Shortly after the new year, it was widely and indignantly reported that the dating website BeautifulPeople.com had removed 5,000 of its members for gaining weight over the holidays.
No news source I saw confirmed that this was the case. No one interviewed anyone struck from the site. The site's founder, Robert Hintze - who, in a quote begging to be quoted, said it couldn't let "fatties roam the site" - wasn't asked to explain how it was it revetted all of its members so quickly, or why so many "beautiful people" uploaded unflattering photographs of themselves simultaneously.
Just as when the site launched worldwide three months earlier by proclaiming the "news" that it had turned thousands of "ugly" people away, the media unquestioningly reprinted the press release.
A similar thing happened this week with the Tea Party Convention, a profit-making event attended by a mere 600 people in Nashville. There was much hand-wringing from the left-wing press and optimism from the right, but the borderline irrelevance of the event was hardly remarked upon.
It's understood that one mustn't mock the Tea Party. "These people are really passionate about this," the admonishment goes, as if the sheer earnestness of the Tea Party's "revolutionaries" was a childlike belief in fairies (instead of, frequently, a call for armed insurrection) and therefore above the media's cynical scrutiny.
And as if blind earnestness, in any cause, weren't inherently mockable anyway.
I struggle to keep a straight face at any protest, no matter how much I support the cause. I hate it when people wear costumes to these things (the Tea Partiers love costumes); organizers can never keep a chant going; there are always silly songs, coupled with a terrible sound system.
I say, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, that crappy megaphone has got to go."
In the case of the fractious Tea Partiers - a group that seems united, tenuously, by only a bitter, keening nostalgia for a better time that really never was - I think this week's reports of the solidifying of a serious political movement were premature.
We printed the press release again. Then we parsed the movement a thousand ways.
The question was even posed in this paper as to whether Canada could develop the equivalent of a Tea Party. This seems unlikely. We have our own national nostalgia for a better time that never was: It's for summer, a time when we mostly complain about the heat and flies.
The convention sparked more breathless/anxious reports that Sarah Palin (who spoke for a reported $100,000 fee) isn't ruling out a bid for the presidency in 2012. Or, as she herself put it, "I won't close a door that perhaps could be open for me in the future," because Ms. Palin, who urged the movement not to get "bogged down in the small squabbles," is seemingly always anxious not to get bogged down in one tense. (I think the point about her reading her hands is that at least she can credibly claim to have read "all of them.") The Republicans cut her loose ages ago. And if she decides to run Ross Perot-style, the Democrats finally would have something to celebrate.
Meanwhile, let's have some perspective here. This movement that Ms. Palin called "fresh, young and fragile" (in contrast to most of its members) is Monty Python's People's Front of Judea. It's a Yugoslavia waiting to happen. Beyond the members' belief in "less government, lower taxes" (territory long staked out), truckloads of resentment and a distorted version of history, they've nothing to unite them.
And lest we all rewrite history: Ms. Palin ran already. She lost. The latest ABC News/Washington Post Poll puts her popularity at a record low.
It was suggested by Ben McGrath in The New Yorker this week that the Tea Party is a response to the social revolutions of the 1960s, that its members are the veterans of the losing side of that culture war.
Aspects of that ring true. But what we're witnessing is less an enduring social movement than a kind of battle re-enactment (costumes and all). But the battle they're re-enacting isn't, despite the racist overtones, from the Civil War or the struggle for civil rights. They're just gleefully re-enacting plum moments from the 2008 campaign.
There's talk of another convention, this time in Las Vegas, and no doubt that will sell out as well. Possibly these revolutionaries want tea and sympathy more they want an actual scrutinized political party. They want to mingle with like-minded people and have fun, without having to defend their beliefs to outsiders.
Honestly, don't tell them, but that whole Nashville event had the feel of a stationary gay cruise.