I've heard some snorts of indignation over the revelation than Andrew Sullivan, now an Atlantic blogger, uses a couple of ghost-bloggers to produce his quota of postings each day. I frankly don't care what Andrew Sullivan does; he bores me. Yet some commentary on the matter by Ann Althouse piqued my interest.

You know, I have had my run-ins with Sullivan. He mocked my engagement announcement. He's given me Sarah-Palin-related assignments. I have paid a lot of attention to these things on my blog. (Here and here, for example.) I seriously believed I was interacting with Sullivan, a writer I have respected for maybe 20 years. I wouldn't have bothered with Patrick (or Chris). I really don't care what they think. If they insult me, they are to me like any number of bloggers who insult me and whose bait I don't take. I would always take Sullivan's bait, because Sullivan is important. Not to know whether it's Sullivan or one of them makes a mush out of the whole blog. I'm not wading through all of this ghost-generated verbiage and guessing about what might be the real thing.

There is was, crystallized into server-stored ASCII text--the triumph of notoriety over quality. Why is Sullivan important? Because he's famous, and famous people can write and say all manner of dreck and someone, somewhere will accord it importance.

The late Tim Russert used to host an amusing little interview show in which he and one or two other people of alleged eloquence and intellectual depth would sit around a little round table and discuss a subject for an hour or so. Obviously, not a show for everybody, but it was refreshing to see something high-minded on television, but I digress. I watched once as Russert's guest where Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan--archetypes of British classical education and post-war arrogance (sorry Mark...I call 'em as I see 'em). What I noted was that Sullivan was out of his league. While I find Hitchens deplorably pedestrian in some of his opinions, he always manages to elicit a satisfying coherence and entertaining wit in his views. Sullivan? Just plain addled.

Nevertheless, he is famous, and celebrity makes people interesting even when they're not. The lovely bunny subscribes to a local paper (for the ads...) and I just happened to glance at a column by Ellen Goodman. She was complaining that Ashley Dupre, notorious for exchanging sex for money with Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, has been hired as a columnist for one of the New York dailies. The irony was thick on the page--an columnist promoted on the basis of gender balance is complaining about the qualifications of a hooker to write a newspaper column.

Meanwhile, back in the democratic bastions of bloggerdom, gloriously talented nobodies like Varifrank, have stopped the apparently pointless exercise of writing a blog.

Why should anyone read what you have to say if you aren't famous?