I haven't referred to the Corner at National Review online since I've gone back to doing some intermittent postings. I did it a lot before and read it about everyday. It's sort of fun because it's a combination of completely random, trivial (and not always politics related) posts that don't seem to come from anywhere in particluar and right-wing arguments so silly (usually; occasionally a good point is thrown in there) it makes me feel smarter for not agreeing with them. Anyway, I followed a link to it today and read a few other nearby entries on the page, and I thought of another interesting thing about it, sort of related to the former of the two traits given above. They often use it as a dialogue, so someone will raise a point and will go back and forth with another about it for several posts. Sometimes it will be an argument, sometimes they're just reinforcing their opinions. And sometimes one person goes off on several posts on one ridiculous subject that no one else seems to acknowledge, at least through an entry on the blog (although they are often encourage by "an e-mail from a reader"). The problem with this is that they do a lot of posts and there's no way of tracking a particular thread so if you come in at some point it might take some effort to go back and find what was previously written (using Find for a key word is sometimes useful but I usually don't care enough to bother). Anyway that happened to me today in an especially peculiar example when I scrolled up a few posts from the link I followed:

GORE'S CAR [Jonathan H. Adler]
Yes, Al Gore's Lincoln was a rental. And yes, it's possible that he really wanted to rent an econobox. But I doubt it. (Though if someone has evidence to the contrary, I'll certainly post it.)
Posted at 08:23 PM

Then again, maybe this is it's own point and I'm so far removed from these people that I just don't get it. But I decided not look for any other posts in order to maintain my appreciation of the sublime ridiculousness of those words in that order devoid of any context. I am willing to speculate though, and I'll hypothesize that there's not a substantive point in there, or maybe my lack of imagination is unable to come up with a possible reason that this could have any significance in the real world (even less than the debate of John Kerry's alleged ownership of an SUV). But I'm leaning towards the former. In fact, I might go so far as to suggest that the insignificance of threads is directly related to sublime ridiculousness of statements to which they lead.

To go off on a tangent here, that was a long ways to go just to reprint that one line, wasn't it? Having seen so many serious posts on important subjects since my last post on Tuesday, I settled on this idea for some reason (and although I take the racism of a widely read/seen columnist/pundit seriously, it seems pointless to worry about a single nutjob columnist when there are so many nutjobs -- probably not quite as bad as this columnist, granted -- running the world). I suppose the blog may be losing any sort of gravitas it once had, not necessarily a bad thing:)