Just to follow up on TBogg's post from yesterday: Apparently it's not just Hugh Hewitt who thinks it's a bad idea for former Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe (who's Catholic and pro-choice) to join the Knights of Malta (Hewitt: "Oh, we'd better put out a word.... I've got friends in the Knights of Malta, yeah. You might not come back from your first trip to Rome"). Now "The Washington Prowler" at the blog of The American Spectator, under a big red "BREAKING NEWS" headline, is issuing a call to action:

Any Knights of Malta out there want to take a shot at blocking this heathen from membership? Any buffoon who would brag about receiving blessings from the Holy Father while in the state of grave sin due to his support of the murder deserves to be taken down a notch or two.

Oooh, tough talk -- talk that's likely to be backed up with, er, a really, really bold headline at the Drudge Report, a handful of Freepers picketing McAuliffe's book signings while wearing cheap Halloween masks, and maybe a tough, hard-hitting story on Sean Hannity's new TV show (if it doesn't get bumped for another story about hookers).

I'm hoping this is one more sign that wingnuts are heading in a promising new direction -- toward an obsession with trivia, and thus a slide into complete irrelevance. Recently, for instance, we've had the right obsessing over the number of vowels in the name of a source for an AP story about an atrocity in Iraq (as Iraq suffers dozens of such atrocities a day), and we've watched as the right dispatched a crack team of forensic botanists to do a Zapruder-like frame-by-frame flower analysis of Hillary Clinton's initial campaign Webcast.

But McAuliffe's Knights of Malta candidacy is even more peripheral than those wingnut obsessions. And I say: Please, righties -- make a crusade of this! Be my guest! Fixate on the trivial!

And leave the rest of us to run the country.