Rich is wrong about most things, but he’s painfully on target in noting the incongruous pandering now taking place by some in the cool-kids clique on the Right. Conservatives criticize Hollywood relentlessly, but as Rich notes, “the embarrassing reality is that they want to be hip, too.”

Which brings me to Mrs. Bush. She demonstrated at the celebrity-studded White House Correspondents’ Dinner this weekend that you can entertain without being profane. Most of her humor was just right: Edgy but not over the edge. But her off-color stripper and horse jokes crossed the line. Can you blame Howard Stern for feeling peeved and perplexed? And let’s face it: If Teresa (“I’m cheeky!”) Heinz Kerry had delivered Mrs. Bush’s First Lady Gone Mildly Wild routine, social conservative pundits would be up in arms over her bad taste and lack of dignity.

The First Lady resorting to horse masturbation jokes is not much better than Whoopi Goldberg trafficking in dumb puns on the Bush family name. It was wholly unnecessary.

Self-censorship is a conservative value. In a brilliant commencement speech at Hillsdale College last year, Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner called on his audience to resist the coarsened rhetoric of our time: “If we are to prevail as a free, self-governing people, we must first govern our tongues and our pens. Restoring civility to public discourse is not an option. It is a necessity.” ~Michelle Malkin

The furore over Mrs. Bush’s vulgarity, which is to say her debasement to the level of rhetoric appropriate for the vulgus, the common people or, more accurately, the rabble, only recently came to my attention by a chance hearing of Michael Savage’s radio show. Savage sometimes loses a proper sense of moral balance in his furious indignation, but here he and Ms. Malkin have been entirely right and the oh-so sophisticated replies from the Volokh Conspiracy, among others, have been quite wrong. (Besides the fact that there is nothing more tiresome than a libertarian telling conservatives what conservatism is, Volokh is simply mistaken, because for moral conservatives there is properly no public venue in which crass, vulgar or obscene jokes are acceptable or entertaining.) The real question ought to be this: who now takes Mrs. Bush seriously as representative of the “moral values” of the evangelical and other Christians who have supported her husband? If these moral values involve watching decadent programs such as Desperate Housewives, their dissolution and disappearance from this country will not be lamented.