In the days following the Cheney-Whittington accident, liberal pundits had to live up to their responsibility to manufacture a series of unsubstantiated allegations while turning the episode into a Clifford Odets-style tale of plutocrats gone wild. "Was he drunk? I mean, these are ultrarich Republicans, at a weekend, fun-time hunting," the pundit Lawrence O'Donnell wondered on MSNBC.

Meanwhile over at the blogosphere, the keyboard jockeys had a responsibility to sniff up vast conspiracies and get lost in creepy minutiae.

So, just to be clear on the Conservative Rules:

• Questioning the details about how the Vice President of the United States shot his 78-year-old friend in the face? "Conspiracies" and "creepy minutiae."

• Questioning not the content of memos exposing the President of the United States's cynical abuse of the Texas Air National Guard to avoid serving in Vietnam, since the truthful content of those memos has been confirmed repeatedly, but instead questioning typographical details like kerning as a way of avoiding the content? Son, that's just your patriotic duty.

Isn't it lucky how it always works out so that we never have to examine the details of what the radical right and their enablers put forward? Amazing, that.