What have we learned from Dreher & Douthat's opportunistic attacks on Ted Cruz this week?

That a mean junior high school girl faction of conservatism will do whatever it takes to sleep with the quarterback, the quarterback in this case being internet blogosphere popularity at large, measured in site clicks from any comers. Principles are now so 20th Century.

That the facts of the Cruz situation simply don't matter. In fact, the facts of the matter were not only willfully rewritten, but also in the case of the rumor Dreher launched about Cruz cynically fielding advertizing based on his encounter, invented out of whole cloth and never retracted. What matters now are imputed and projected feelings, the universal currency of liberalism, NPR, and most importantly, those wonderful cat videos.

That for its loudest proponents, "Christian" has become nothing more than a marketing tool, like "new improved Tide". Dreher, Douthat and their fellow opportunists have seldom previously given a flying f*ck about the fate of Mideast Christians, but given the chance to score some internet hits at the expense of a Senator calculated to be most widely perceived as SNL material, they weep ostentatiously like the Walrus and the Carpenter. Next week something else will be the big blog hit score, and the Mideast Christians will once again be forgotten.

That the very, very best position to take is all positions. We saw this exemplified in Dreher's blogging this week (links in my posts below), where each subsequent post was recalibrated based on both responses to his previous ones and to the buzz on the internet at large and new, nuanced talking points contradicting his previous ones introduced to capture those eyeballs who might have frowned at something previously .

Welcome to the land of conservatism beyond principle or, rather, conservatism where "principle" now means how many "likes" and blog hits you scored today.