Well, I think I know why Wesley and Phil haven’t had me back on “Pub Politics” for several weeks: I’m just not outrageous enough.

In this new environment, a blogger who wants attention is expected to claim to have done the nasty with a front-runner, and a state senator has to dredge through the darker recesses of nativist terminology to trash the ethnicity of a fellow legislator (who, coincidentally, happens to be that same front-runner).

I’m just a little too whitebread boring, I guess. I’ll try to work on that, if I can figure out the criteria for being the cynosure of all eyes in 2010: I mean, is it OK to claim to have done the horizontal mambo with ANY lawmaker, or do the standards require that it actually be Nikki Haley (because, you know, she just hasn’t been made to look like enough of a victim yet)? And are all ethnicities fair game? Can I say “wetback” or “mick;” is the “N” word going too far? Or does it have to be about Indians specifically? If so, it’s not fair, because Jake’s taken the best one. “Dot-head” seems thin stuff by comparison. And I hate to fall on the inaccurate, feeble slurs that Larry Koon supporters used against her in 2004, talking about worshipping cows and the like.

Or should I just go with my strength, and hope y’all will have me back because you think that after Jake Knotts’ performance, the show needs a little class to redeem it? Yeah, that’s the ticket.

What to say about Jake’s venture into what he terms “Saturday Night Live” humor? A number of things, I suppose:

• First, thanks for holding yourself back there, Jake — seems I usually hear the full construction as “raghead sumbitches.” So you exercised some restraint. Either that, or you realized halfway through that she’s a chick, and can’t technically be a “sumbitch.”
• That was really creative. Usually, the term is applied to A-rabs and the like. To expand its scope to include half-Kenyans and Sikhs displays a linguistic originality that is noteworthy.
• Is that Andre Bauer camp a bunch of strategic geniuses or what? I hadn’t thought there was anything else that could make Nikki Haley look more like a martyr than what we had seen thus far, but these fellas just never say die; they can always go another mile.
• Cindi Scoppe has got to be feeling really self-righteous today (if you can imagine that), being certain about how right she was to kick and scream and complain every inch of the way when I insisted that we break with precedent and endorse Jake last time around.
• I might as well take down my video of Jake telling his life story (“How Jake became Jake…“), because it’s just going to seem way too dull after Wesley and them put up his latest performance on the Web.
• Must I lower the standards of “The Brad Show,” if I ever have a second installment of it, in order to get viewers?

There’s plenty more that could be said, yet on another level, I sort of feel like enough has been said already.

Jake Knotts, 2008 file photo/Brad Warthen

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