/11, will get a piece of the game's profits if there are any. He was captured by the CIA in Pakistan in 2002 and shipped to Gitmo. According to the Weekly Standard, Begg confessed to FBI interrogators that he "was armed and prepared to fight alongside the Taliban and al Qaeda against the US and others" and was among the Al-Quaida fighters who retreated to Tora Bora with Osama bin Laden. Begg says the confession was coerced under torture. He was released in January 2005 at the request of the British government.

The Telegraph says the game is being developed for the XBox360, which we find dubious. T-Enterprise claims to be a "team of expert computer designers and developers based in Glasgow [that] specialises in designing and building computer 3D console games for the Xbox 360," but the firm's web site features only flash and mobile phone games. And to judge by the "Rendition: Guantanamo" trailer, as well as this one for something called "Karma Combat," both of which look like they came from 1998, they're not very skilled at more sophisticated platforms.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.And to get a sense of where T-Enterprise is coming from, some of their other games include "Bush's Billions," "Bye Dubya," and "Send a Ransom" (!). And here are pictures of co-founders "Sadia" and "Zarrar."

In a statement, Microsoft said: "We are unaware of this game and have not been contacted by this developer. As such, we don't have enough details about the game to even comment about it."

When Fox News announced earlier this month that Prejean would fill in for noted beauty contest winner Gretchen Carlson, vice president for programming Suzanne Scott said, "We're just using her one time to sit with the boys and have some fun."

We tried to warn Prejean that "sitting with the boys and having some fun" doesn't mean the same thing in the news business that it does in the pornography world she comes from, but she didn't get the message. She kept rubbing all over her co-hosts, and practically had opposite marriage with both of them, at the same time, right there on television.

[Thanks to Gawker video intern Ari Golub for the fine clip.]

US Weekly, which has been leading the charge in reporting on the apparent failure of Jon and Kate Gosselin's marriage, has produced no less than four covers devoted to the family, the most recent of which, we hear, outsold by a smidge People's exclusive interview with Bristol Palin. Last night's premiere set a record for TLC in terms of its share of the 18-to-34-year-old viewing audience. The Gosselin's are a phenomenon. And they hate it. Because they just wanted to live their lives like normal people with a reality show, and the tabloid media has ruined it for them.

From an Associated Press story on the premiere party for the show:

"I have a lot of anger," she summed up, "because this is not where we were supposed to be, this is not what I envisioned for us."

From another AP story on the boomerang effect of fame in the age of reality TV:

In short, Americans who traffic in the commodity that is their lives - Hollywood actors and reality-TV stars alike - aren't at all happy when their carefully calibrated reality bursts out of the cages they have built to contain it.

"It destroys people's lives," Kate Gosselin of "Jon & Kate" said at a recent appearance - a publicity appearance - in Michigan....

"This is certainly not what I envisioned I was signing up for," Gosselin said during the Michigan appearance. "When I see magazines in stores, it's really difficult. It amazes me there is an industry that follows you around and writes stories about you...."

"It's hard being on this side of the camera," Jon Gosselin says in one Webisode. "People see your life as episodes ... I mean, we don't have privacy at all. If I go out, people know I go out, and photograph it and do everything they gotta do to do something about it."

We don't watch the show enough to know whether the Gosselins could fairly be described as clinically incapable of normal ratiocination—some kind of right brain/left brain split, maybe?—which under typical circumstances one would have to be in order to resent the curiosity that they have so assiduously worked to inspire in their lives. In fact, it doesn't really seem so crazy once you consider that, for the Gosselins, being on a reality TV show is not an extraordinary effort to draw attention to yourself—it's just another way station on any family's path to the American Dream.

These people see themselves as just a normal family, doing what any normal family would—attempt to enrich themselves by packaging themselves into a marketable narrative and partnering with a cable network to deliver that narrative to an audience. The center of gravity of celebrity and and privacy in our culture has been yanked so far out of whack that there is a sense of entitlement when it comes to inviting a camera crew to document the minutiae of one's life. It's normal behavior now, and it ought not inspire the sort of tabloid feeding frenzy that accompanies old-world, analog celebrity. You wouldn't harass some poor woman with a camera just for walking down the street, would you? Even if you knew she was cheating on her husband, you wouldn't tell the world, would you?

As far as the Gosselins are concerned, they are just walking down the street. It amazes Kate Gosselin that an industry exists to document her life—even as she participates avidly in the documentation of her own life—because she never imagined that there is anything out of the ordinary about inserting yourself as noisily as possible into the cultural conversation by whatever means are available. Being on a successful reality TV show is now part of what being an American is about. Why would you punish her for it?

According to U.S. News & World Report's Paul Bedard, Fox decided to give Prejean the "one-time" gig yesterday after her appearance on the show as a guest:

Suzanne Scott, Fox vice president for programming, filled me in on the details of the gig for Prejean, who was thrust into the headlines when she rejected gay marriage during the Q&A part of the pageant. "We're just using her one time," she said, "to sit with the boys and have some fun."

Don't worry, Carrie—"sit with the boys and have some fun" doesn't mean the same thing on TV as it did back in your nipple-slinging days. There won't be any DP with Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade or anything.

As we've noted, CNN's Anderson Cooper and MSNBC's David Shuster and Rachel Maddow have been having been saying "teabagging" a lot—over and over and over again!—in reference to yesterday's attempt by Fox News and its slackjawed audience to re-enact Mike Judge's 2006 film Idiocracy at festivals nationwide (think of it as their Rocky Horror Picture Show).

"What's with all this 'teabagging' business?" Fox News wondered. "They're saying that word an awful lot." After some investigating, Fox came to understand that CNN and MSNBC haven't been shooting straight—the word "teabag" carries with it subtle mockery when used by pointy-headed liberals conversant in the coded language of sexual perversity!

Teabagging, for those who don't live in a frat house, refers to a sexual act involving part of the male genitalia and a second person's face or mouth.

WHAT PART!?!?!?

"I've never seen anything like it," Bozell said. "The oral sex jokes on (CNN) and particularly MSNBC on teabagging ... they had them by the dozens. That's how insulting they were toward people who believe they're being taxed too highly."

Yes, a bunch of anchors employed a double entrende to mock a mindless farce. (Why not watch the video compilation we posted yesterday, at right, one more time?) But let's remember why it's funny. Simply picking a sexually suggestive phrase and using it to describe the tea parties is not, in and of itself, funny. What makes it funny is this: The reason people call it "teabagging" is that the idiots at Fox News started calling it "teabagging" themselves without understanding that they were using a word that, in another context, means gently sucking on somebody's testicles. Now that is funny, and Maddow pointed it out in her April 9 broadcast, with video of a Fox Newser saying, "teabag the fools in D.C.!"

But Fox does get one thing kind of right, in reference to Maddow's buddy act with Gawker Media alumna Ana Marie Cox:

If anyone thinks the orally charged remarks on mainstream cable were just a coincidence, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow's segments over the past week with guest, Air America's Ana Marie Cox, would dissolve all doubt. Their on-air gymnastics, dancing around the double entendre of the week, looked like live-action Beavis and Butthead.

They're both very pretty ladies! But Maddow does kind of have a Beavis Butthead thing going on, doesn't she?