Its very purpose "is to dethrone the serious."

In his book The Long March (highly recommended by the way) Roger Kimball has a good discussion of Susan Sontag. I was struck by by a couple things she wrote about the camp sensibility.

"[it] is the the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of 'style' over 'content' 'aesthetics' over 'morality', of irony over tragedy."

camp "is the solvent of morality."

"the relation between boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated."

It's puzzling that this attitude seems to be oozing out of every media channel, just 2 1/2 years after the WTC atrocity. You find it on ESPN, on cable news shows, in infotainment programming, on the op-ed pages of our newspaper of record.

Not even the blogosphere is immune. The hottest site going is Wonkette where wartime politics is just one big joke.

That's the most disappointing thing. All those macho warbloggers who've slapped MoDo around for the last year are now ga-ga over a one trick pony who is just Dowd with a cute graphic. Maybe the medium is more important than the message; having a blog means never getting smacked down by the wargods of the blogosphere. We don't apply the same standards to fellow bloggers that we do to journalists.

Ilyka is on to something when she wrote

"Premise: Nick Denton is to blogging as Dick Clark is to rock-and-roll."

I liked Scott's comment on this thread:

Isn't she a Nick Denton Creation? She gets whatever attention she gets because all the other cool kids want Nick to pick them for his kickball team next. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if you want to cram yourself into Denton's mold.