I don’t have the time or energy to write another post tonight.

So… go, read and ponder our friend Mary Katharine Ham’s brilliant Townhall column.

It’s worth every second. I’ll try to add some comments in the morning. And perhaps Cam and Jim will chime in. I really think MKH is on to something important here.

Jim: Bravo, MKH.

She mentions how the shameless behavior of Jayson Blair and Jessica Cutler only helped their careers. I thought it was a terrible sign that immediately after he was fired for making stuff up, he signed a book deal in “the mid-six-figures.” (His book sold about 4,000 copies, and his publisher went out of business shortly afterwards, although Blair’s book wasn’t the only reason.) Ditto for Washingtonienne, which we discussed here. How many honest reporters asked, “Hey, I never made stuff up in my stories. Where’s my $500,000 book deal?” How many folks have said, “Hey, I slept around on Capitol Hill and I’m easy! How come my promiscuousness didn’t yield book deals and movie rights?”

I can say that Person X has behaved shamefully, and boycott them. But that doesn’t seem to have much of an impact. For some reason, the elites of our media and publishing world always seem to rush in to save these individuals from the consequences of their actions. For some reason, the media feels they deserve the spotlight (like the Washington Post magazine’s profile of Cutler, her columnist gig for some DC mag) and continued attention, which borders on approval.

We don’t have equal say in the shaping of our society’s values; there’s no point in pretending three guys at a bar and/or MKH can change the direction of the tides. The heads of publishing houses, editors of magazines and newspapers, television show bookers, celebrities - they all have much vaster power in shaping our culture and what it defines as good and important.

Probably the best example I can think of this infuriating phenomenon is Madonna’s recent lament, in song and interview, that America is too materialistic. Gee, I wonder how it got that way…. “Material Girl”! I wonder if there was any image-obsessed pop star who milked her fame for ultra-expensive concert tickets, a concert film, a nudie book, and a slew of ultra-crappy movies who could have had any role in shaping those values. Like the old anti-drug commercial said, “[We] learned it from watching you!”

Cam: We love scandal in this country. Fame is good, but infamy is better.

The problem is, I do have a sense of shame. Sure, I could say and do wildly inappropriate things that would probably gain me more notoriaty, but what would I tell my kids? It’s not worth it. I will continue to naively believe that one day the pendelum will swing back in the other direction and we’ll stop creating folk heroes out of the dregs of society.