One of the paradoxes of blogging is that if you write about something, it tends to be seen as, if not the most important issue, at least as an issue more important than whatever it is you don't write about.

Appearances can be misleading. Sometimes, the most important things are precisely what I do not write about. There may be a number of reasons for this; often I'm sick to death of an issue, and I don't like the way contentious people have beaten it to death.

For example, I feel largely left out of the Sarah Palin debate (typified by this pro-Palin piece by David Solway which excoriates Rick Moran's Palin-skeptical piece), because my fix on her is largely grounded in my libertarian pragmatism. I have long believed that she may be the closest thing we will ever get to a genuinely libertarian candidate, and that while her libertarianism is not "pure" it does result from her government-hands-off, strictly constitutionalist approach, which I find very refreshing. I don't like the way her supporters tend to hurl cultural attacks at her conservative opponents, but they are not her, and to step into this fray and denounce cultural attacks is a losing venture, and I would appear to be anti-Palin. Those who don't like her plain-spoken, homespun style and who think the White House should be occupied by a patrician-style leader are just as entitled to their opinion as those who want a populist-style leader.

I don't see either "style" as necessarily right or wrong. What is important to me is what the leader would do. (In this respect, I am almost tempted to quote Deng Xiao Ping's "I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat so long as it catches mice," except I would want to commit an Anita Dunnism on the Internet.) A cosmopolitan, Ivy League libertarian with a Ph.D. from Harvard in my view beats a populist big government welfare statist from Small Town, USA with a degree from a community college. Likewise, I'll take the Small Town, USA community college libertarian over the Harvard-educated socialist.

So I'm more interested in what would be the likely result of a Palin presidency than in whether she's a big hit with people who go bowling instead of golfing, and I wish other people felt the same way.

Not writing about the endless cultural squabbling does not mean I don't think it's important, because obviously it is. To many people, pro and con, Sarah Palin's cultural attributes are not only very important, but they are the Most Important Thing.

The paradox is that because I wish these things weren't so important, I tend not to write about them. I mean, how do you complain about something being too important without making sound even more important?

Is this a case of "Methinks I doth protest too much?" If I don't think something should be important, then why on earth should I complain?