Oil cans are so five minutes ago. These days, squeaky wheels get Fox News contracts and book deals.

Jay Taplin wrote Tuesday:

Now Beck makes $23 million per year and Limbaugh makes even more. As they ride around the country in their private jets they may be laughing at how they are able to get the poor crackers all riled up about an imminent invasion of martians or socialists or Nazis while they take it to the bank.

But they have help: The Left, this site included, plays into their acts by reacting with kneejerk fury to everything said by these second-rate clowns, participating in burlesque that elevates trivia to crisis, inflates "nanostory" to crucial-issue proportion. For every jackass prattling about "death panels" or packing heat to a political meeting, there's a whole slew of sanctimonious denunciations of racist teabaggers and updates on Orly Taitz. Secretly, I think, we love it all (and I'm as guilty as any).

Perhaps we should remind ourselves, however, that beneath all the cheap-shot self-indulgence, the most important questions of the day, the most critical decisions facing this country, wither in neglect.

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Those immune to dogmatic allergies owe themselves a traipse over to The American Conservative magazine, and it's cover interview of whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, by former CIA case officer Philip Giraldi. Edmonds has spent the last several years muzzled by various cabinet regimes, and has some real dirt on folks real dirty:

John Ashcroft's Justice Department confirmed Edmonds's veracity in a backhanded way by twice invoking the dubious State Secrets Privilege so she could not tell what she knows. The ACLU has called her "the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America."

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As Sgt. Joe Friday, Jack Webb so epitomized stoic machismo it's easy to imagine even his cooties were bad-ass.

Especially in the original "Dragnet", Friday was a kind of retribution genie for television audiences back in the early Cold War, another time when our Constitution was considered useful only for toilet paper. After some cute housewife was disemboweled on her way to a church bake sale (we were invited to sadistically enjoy the frightful misery of simpering victims, while sanctimoniously abhoring guilty perps), it would be up to Friday and his jovial partner to scour the asphalt jungle of L.A. until the jibbering switchblade hophead was brought to swift - severe - justice.

One of their favorite methods of shaking down suspects for information was the good cop/bad cop routine. In the interrogation room, Friday's sidekick was all sympathy and grandfatherly backpatting, alternating with The Man's verbal waterboarding so snarlingly overblown that even the most hardened street punks routinely were reduced to cringing docility.

I think I'm seeing this very jailhouse mind-f*ck played out on a much larger scale, with this summer's town hall thuggery, racist tea-bagging and GOP "death panel" hysteria providing a chance for eclipsed neoconservatives to revive themselves as the most reasonable voice in the American Right. You can talk to us, they seem to be saying, at least we're not these throwback birther baboons.

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