So the White House has apparently concluded that it would be inappropriate to let Kid Rock perform at an event commemorating the inaugural of a "traditional values" president.



Gee, you think?

You know, I don't want give the impression that I hate Kid Rock. I'm not a fan, but some of his music has a goofball appeal (I kind of like "Bawitdaba"), and hey, he does USO shows, he made a record with Sheryl Crow even though she's theoretically his ideological enemy, and I like the fact that he's a fan of rock, rap, and country (the mongrel nature of our music is one of the things that makes this country great, dammit!). I just wanted this to be an embarrassment to the Bush administration -- first as a betrayal of "values" voters, then, on the flip side, as an example of how the Bushies genuflect every time some direct-mail preacher gets his knickers in a twist.

Of course, nothing of the sort happened -- this wasn't an embarrassment to the Bushies because, apart from social conservatives and bloggers, nobody even noticed that it was going on. There was one story in the New York Daily News; beyond that, I didn't see anything about this in the mass media.

And that's because the mass media doesn't include a cadre of liberals who seize every trivial story that could potentially embarrass the Right and squeeze every drop of outrage from it. There certainly are a lot of conservatives who do that, on talk radio and cable news. Right-wing blogs move stories to the mainstream; left-wing blogs still don't. So the Bushies got away with this -- and I'm sure they'll get away with the next embarrassing moment, and the one after that.