I have no idea who Patrick O'Hara is, and I don't especially care. Certainly not enough to Google him and find out whether he's really the lifelong Republican he says he is. So for the purpose of this post, I'll accept what he says in an op ed in today's Inquirer on faith:

Last week I registered as a Democrat, no small step for a long-contented Chester County Republican. Weaned on William F. Buckley Jr., I was a teenage Barry Goldwater adherent in 1964. My first job was in the administration of New York City Republican Mayor John Lindsay, and my second was in the executive offices of New York Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

One does not lightly abandon such deep political roots.

In any other year, I give this primary season a pass and vote Republican in November.

This is not any other year, nor any other vote.

I became a Democrat to cast an April 22 Pennsylvania primary vote that I believe will be the most important of my lengthy political life.

Campaigns of ideas have been replaced by "gotcha" politics: endless loops of Obama in a turban, his pastor rousing Sunday congregants with wacky rhetoric, talk-radio-heads slowly enunciating Barack Hussein Obama, and Hillary Clinton's studied hesitancy on 60 Minutes about whether Obama is a Muslim. We have the "race card," "the indignation card," "the religious card," and the "gender card." Kennedy and Reagan must be rolling over in their graves - they thought enough about Americans to talk about ideas.

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald played a devious and disingenuous game of "gotcha" with Glenn Reynolds. When I posted about it, the self-refuting nature of the illogic involved seemed so self-apparent as to not be worth much of my time. It struck me that -- DOH! -- a post you link is not a post you didn't link. And a blogger you link is not a blogger you didn't link. As "gotcha" games go, it wasn't even much of a gotcha.

To Greenwald and the "gotcha" players, though, any connection -- even an imagined one -- is a "connection." That's because they're conspiratorial, and always assume evil intent. If Glenn used the word "niggardly," that would probably be seen as winking at another word.

What I didn't realize until last night was how truly pathological the gotcha game can become. The way the gotcha players see it, if Glenn links a "nice" post (which no one denies the Easter post in question was), he does so only to call attention to the hateful nearby post he really wants you to read!

Mind you, this would never have occurred to me, but it was explained (by "downtownlad") in a comment to this Ann Althouse post :

Instapundit knew that post was there and that was the only reason he even linked. As if he really gave a shit about that lame Easter post. Yeah right. He wanted people to find that post underneath, which Reynolds does not even think is racist (same as others on this thread). Fine. But don't link in a passive aggressive way and then act all SHOCKED SHOCKED that someone called you out on it.

He frequently does the same with the most vile anti-gay posts. And when someone like Sullivan calls him out, Reynolds will claim that a link does not equal an endorsement. But we know where his true feelings lie.

I might have left a comment, but Ann Althouse patiently explained the folly of dtl's thinking:

dtl, do you not realize that when you link to a post when you scroll down you don't see the next post. You'd have to click to the home page and then scroll down, and people rarely do that. It's not a practical way to point to the other post.

Sorry, but it takes too much time to do that. I suspect that most of the people doing it with Instalanched posts are playing gotcha games, in a relentless search for revelatory signs of Glenn's true passive aggressive deviationist feelings.

However, I'm glad I saw dtl's comment, because I wrote a post attempting to understand the phenomenon of passive aggressive linking, and I'm ashamed to admit that I just didn't get it.

I don't know what Andrew Sullivan means in using the term that way. Of course, why should I care what "means" means? I mean, who needs meaning?

I link things I consider interesting -- even meaningful -- nearly every day. Does that make me passive-aggressive too?

Well why is that? On top of all my many problems, do I have to be made passive-aggressive against my will, merely for the crime of clicking on links to which Sullivan has assigned the passive-aggressive label?

I wish I had more mental processing power and maybe I could attempt to figure out how to put more passive-aggressiveness into my links! The problem is that people like Andrew Sullivan won't stop forcing me into a passive-aggressive role, and if I wasn't more into being passive-aggressive I'd be inclined to say enough is enough.

You'd think that after nearly five years of blogging (and six years of Instapundit reading) I'd have figured out the true subtext of Reynolds' passive-aggressive methodology.

But better late than never. At least I know now that what Glenn links is not what he's really linking.

Damn. It's just too much work having to go through all of Glenn's links and reinterpret them. I don't know whether I'm up to the task.

I mean, as it is, I hate gotcha games and gotcha politics. And I have long hated being forced to be passive aggressive, especially against my will!

But passive-aggressive, discern-the-true-feelings gotcha?

That I absolutely I refuse to do.

However, with all due respect, I think Glenn bears some of the blame here.

I mean, if Glenn wants people to discern his true inner passive aggressive feelings, why does he have to put the gotcha people to so much work? Why make the experts like Glenn Greenwald and downtownlad do all the heavy passive aggressive lifting?

So, I propose a rule. Maybe even a passive-aggressive code! Although I should probably note that I'm not really sure that these are my true feelings, so I don't know if I really have a duty to propose it. So I'm just kind of passively aggressively promoting it. (It strikes me as eminently fair that a passive-aggressive code should be promoted passive-aggressively.)

From now on, all passive-aggressive true feelings should be clearly discernable, stated on the record, and made perfectly clear. Any failure to disclose and link all passive-aggressive true feelings links should be treated as a breach of blogospheric passive-aggressive ethics.

Furthermore, all books by bloggers suspected of true-feeling, passive-aggressive linking should be rigorously vetted for passive-aggressive subtexts.

I see no other way to avoid the appearance of passive-aggressive impropriety. Why, if the true-feeling, passive-aggressive linking phenomenon is allowed to go unchecked, the blogosphere could ultimately be facing an Army of Passive Aggressive Davids.

What then?

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking this post, and welcome all!

Hmmm...

Or did he really mean to link this post?

While I think it's just fine for Glenn to "enjoy wasting the time of people who struggle to read [his] mind," I'm of two minds about how to interpret his link to this post, because after all, this is my blog, and I'm not the only blogger, so there are more posts here than I can keep track of. Considering Glenn's meticulously documented pattern and practice of passive-aggressive linking, I think it's fair to ask, just what post is he really linking by purporting to link this one?

My guess is, it's the post about "Giraffes on Horseback Salads."

That's because not only is the title filthy, but this blog is dark. And the reason Glenn can't link it directly is because "the more respectable venues promote more tepid versions of the filth being spewed by the darker corners of the noise machine, so as to keep a safe distance while simultaneously ensuring that it ends up widely circulated."

So, to see more of the "filth being spewed by the darker corners of the noise machine," just click to the filthy home page, and scroll down to my dark corners.