Hm, what a shocker.

So if you’ve been following the David Letterman-Sarah Palin business, you know that the right is in full professional OUTRAGE!!! mode. This is what they do; the only glue holding the conservative movement together is its resentment, its perpetual sense of victimhood. In this case there’s a legitimate reason for that grievance;Letterman’s joke about Palin’s daughter, even if we understand he thought he was talking about Bristol and not Willow, was offensive and tasteless and uncalled for.

C’mon, Dave, you’re better than that.

Nonetheless, the  OUTRAGE!!! that followed was about 5 percent legitimate, 95 percent manufactured - as exemplified by the fact that the big protest planned outside Letterman’s studio yesterday attracted a grand total of 15 protesters, who were outnumbered by the media.

The term “much ado about nothing” come to mind. But in fact those 15 showed that Letterman wasn’t the only one who could “hate”:

“How dare he?” asked yet a third, the most offensive of all. “When he has a bastard son, and a slut for a wife”

Sweet.

Other conservative talking points thrown around at the rally included, “Close the borders!” and “I only watch Fox News,” as well as the general sentiment that Jay Leno is a better host than Letterman.

You only watch Fox News. How surprising.

As we will get into in the print edition this week - this is a prime example of the conservatism of resentment, which first coalesced as a political force in the 1960s. When we do the OUTRAGE!!! bit in the vids, this is exactly what we’re talking about - this how-dare-you sense of grievance on display nightly on Fox News; the notion that the whole world is arrayed against common-sense workaday conservatives - you know, the people who ran the show for the better part of this decade.

The base is perpetually outraged; we know this. But for this perpetual outrage to have an effect beyond the base, it has to seem legitimate to the vast bulk of what Nixon called the “silent Americans.” But the right has used this cultural OUTRAGE!!! as its motivator for 40 years. You get into the Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf syndrome; even when there are legitimate things to be outraged about, we’ve heard it all so often, and it’s become so tiresome, that it ceases to be politically effective.

That the likes of me can so publicly laugh at the Outrage Machine, yet the right keeps on cranking it up anyway, is a sign that as strategy, outrage is outdated. Don’t tell ‘em, though - hell, you don’t want to deprive me of a catch phrase, do you?

Update: Actually, the funniest bit about the rally is this:

Ziegler scowled as a huge red-bearded man carrying a placard reading “I’m a Right-Wing Lunatic” whirled around and shrieked such sentiments as “I hate it when people tell jokes on television!” “Jesus is speaking to me!” and “Letterman is worse than Hitler!” (Turns out the guy was a plant from the Ron & Fez Show on Sirius XM Radio.)

We ain’t the only ones making jokes about the OUTRAGE!!!

Update 2: And here you go:

The woman in the yellow? OUTRAGE!!!