Why I won't read "Why We Published the Christine O'Donnell Story."

This link goes to the Memeorandum collection of links to the above-titled item in Gawker. They got nothing but outrage for the story they published, which I glanced at but refused to read and would not link to. My refusal to read it was reflexive, the way I'd immediately close the bathroom door if I opened it and found someone in there. Gawker got a lot of traffic for its paid-for, anonymous story about not having sex with Christine O'Donnell, and they're out to get more traffic explaining why they published it. Gawker has long been traffic-grabbing, which isn't inherently wrong, but it exposes you to temptations, and you have to decide where you want to draw your lines. Gawker has decided, and I'd say, the best response is to deny them the traffic they live for. Don't go there. It may not discipline them back into decency. They'll probably get more traffic as they become more and more notorious for outrageous invasions of privacy. But you don't have to add to that traffic. Don't be a chump and go look just because everyone else seems to be looking.

"Maybe Michelangelo was hiding secret drawings of brains inside the Sistine Chapel's ceiling frescoes."

"Makes total sense, right? Because... well, wait, it doesn't make any sense at all."

"Help Us Congratulate Rush Limbaugh on His Wedding Day."

Now, this headline really is about Rush Limbaugh. Sorry to make the link to Gawker, because they're being a little mean about it, but that's where I saw it first. Somehow, I didn't expect it, even though I heard him say on Wednesday's show that he was going to be away until June 16th. The reason he gave was that he was going to get another English sheepdog to drive his cat crazy.

Gawker:

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, 59, is marrying his 33-year-old girlfriend Kathryn Rogers in Palm Beach this Saturday. He's said some nice things about Gawker in the past, so we wanted to wish him and his betrothed a lifetime of happiness. But Rush is not inviting members of the media to the event for some reason. So we came up with a work-around and rented one of those big airborne billboards to fly down the coast—and over his house—during the wedding.

Now we need your help in coming up with a pithy slogan to share with Rush, his bride-to-be, and the assembled guests. Submit them in the comments, please!

Nothing too amusing in the comments there so far.

By chance, Rush's last show before the wedding hiatus had to cover the breakup of the Gore marriage. He was noticeably kind-hearted about it:

Ladies and gentlemen, Algore and Tipper amidst all of this, separated.  Forty years of marriage.  The interesting thing about this, you can't say, "You know, they just didn't really know each other.  They got married too soon.  Their lives changed just way too much."  Forty years.  Forty years and you split up.  That is not comforting....

He quotes Sally Quinn on CBS saying: "I've been on the phone with friends ever since I heard it yesterday, and everyone feels as though somehow their own marriages have split up.  It's -- you know, watching the Gores is sort of looking at the possibilities of what a good marriage could be, and when they -- when it doesn't work for them you sort of think, 'Oh, my God, maybe it's not possible.'" Rush finds that quite bizarre:

How many of you, I must ask, how many of you who have known friends who got divorced felt like your marriage was dissolving at the same time?  Any of you?  You know what you're thinking about when a couple you know gets divorced?  You're thinking, "Okay, which one of them do we like best?  Which one are we going to continue to socialize with and which one are we gonna ostracize."  That's what you're thinking.  You're not thinking, "Oh, my God, oh, my God, my marriage is in trouble, too.  Why, Biff and Sally here just split up."

He's into believing in marriage there — even as he zeroes in on the hilarious (and painful!) truth.

All right, you want me to explain it to you? The Gore divorce.  I'm stunned none of my bright, overrated staff understand what really happened here.  You separate after a 40-year marriage? I mean, that's... (sigh) That's just not done. 

He sighs!

How often do you hear about that?  Now, what it seems to me... This a pure, wild guess speculation, but it's also intelligence guided by experience.  If you are separating after 40 years, it means that there's been trouble in paradise for many years.  However, look at what's happened now.  The kids are all gone; they're out of the nest. 

She stood out of the way and let Algore make his gazillions.  She gets out just before Algore starts the drooling old man part of his life.  She's rich and she's got her whole life ahead of her....

A caller suggests that Al cheated on Tipper:

RUSH:  That's hard to envision....

Another caller:

CALLER:  The key word, Rush, is money.  Whichever way it goes.  I think it's to protect his fortune somehow.

RUSH:  Or... Well, yeah. That's not exactly my theory.  You said you were calling to agree with my theory.

CALLER:  Yeah.  Well, it's something to do with money. That's all I know.

RUSH:  Well, my theory -- I don't need to go through it again but my theory -- basically was if you're going to get divorced after 40 years, it can't all have been hunky-dory but you hang in there for various reasons. The kids...

CALLER:  Yeah.  I would hate to think it's an affair, I really would. 

RUSH:  Yeah, that's just... That's the stuff of nightmares.  That wouldn't compute. I totally agree.

He ends it there, sounding genuinely circumspect.

"We are not very judgmental people, generally, and probably these kids are having a blast dancing their scary little hearts out."

Gawker primed me to disapprove of this video with young girls dancing to "Single Ladies," but I thought they were just fine and even kind of great.

Isn't there a song that is not about, you know, marriage, that they could dance to?

Pro-marriage is a bad message for young girls? When did that happen? When I was a kid, in the 1950s, we played "house," in which you pretended to be a married woman. With children, of course. Adults loved to give us baby dolls to play with. Imagine that. It was all perfectly okay. As for the costumes the girls are wearing in that video — again, in the 1950s "dress up" was a perfectly conventional and encouraged form of play. When did that become wrong?

If you don't think girls should dance like Beyonce in "Single Ladies," you shouldn't let them see the video at all. When I was a kid, I learned to dance listening to "The Mexican Hat Dance." I think I'd be a lot better off or at least a lot better dancer if I could have learned how to dance from "Single Ladies."

"J.D. Salinger invented blogs, according to a federal judge..."

"... who granted a temporary injunction yesterday against John David California's planned 'parody' of Catcher in the Rye."

That's Gawker's take on the judicial opinion that said:

Both narratives are told from the first-person point of view of a sarcastic, often uncouth protagonist who relies heavily on slang, euphemisms and colloquialisms, makes constant digression and asides, refers to readers in the second person, constantly assures the reader that he is being honest and that he is giving them the truth.

[Insert you own slangy, sarcastic, digressive aside against the judge... who is probably a phony.]

"Enough. It’s not that you suck, it’s not that you strain for wan fratboy humor, it’s that you’re uninteresting. We’re embarrassed for you."

Enough of Gawker Media.

Via anamariecox.