Opposite evils to do not balance: They aggravate each other

A reader complains:

You and Galupo are just wrong about Palin. Her bit with the Big Gulp was so drawn out, it was obviously comic shtick to make fun of Bloombergism.

Apparently Palin the performance artist is too sophisticated for snotty Mark Shea to understand.

I think product warning labels are often deeply stupid and unnecessary Nanny statism. You have to be an idiot not to know you should not use your hair dryer in the shower, not to use shampoo on dry hair, and not to eat Odor Eaters.

Still, I knew a man who, in a particularly rowdy moment, was joking around with a friend who had told him to do something. He brashly replied, “I don’t take orders from anybody.” Spying a Binaca breath spray thingie on the dash of the car they were riding in, he picked it up and said: “You see this? It says ‘Do not spray in eye'”. Whereupon he sprayed it in his own eye. Funny stuff, particularly when he started howling in pain because, you know, you shouldn’t spray breath spray in your eye. That’s bad for you, even if some nanny state ninny tells you that in a dumb product warning label.

So: Palin. Of *course* it was comic schtick to make fun of Bloomberg. That’s the point. Pretty much her whole schtick is to take some stupid thing some Dem says, make fun of it, and do the opposite, to the roars of the mob.

The problem is, what with Palin being dumb, “doing the opposite” doesn’t mean “Doing something smart in opposition to doing something stupid”. It far too often means “doing something stupid in opposition to the stupid thing my enemy does”.

If a Dem says “We should pass a law against committing suicide by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge” that’s a stupid law. It does not help to fight that stupid law by doing “performance art” and jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. It helps instead to find smart ways to oppose suicide. Bloomberg’s Nannyism is a stupid way to advocate for public health. Advocating everybody guzzle sugar is also stupid in a country with soaring obesity and diabetes rates. I advocate less stupidity from our Ruling Class. It’s my civic duty. Otherwise, you wind up with a party that used to be prolife devolving into a machine that hawks funnee T-shirts reading “I’d rather be waterboarding” because that’s the opposite of what those damn libruls say so it’s funnee performance art. Get it?